SATURDAY MORNING, Tom Brady and Bill Belichick alone, one last skull session before game day. This was about 10 years ago, during the decade-long New England championship drought, when the Patriots were trying recapture lost magic, back when we first started to consider that maybe Brady was getting up there. Belichick was watching film of Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez and zeroed in on a particular play. Sanchez was rolling right, chased by defenders, off balance and trying to survive, and he had a receiver open downfield -- 65 yards deep and 10 or so diagonal, on the opposite hashmark. It was a throw only a few quarterbacks in history could attempt, much less complete -- a fact that seemed lost on the greatest coach in modern football history.
"Just throw it," Belichick said. "You're not going to get any more open than this."
Brady sat in disbelief. I couldn't throw it 85 yards! he thought.
"Just let it go," Belichick added.
Let it go? Brady thought, laughing to himself. The ball would go 15 yards if I threw it.
Years after Brady told me this story, it stays with me. It's not just because it's rich to picture a lifelong defensive coach failing to grasp -- or refusing to care about -- the degree of difficulty on a near impossible throw. It's because of what Brady told me after he described the moment: "When I see a play, I see it within my own limitations."
BRADY'S WORDS WERE hard to buy then, and they're harder to buy now. Throughout most of his two-decade career, it's seemed to both his fans and his detractors that, for Tom Brady, anything is possible. After the Tampa Bay Buccaneers knocked off the Green Bay Packers to go to the Super Bowl, Bruce Arians put it best: "The belief he gave to this organization that it could be done -- it only took one man."
No matter the obstacle, Brady finds a way to transcend it. It's the surest thing in sports nowadays yet the hardest to explain. How at age 43 -- with a new team and a new coach and forced to win three playoff road games -- is he back here again? All these years watching Brady, listening to him dissect himself, asking the most brilliant football minds how he does it, yet it's still something of a mystery.
What does he see when he's back in the pocket? How does he process? He has made a habit of subtly redefining himself on a weekly basis, expanding the idea of quarterbacking all the while. Lloyd Carr once said that nobody relished football's inherent struggle more than Brady. He has worked on nearly every facet of his craft. After six championships he still looks for ways to improve, even if he's the only one who thinks he needs to.
He won't give us all the answers, so we're left to consider what little he does tell us: like that he views each play within the prism of his capabilities and its possibilities. And maybe it's that ability to see his limits that allows him to be great, that makes him seem limitless to others.
NO MATTER HOW much we're hardwired to see him as a superstar, Brady has often described himself as something of a loner, and it's true. I'm reminded of a winter night in Detroit, in 2006, the Friday before the Super Bowl. I'm at a party downtown, an interloper in a sea of athletes and celebrities. On the eighth floor, there is a VIP room, with two open bars and various luminaries of the moment, elbowing for space. Snoop is performing. Alex Smith is nearby. Matt Leinart is hanging out in a white shirt and black blazer. Will Ferrell holds court, a drink in his hand, near Usher and Jessica Alba.
Around midnight, an elevator opens.
It's Brady. He's only a few feet into the room before people realize he's there, that it's him -- Tommy F---ing Brady! -- and people move closer, almost tilting the floor in his direction. His friends encase him, lead-blocking through the masses. He's one of the tallest people in the room -- so tall that when you stand next to him you straighten your back -- but he seems small, hunched over slightly, staring down. He looks uneasy. This is not his element. He shuffles a short distance and sits down on a couch near a balcony, finding a seat next to Vanessa Minnillo. Moments later, he's swallowed by a mass of people. His friends try to form a pocket around him, but it's less successful than the one on Sundays. A little while later he quietly gets up, walks to the elevator, and he's gone, calling it a night, leaving the place feeling empty but somewhat more balanced.
Brady was only 28 years old at that point, but he had already won three Super Bowls. We were waiting for some kind of change out of him, a hard pivot away from football and into, what -- acting? politics? We thought that he would be the next Joe Namath -- all glitz and glam, hosting talk shows, transcending sports with his fame. But in reality, Brady had already seen enough of what the distraction of fame could do. What he feared most was not his celebrity dwindling, not never being the life of the party -- but rather the end of his playing career. Even back then, what made him unique was his own steady reserve, a desire to withhold and conserve and then deploy his energy -- of his celebrity, of his arm, of his mind -- when it was most effective. His transcendence is not so much otherworldly as it is deeply grounded in a kind of pragmatic approach to his skills and, yes -- no matter how badly scouts whiffed or how hard he tries to convince you that he was overlooked and unwanted -- his gifts.
SETH WICKERSHAM AND PABLO TORRE DISCUSS BRADY'S CONSTANT REINVENTION ON ESPN DAILY
FOR A WHILE, Brady never slept after a Super Bowl loss. Then he stopped sleeping after any loss. Now a mistake -- any mistake, in an inherently random game -- keeps him awake. And yet, when he chose a new team in March, the chance to win a seventh Super Bowl was one of a few factors but was not at the top. He wanted to enjoy his final few years, in warm weather, not too far from his oldest son, Jack, who lives in New York with his mother. His friends insisted, however hard it seemed to believe, that he was secure in his New England legacy -- that another championship wasn't the only thing he was chasing.
So we rationed expectations. Sure, he'd win a few games in Tampa, where he'd be taking over a 7-9 team, but that seemed somewhat secondary. Until last March, we had never seen Tom Brady as a professional outside of New England -- this was a chance for him to be his truest and most essential self.
Our first glimpses into the new and free Brady arrived fast, during a strange time. Shortly after he signed with the Bucs, he spoke virtually at a conference and seemed to imply that a global pandemic might be a "recalibration" -- that "maybe the world is telling us to slow down a little bit, you know? Everyone needs to chill out and recalibrate some of their priorities." He then accidentally walked into a stranger's house, believing it was the residence of his new offensive coordinator, Byron Leftwich. Weeks later, a city employee politely tossed him out of a local park where he was trying to practice. In the spring, he offered a bit of help to the masses by selling two "immunity supplements" produced by his business, TB12. One was called Protect, and a 30-day supply cost $45. It was tone-deaf -- borderline "wartime profiteering," Dan Shaughnessy of The Boston Globe wrote -- but also in line with someone who sometimes has so much faith in his own approaches and theologies that he's hardwired to see any limitation as something to transcend.
But as the strange offseason came to an end, we saw the Brady we had imagined: relaxed, calm, liberated from the pressures of New England. In training camp, Brady sat with Rob Gronkowski, who had signed with Tampa a month after Tom did, and filmed a team-produced video called "The Friendship Test: Tommy & Gronky." Brady was bronzed and at ease, soaking his feet in a kiddie pool. "It's a little toasty out here today," he said, with as much irony as possible from one of sports' least ironic icons. Both men laughed throughout, leaving no doubt to the subtext: This was different. They were free. Football was fun.
The host asked them questions about each other, and they laughed and smiled. The last one was, "Which is Tom's favorite ring?"
"I know this one," Gronk said. "I know it! Oh wow: Gisele loves this one, too."
Brady glared at him, fully aware that his wife has said publicly that she wished he'd called it a career by now.
Laughing to himself, Gronk shared his answer: "The next one!"
FOR THREE-QUARTERS of the season, there were regular reports of frustration between Arians and Brady -- the coach dedicated to the long ball, the quarterback who loves to bleed opponents to death, two men who seemed too successful in their own ways to adapt to one another. Belichick hovered above it all, just like Brady hovered above Cam Newton. At one point in the season, watching a game against the Los Angeles Rams, Michael Lombardi -- a former Patriots executive and one of Belichick's best friends -- wondered whether Bucs ownership might have to decide between Arians and Brady. With just over two minutes left in the first half of a 14-14 game, Tampa Bay had the ball near midfield. Brady had been hardwired by Belichick to think globally about this situation, about how his decisions could not only impact the offense but his defense -- complementary football. His twin goals were to score and to run clock, helping his defense keep the Rams from scoring before halftime. It's a concept based on playing within limits. Arians, though, wanted to attack, regardless of consequence. By now, you know his catchphrase: "No risk it, no biscuit." Brady threw deep, a low-percentage pass, and it was incomplete. Two plays later, on third down, Brady threw and missed again, handing the Rams another clock stoppage before the Bucs punted. The Rams scored a field goal just before halftime -- three points that ended up being the difference in a 27-24 Los Angeles win.
Brady's proficiency throwing the deep ball has been discussed for years, inside and outside the coaches' room. In 2013, he seemed to have bottomed out, averaging 6.92 yards a pass, his lowest since 2006. Even as he gradually improved, there was still something at risk every time he reared to throw long. And yet, according to Pro Football Focus, Brady still led the league in passes attempted over 20 yards with 115. His arm strength wasn't at issue. It was his accuracy. All season, the Bucs worked on a simple deep route with Scotty Miller, not to be deployed on every down. But if the situation presented itself -- if the defense played man coverage, with no help -- it was a risk worth taking.
"He's hit it in practice all year," says Bucs assistant head coach and run game coordinator Harold Goodwin. Goodwin had a particular window into Brady's abilities: From 1995 to '97, he was a low-level assistant coach at Michigan, just getting started in his coaching career. He saw a skinny kid from California arrive on campus -- probably too cocky for his own good, buried on the depth chart and unsure of a path forward. Goodwin left before Brady transformed himself, but now he's on the sideline to see the result of that evolution. Just the other day, in a pre-Super Bowl practice, Brady pulled aside the entire offensive line to go over communication processes, making sure everyone is on the same page. "Tom is particular about how he sees the game and wants things done," Goodwin says. "He's very decisive, and he's always talking about ball. When there's downtime in practice, he wants to talk about ball."
In the NFC Championship Game, Tampa Bay had the ball in a similar situation to the one in the Rams game: trying to score and leave no time for Aaron Rodgers to answer. Brady picked the Bucs into field goal range, with eight seconds left in the first half. There was time for one more play, and it was easy to imagine Brady throwing quick and short, within his limits, and making the field goal try a little easier. Instead, preparation met opportunity: Brady saw man coverage on the outside. He threw deep down the left sideline to Miller for a 39-yard touchdown.
In the second half, he threw two interceptions on variations of the exact same route. Both passes stalled in the air before fluttering down and giving the defensive back an uncontested catch. It's a thin line on all of those throws, just as it's been his entire career.
THERE ARE SOME athletes who feel like they can do anything. Patrick Mahomes is one of those guys, able to alter the game's geometry. Is Tom Brady? He will try hard to convince you that he's not. That he's not Joe Montana, so effortless and graceful and smooth. That he's not Russell Wilson, able to make plays with his feet. Brady has always been hard on himself, to the point that it's easy to wonder whether we all share a reality with him. In 2019, after New England lost to the Ravens, Brady hugged Lamar Jackson.
"Great game, dude," Brady said. "You played great."
"Appreciate that," Jackson said.
"Congratulations."
"GOAT," Jackson said, looking Brady in the eye. "The GOAT!"
Brady's eyes seemed to narrow, his lips pursed. It was the last thing he wanted to hear, after a loss and in general. He hates it when people call him the greatest ever -- maybe because it speaks to a kind of finality he's not ready for yet, maybe because he simply doesn't feel it. He has accomplished more than anyone else in his sport, yet he still feels like it isn't enough. Brady has told us over the years that he tries his best to live in the present. He learned that years ago when he watched "Jiro Dreams of Sushi," a film about an 85-year-old cook dedicated to improving his craft, regardless of age. "It smacked me in the face as a reaffirmation," Brady once told me. "Just be in the moment. What's better than what you're doing? Nothing."
Brady has said that the turning point of this season was a win over Atlanta in Week 15, when the team "let it rip." But when you're talking about Tom Brady, is there ever really a turning point? It's all one continuation that began when he was 14 years old and decided that he wanted to be a quarterback. The least surprising moment of Super Bowl week arrived Monday, when Brady opened the door to playing past his long-stated goal of 45 years old. He has moved the goalposts repeatedly over the course of his career. First, it was playing until he was 40. Then, early 40s. Then 45. Now, who knows? He has long blown by all standards and comparisons, at least in football. He once had Montana, with four rings. That's long gone. He really has only the same person he's had his entire life: himself.
After the Bucs beat the Packers, the first thing Brady did was run away from his teammates and the cameras -- everyone who might be tempted to call him the greatest of all time -- and instead go to the sideline.
"Can I say hi to my son?" he said to a security guard.
Jack ran down the stadium stairs. He will be 14 later this year -- the exact age when Tommy Brady on Portola Drive in San Mateo decided that he wanted to play football and signed up for the team, watching other players before his first practice for clues as to how to insert knee and thigh pads into football pants. Jack is a good athlete, and he inherited his dad's trait for expecting a lot of himself and tearing himself up at perceived failures. He was with his dad at the beginning of the journey of the past year, in a New York City apartment when the greatest quarterback ever signed a contract with a team other than the New England Patriots.
"Love you, kiddo," Brady said. "How about that? We're going to the Super Bowl."