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HE'S NOT GOING anywhere.

That's the thing to remember about Tom Brady, now that he's retired for good, one year to the day after he retired for six weeks. And it should come as no surprise. He's never gone anywhere, except back to the game. He's retiring to the booth, retiring from football by staying in football. His presence will loom over the game, as it has for a generation, thanks to the 10-year contract he signed with Fox to broadcast games and to be a company "ambassador." In the booth he has pledged to be a different Brady than the one we've known, which is to say that he'll be brutally honest about what he sees below. As an ambassador, he'll be the exact Tom Brady that we've known, which is to say that he'll be an icon with ultimate leverage, a man who after 22 years of professional football answers to nobody but himself.

And that might be among his greatest feats: He could have played for nearly any team of his choice, dictating the terms of employment. He did his best to not answer to time. Whenever he appeared to be brought down to earth, he found a way to push the limits, one unremarkable statement and one unremarkable pass at a time that added up to something nobody had ever seen before. Even this past year, when he was 45 and gaunt, looking exhausted for good reason, and commanding a team with a losing record, he figured it out much of the time, regardless of personnel or deficit or logic. He never lost the magic and he never lost stature, even in a year when he lost so much else.

WE'VE KNOWN HIM for a long time now. We've known him as a single young man, as a married man and as a single middle-aged man. We've known him with his hands on his head under confetti at age 24, in disbelief at what he had done, and we have known him win so many championships that he seems more relieved than surprised when he holds the trophy. We've known him so long that it seems like we've known him since he walked into campus at Michigan, as if we all knew what was to come, as if all of us could see what nobody but he saw. And the entire time we've known him, we've known a man who has not only lived a life of upward trajectory but has been accustomed to life on an upward trajectory. Only twice has that trajectory nearly gone off course: During the 2000 NFL draft, and in 2008, when Brady blew out his knee. He watched the game go on without him, and whether he fully articulated it or not, he decided to try to bend the game to his will. He retooled his diet and exercise regimen into something that would later become a business, and then he started talking about playing until age 45, patient zero for a host of peers who would be influenced by his ambition. He knew himself, better than anyone else. He needed the game to feel most alive, to feel like his most essential self, to stave off whatever life held beyond football -- and maybe the demons that accompany having been a legend, which we often learn about only after the fact.

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Tom Brady got almost everything he wanted out of his football career. The game offered him the gift it now offers every quarterback: the gift of longevity, through rule changes. And he took it, and he took more. Back in 2004, Brady privately said that he'd determined that what caused quarterbacks to slide in their 30s wasn't just age; it was that they had spouses and kids, diverting time and energy from their craft. He vowed that he wouldn't fall to the same fate, that he would wait to have kids until later in his career, or maybe after. When he ended up as a father of three by age 35, he tried to find a way to balance everything. We talked about it once, in his living room.

"At a time when I feel like, people see professional athletes getting worse physically, I don't feel like that's where I'm at," he said. "I feel like I can still get better athletically, and I'm so much more efficient in other aspects of my life, with my rest and with my ..."

"How so?" I asked. "Besides the fact that kids force you to be."

"Yeah, they do, no question. And that's a big time, that's a big part of your life that gets committed to them. But hopefully in my profession, you learn more as you go."

He learned, maybe too well. He kept getting better, beyond his already inconceivable greatness and odds, both actuarial and unimaginable. He redefined so much of what was considered possible out of a quarterback, out of a football player, out of a professional athlete -- and for a while, out of a celebrity in a celebrity marriage -- that he became his own singular definition of them all. And then he kept going, and going, winning Super Bowls, leaving the Patriots and winning a championship with the Bucs in his first year, where on the field, as the confetti fell, Gisele Bundchen hugged and kissed him and asked ...

"What more do you have to prove?"

Brady smiled and changed the subject. He seemed to know how she wanted him to answer, and he seemed to know his own answer was the same as always: He had more to prove, with a caveat that it actually didn't matter what he proved, or what he had left to prove. He just wanted ... more. He wanted to do what he loved. He wanted to live his dream, beyond what others could dream possible. He wanted to keep sacrificing for his career. She had already sacrificed, setting her career aside and moving to Boston, learning each year that there was no offseason or off switch. When their daughter, Vivian, was an infant in 2013, Brady would spring out of bed, ready to attack the morning with whatever new training idea he was consumed with, unaware that he was in trouble before the day started. Gisele would say, "Hey, can you help me out?" And he would think, "What did I do?"

"Is this a family day or a Tommy Day?" she'd ask.

Tommy Days became Tommy Decades. Brady has become not only a template for so many quarterbacks, down to his Tom House-taught throwing mechanics, of tucking his left hand close to his right shoulder while following through, a technique nobody but Brady was doing a decade ago and so many quarterbacks use. Brady tried to become a template for us all, with varying convincingness: how to eat, drink, sleep, exercise, age, how to be more, you know, pliable, how to think positively, how to try to not take anything personally, how to parent, how to husband, how to invest, how to live.

Man in the Arena: Tom Brady

Get an unprecedented firsthand account of each of Tom Brady's Super Bowl appearances. Stream "Man in the Arena: Tom Brady" on ESPN+ now.

Tom Brady had always wanted it all, and he wanted to stretch the boundaries of what was possible, personally and professionally. He appeared to attain it. He was the best quarterback in football as an older man and posted nothing but snuggly and warm photos of him and his wife, on the beach and relaxed. Yes, something about it all seemed a little too perfect, a little too tanned, a little too hydrated. And yes, Brady always reminded us that nobody truly knew his reality except himself. But whenever someone tried to weigh in with judgment, of his TB12 methodology or of his performance, he responded as he always does: with the type of last-second performances that reminded the world that he could slay anyone in the game whenever he wanted.

But then 2022 arrived, bringing cracks, before the public knew just how deep or wide. Toward the end of the ESPN+ series "Man in the Arena," recorded a few months before the state of his marriage became a daily update, he broke down. He hasn't publicly cried often during his career, and when he does, it's usually when he talks about his mom and dad. This time, he was talking about his father, Tom Sr., and he really started crying -- voice uneven, eyes dark -- but he was really crying for himself, and his kids.

"When I think about being a dad, I think about him, because of what my dad meant to me. ... I know I'm not as good of a dad as my dad's been to me. I think maybe what I'd wish for my children to find something they really love to do like I have, but I think I've taken it to an extreme, too. You know? There are imbalances in my life. I hope they don't take things as far as I've taken them.

"There's a torment upon me that I don't wish upon them."

"I'VE DONE MY part."

Those were Bundchen's words, to Elle magazine, in a story published this past September, after the NFL's opening weekend, mere weeks after Brady left training camp for 11 days, an absence he explained as a byproduct of being 45 years old and having "a lot of s--- going on." Her words were a declaration, no longer in the marital language of shared sacrifice, spoken in past tense, signaling the end of something -- and if we've learned anything, Brady doesn't like to accept finalities. Her words seemed to explain, at least with both enough certainty and enough vagueness, an uncharacteristically dramatic offseason for Tom.

For someone who has been in the public eye for more than two decades, Brady has managed to avoid his issues playing out in public. There was 2006-07, when he left Bridget Moynahan and ended up with Bundchen, and was publicly declared as the chief beneficiary of Spygate. And there was Deflategate in 2015. But we have never seen anything like what we saw in 2022, beginning in January, when after stating his goal of playing until age 45 he seemed to shift, refusing to commit to a return to the Bucs. Then there was the crushing playoff loss to the Rams, after Brady rallied Tampa from a 27-3 deficit. Two weeks later, Adam Schefter and Jeff Darlington reported that Brady was going to retire, which brought an avalanche of denials until it was proven true days later when he retired in a statement in which he refused to use the word "retire."

Explaining his retirement before he had retired, Brady seemed to indicate that Gisele had indeed done her part -- and might be close to done with doing her part.

"It's not always what I want," he said. "It's what we want as a family."

But over the course of the next few days after he seemingly made it official, when Brady was active on Instagram with a teenager's frequency, thanking all of the well-wishes that came from football and beyond; as he vacationed in Costa Rica, literally walking into the sunset; as he and Bundchen seemed happy, holding hands on the beach; as word from his camp spread that he was walking away in large part because he had reached his limit with Bruce Arians' coaching style, which wasn't as buttoned-up as a neurotic perfectionist like Brady had been accustomed to -- when it appeared that Brady had finally relented to something -- he was already second-guessing himself. A week after he announced that he was done, he said that he might not be done after all.

"You know, I'm just gonna take things as they come. I think that's the best way to put it and I don't think anything -- you know, you never say never."

You can only imagine what it felt like to be Bundchen. She had joked in a non-joking way for years about Brady's "first love" being football. It seemed less funny when he announced his comeback, saying that 40 days away -- 40 days with his family -- had taught him that his "place is on the field, not in the stands."

But then training camp arrived, and it was worth wondering if his place was truly on the field. What was more revelatory than Brady's brief departure was his appearance. He looked tired and thin and most of all, deprived of something essential. He left training camp because he needed to leave training camp -- because his presence was required elsewhere. Soon reports surfaced that his marriage was near its end. Her camp and his camp were leaking against each other, in that unique American spectacle of tabloid wars. Brady had come full circle. He had arrived in our consciousness in 2001 as a single man with a limitless future, and he would exit it as a single man with a future limitless in every way except the one he imagined in the winter of 2009, when he asked his friends and family to jet to Santa Monica for a surprise, and decided to make it official with Bundchen, seemingly forever.

BRADY RETIRED WEDNESDAY alone on the beach, with wind muting his words. He had decided to play football at age 14 because he enjoyed having teammates, being part of something larger, unlike a solitary sport. But in the end, he was a self-described loner, and so there was a beauty to the way he did it, with only his face on the screen.

Brady never cared about our narratives. It's a little too convenient to cast Brady as so hopelessly in love with football that he can't walk away because he can't imagine life without it. He can imagine life without it. One could argue that the man who refused to walk away did more to plan for his post-NFL life than anyone by lining up his broadcasting deal, his podcast, his clothing line, his TB12 business, his production company. He has plenty to keep him busy, but that's not the point. It's easy to be busy. It's hard to be the greatest ever at something again. You can't re-create it. He seems to know this, and have planned for it, as he planned to play until age 45. He is steeped not in denial, rather in reality. He knows that the moment an NFL game kicks off without him, it's gone, forever, even as he stares down from the booth, knowing he could slap those kids around down there ...

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All the great athletes feel that way. They all think they could keep playing forever. With Brady, it's true. His dominance outlasted his will, which is bizarre to think about. By November, he looked so beaten down from what his life had become that it was easy to mistake him as weakened, checked out, maybe ... done? Yes, he wasn't dominant all the time. Yes, he had his typical meltdowns on the sideline, a reminder that the boy whose father had to discipline him on the golf course for throwing fits was still somewhere inside him. Arians, from his strange role, seemed eager to point out in the middle of the season that "nobody is going to say that Brady is playing bad, but he was playing bad." The day after a loss to the Ravens, he sat at his locker staring at the ground. In 12 hours, TMZ would break the news of his divorce. He was not only a man alone, but he was alone with his choices.

And then, the most constant and predictable theme of the past two decades in American sports resurfaced: Brady found a way. The Bucs would stammer around, drop passes, commit penalties, argue, vent, fume ... until the final minutes, sometimes the final seconds, when Brady would just take over and do what he always does, no less miraculous and no less heroic. He beat the Rams with a touchdown pass with 9 seconds left. Then he beat the Saints with a touchdown pass with 3 seconds left, the 40th time in his career he's undone a deficit of at least 10 points. He did it again against the Panthers in Week 17, throwing for 432 yards and three touchdowns. Brady had always promised that he'd retire when he sucked, but no matter how the Bucs' season was destined to end, no matter how creaky he looked at times, he won, not weekly but cosmically. He had outlasted time. And so when the Bucs lost to Dallas in the first round of the playoffs, it was testament to how little he sucked that nobody could turn off a game that so clearly seemed decided. Could he do it again? That's how potent Brady was, and is. Nobody could be sure, until late in the fourth quarter, Tampa down double digits, when the odds, even for the great Tom Brady, were insurmountable.

EVERYONE SAW GREATNESS walking off the field. He tipped his cap to the fans who had hung around after the loss to Dallas to see him, revealing hair that has grayed on the fringes, and then he grinned in a way that rarely happens after a loss, even now. He saw his parents to the left of the tunnel, waiting for him on the field. They are his heroes, both individually and together, a love affair that began decades ago. Tom Brady Sr. knocked on Galynn Johnson's door with the intent to sell her insurance, but then she invited him in, and they didn't talk at all about insurance, and he asked her out on a date for the following Friday, and six months later, they were married.

Their marriage was built on a spark that never waned, and that love has proved to be the most consistent aspect of their only son's career, aside from his dominance. It was easy to remember back to 2001, when Tom Sr. and Galynn were flying East for every game, running on fumes, at the beginning of a ride that they knew might end at any moment. They kept flying East, as their son became a superstar, as his life changed in ways nobody could imagine, as Tom Sr. felt a tinge of wistfulness as he'd watch fathers and sons on random golf courses and miss those days with his own kid. They kept flying East, to see their son's newborn kids as they became older ones, after cancer and a hospitalization due to a deadly virus, to see their son win, to see him in pain, to be with him the day his marriage officially ended. They are always there for him. They are his role models, and the best way to honor role models is to carry what one has learned and try to do it better, rather than speaking to a camera that one can't live up to the standard his father set. Nobody has ever refused to concede the inevitability of the next day, next hour, next minute, next few seconds, like Tom Brady Jr. He now has three kids at the beginning of the adjustment of a new reality. He doesn't just answer to himself; he answers to them. Tom Brady smiled as he saw his parents, and he leaned in to kiss them, and for the last time, he entered a tunnel until he faded beyond sight.

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2024-06-13 03:02:50