Drew Bledsoe is the most powerful quarterback I've ever seen in person. I first met him in 1992, when I was a middling high school quarterback and he was a rising junior at Washington State, already Mel Kiper's prediction to be the first pick of the draft. Drew's father, Mac, held a football camp in the Pacific Northwest, and I was one of a hundred or so attendees. The lessons on how to throw a football from the Bledsoes were easy to hear and hard to implement, and so we all watched Drew's release, beautiful and clean: arm at 90 degrees, from torso rotating back like "there's a pole straight through your ass," Bledsoe once said, and then this sort of violent propulsion forward from the hips that turned your arm into a whip more than an engine. Drew was "a clinic" on how to throw, Mac would say, and to this day, whenever I dust off my mid-40s arm, I have some sort of brief flashback to trying to throw it exactly the way Bledsoe did.
The buzz around Bledsoe was palpable in those days. One of the counselors told us that one day we would look back and thank the heavens that we were able to watch such a prodigious talent up close. Even then, Bledsoe was strong, but not in a meathead warrior way. He actually looked skinny, but he was thick -- and was proud of the work he had put in to get there. He told us that he was once a thin kid with a gifted arm, and he knew that if he wanted to play football beyond high school, he would have to bulk up. So he did. He told us that he had lifted weights every day -- even on Christmas, his dad said. The next summer, in 1993, Bledsoe returned to the camp, this time in a New England Patriots jersey and carrying around an NFL ball, having been the first pick of the previous spring's draft. He still looked kind of slim from a distance, but up close he was even thicker than he was a year earlier. There are some quarterbacks who are so thin that you wonder how they'll hold up -- like, for instance, Bledsoe's backup in 2000, another tall and skinny guy with a gifted arm that needed to bulk up. Bledsoe, though, had become a prototype. Not just so handsome that he would soon star in national ads, not just so charming that he would soon play himself in "Jerry Maguire," but so stock strong that he seemed invulnerable in a game so dangerous.
Today is the 20th anniversary of a sideline collision that forever changed American sports. It's become easy to consider the Mo Lewis hit that nearly killed Bledsoe and launched Tom Brady's career as a jumping-off point for an endless array of what-if moments. If Bledsoe hadn't gotten hurt, would Brady have seen the field? If Belichick had benched Bledsoe, as it later came out that he wanted to, would Brady have held onto the job through the rough patches in early 2001, with a healthy veteran ready to go? Would New England have become a dynasty? Would Spygate have happened? Deflategate? Would we discuss Bill Belichick alongside the greatest ever, and would Tom Brady still be pushing the limits of human endurance at age 44?
But it's also worth looking at the hit in the most basic terms, of life and near death. It understandably took years for Bledsoe to come to terms with what transpired on Sept. 23, 2001. When he relives that day and that season, like he has in books and interviews. With E:60's Jeremy Schaap in 2020, he sometimes appears to still be coming to terms with how he lost his job and nearly lost his life. It's a complex moment. When Bledsoe almost died, a legend was born. Tom Brady's singular place in the culture is growing so exponentially that it's making the accomplishments of legends, such as Joe Montana and Dan Marino, somehow seem small. And remembering one of the worst days of Bledsoe's life offers a clue as to why Brady won't stop.
In 2013, OTL's Don Van Natta Jr. reported that Roger Goodell's greatest fear was a player dying during an NFL game. At the time of that story, it was in the context of concussion crisis. But 12 years earlier, when it nearly happened with Bledsoe, Goodell wasn't commissioner yet, and the only people talking about concussions were Brady, backup quarterback Damon Huard, the Patriots' medical staff and Belichick. It was midway through the fourth quarter of what appeared to be another forgettable Patriots season. New England had lost its opener and was on its way to falling to 0-2. Robert Kraft was best known as the guy who ran off Bill Parcells and who traded a first-round pick and more for Belichick, who was about to lose his 13th game in 18 as Patriots head coach. Even though Belichick had his quiet doubts about Bledsoe -- about his ability to react as quickly as the game demanded and about his accuracy throwing to his left -- less than a year earlier the quarterback had signed a 10-year, $110 million contract to help Kraft sell a new stadium.
Down 10-3 to the Jets, Bledsoe ran toward the sideline on third-and-10, saw Lewis closing fast, and he faced a choice: Concede by drifting out of bounds or aim for the first-down marker. He picked the latter and started to lower the shoulders of a body that he had built to not only survive hits like the one that was coming but to win his fair share of them. Problem was, Jets defensive end Shaun Ellis clipped Bledsoe at the ankles, and when Lewis arrived he was standing straight up. Lewis hit Bledsoe high and hard. It was "a massacre," Brady recalled.
Bledsoe lay on the turf after the hit. It was clear he was hurt, but nobody knew that he was bleeding internally, with a torn blood vessel in his chest. At the time, he had the dull gaze in his eyes. Moments later, Brady noticed he was slurring his words and struggling to discuss the team's audible system.
"We gotta get him out of the game," Brady told Huard.
Belichick inserted Brady for the rest of the game. As Bledsoe walked to the locker room for team prayer after the 10-3 loss, one of the Patriots doctors noticed that Bledsoe was looking suspiciously ill and asked him to follow him instead into the medical room, a decision that likely saved Bledsoe's life. Bledsoe's heart was racing, the opposite of what typically happens with a concussion. Soon, Bledsoe was in an ambulance. He started to fade out of consciousness. His younger brother Adam implored the driver to go faster, as Bledsoe's eyes closed and didn't open until hours later. Doctors later discovered the he was bleeding a pint of blood every hour and had suffered a hemothorax, with blood filling in his chest. When Bledsoe woke up, he was at Massachusetts General Hospital with a tube inserted in his chest, hooked up to a machine that pumped blood out of his body, cleaned it and cycled it back in -- and the world as he knew it had started to change.
Tom Brady might not have understood the fragility of life to the degree that Bledsoe did in 2001, but he understood the fragility of his chosen line of work. He had learned at Michigan how fast the stage can be taken away, and now, he had no intention conceding to Bledsoe, tradition or conventional wisdom. It was the birth of something, the beginning of what's become Brady's defining trait: his steadfast refusal to surrender to anyone's expectations except his own. Belichick gave him the starting job in the middle of the season, and he never looked back.
Dining with his parents one night, Brady recognized the inherent fragility of his job and reminded himself to enjoy the moments. "These are the best of times," he said.
In early December, the Patriots played the Jets again. I saw Bledsoe in the locker room after and walked over to shake his hand. He was still tall and thick and yet somehow slim. I told him about how our paths had crossed almost a decade earlier.
"No s---," he said with a smile.
We talked for a few minutes, and then I started to ask something on the record about Brady, and he closed up, politely declining to comment. He would later say he was angry at Belichick, whom he felt had promised him the chance to compete for what he called "my job." He was trying to figure out what had happened to his life, and called the previous few weeks "Brady Days," as if everything was turning up Tom. History has forgotten how incredible it was that he was even able to suit up, so soon after the torn blood vessel. On that day, while Brady celebrated another win, Bledsoe was the first one showered, the first one packed, the first one out of the locker room, a man processing pain on several levels.
Two decades later, Tom Brady is still celebrating wins and Drew Bledsoe, 49, is long retired, living in Oregon, skiing and running his own wine company, Doubleback. We've seen Brady process a lot of pain and the fragility of life on a public stage. His grandmother died in 2005; Patriots quarterbacks coach Dick Rehbein died in 2001. His longtime personal quarterback coach Tom Martinez died in 2012. His mother, Galynn, successfully battled cancer in 2016. Along the way, he has made a business out of pushing the limits of human achievement in a brutal sport. He wrote a book about his methods, the point of which was how to play longer and the subtext of which was how to live longer. In an interview at the time, I asked him how long he wanted to live.
"I mean, the reality is for me, it's not about how long I want to live, it's the quality of life," he said.
But something changed in February 2020. On the day of Kobe Bryant's funeral, Brady posted a message on Twitter titled: "What's Really Important?" Brady had long felt a kinship with Bryant, two ruthless and relentless overachievers, even if Bryant seemed to derive his motivation from a darker place than Brady, and he seemed to miss the idea of Bryant as much as Bryant himself. "And in this tragedy, I have learned so much," Brady wrote. "Why has this touched me in a way it did? Why has it kept me up at night and brought me so many tears?"
Bryant's death seemed to reaffirm Brady's desire to play football forever. But that clarity of that desire no doubt began with how his career started. If his days are limited, why not spend them doing what he loves most for as long as he can? It could all be taken away tomorrow.
When you look back at Bledsoe's career, of course, you not only do it within the context of what Brady did after taking over the job. You do it within the context of what Bledsoe sacrificed. A body built to absorb punishment was tested. He was once hit so hard as a rookie that his body bent backward at the waist until it reached what seemed like 90 degrees. He led the league in passing attempts three out of his first four years, and with those dropbacks came rushers. He played with a broken index finger on his passing hand in 1998 and threw the game-winning touchdown pass in two straight games with less than 30 seconds left. In 2000, playing for Bill Belichick's 5-11 Patriots, he battled various injuries -- "Nobody I've seen that's ever been tougher than him," Brady later told me.
Bledsoe returned to football after the Lewis hit. He returned for the same reason Brady refuses to walk away 20 years later, because he loved the game and there was a "sickness" in him to throw a spiral, as Brady has termed it. It's easy to remember Drew Bledsoe highlights. Watch him in his last year at Wazzu, throwing a bomb in the snow to Phillip Bobo. Or throwing four touchdown passes against the Dolphins in 1994, or 70 passes against the Vikings that same year ... and it's easy to watch them now with a kind of melancholy that understands the sacrifice and the fragility of it all. And then you eventually surf to another of Bledsoe's highlights: this one of his son, John, who successfully walked on at Washington State. His throws at Summit High in Bend, Oregon, where he was all-state as a senior, throwing to his younger brother, Stu. It takes a moment to consider why Drew Bledsoe would let his sons play the game that could have ended his life, that brought such frustration and pain. But then you remember John wearing his old man's No. 11, with that same clean and beautiful release, hip-forward, arm at 90 degrees, and you see some stock strength in a tall and thin frame and a willingness to hang in the pocket, and well, both Tom and Drew kinda makes sense.