It’s that time of year again. Like Santa Claus with Christmas or Cupid and Valentine’s or, God forbid, Jim White and transfer deadline day, with Super Bowl Sunday comes Tom Brady, more often than not, and here we are again.
And as equally predictable as a New England Patriots appearance in the NFL season’s showpiece game is whenever their superhuman, future Hall of Fame quarterback does come up in conversation it’ll be the numbers you hear first. They are record-breaking ones after all. The number of top seeds. Play-off wins. Championship game appearances. Super Bowl titles.
But there’s only one number that matters this week. Zero. The chances, he says, of Super Bowl 53 being his final game.
Post-40 most people are starting to think about retirement, life begins then, as they say. The majority of professional athletes have long since hung them up by the time they pass their fourth decade. But not Tom Brady. Not by a long shot.
On Sunday Brady will play in his ninth Super Bowl when he leads the Patriots into Atlanta to face the Los Angeles Rams, 18 years after he did so for the very first time. Facebook. Twitter. The Houston Texans. All of them didn’t even exist when Brady won the first of his five rings all of those many moons ago. This weekend, at the ripe old age of 41, he’ll go for number six.
So how does he do it? How, when 30 of his teammates are closer in age to his 11-year-old son Benjamin than they are to him, does he continue to set the standard? How, when Father Time remains undefeated, does he keep coming out on the winning side? For him it’s simple, it’s just a matter of doing what the other man won’t.
“What are you willing to do and what are you willing to give up to be the best that you can be?” he asks as part of the 2018 Facebook documentary Tom vs Time. “You only have so much energy and the clock is ticking on all of us.
“When you say yes to something you have to say no to something else. I’ve given my body, my everything, every last bit of energy for 18 years to this game. If you’re going to compete against me you better be willing to give your life because I’m giving up mine.”
Brady’s relentless run at the very top of his sport is well-documented, his commitment to his body legendary. There’s “no way” he’d be playing today, he says, were it not for his meticulous, decade-long work with plyometric coach Alex Guerrero. The lengthening of his muscles day in, day out help him “rip it”, to use his words, down in, down out. But it’s not all down to the patented TB12 regimen or $200 ‘nutrition manuals’, to avocado ice cream and 25 glasses of water a day, Brady’s advantage off the field, as it is on it, comes from within.
Never the strongest or the fastest Brady knew early on if he was to win in the NFL it would be his brain, not his body, that would get him there. “He’s mastered more information and instruction than anybody in the history of football,” says long-time throwing coach Tom House. “He won’t be able to do this when he’s 70”, he adds. “But he’s still on the journey. He’s pushing the curve back."
NFL teams tend to give players Monday and Tuesdays off during the regular season with rest and recuperation in this most physically demanding of games key. Brady spends those days watching film of his next opposition. Unlike most after nearly two decades doing it he’s not watching for specific players or plays anymore. Now he looks for tells, he says, like a poker player. Every split second advantage he can gain here pays off on Sundays. While grinding tape is a chore for most Brady finds it “soothing”. This is his R&R. He could happily watch play after play for four or five hours in one sitting, he says, and regularly does.
For a competitor so used to winning it’s the losses – even as few in number as there are – that stick. The 2007 season where the Pats ran the table unbeaten during the regular season only to lose to Eli Manning’s New York Giants in the Super Bowl still stings more than most. “I’ll never let go of those losses,” he says. “The scar tissue is too deep.”
The infamous Deflategate saga saw Brady suspended for the first four games of the 2016 season for his alleged role in the deflation of footballs before the 2015 AFC title game. He kept the league’s suspension letter. Five months later he won the Super Bowl.
“It’s more than a game to me,” he says. “So when I lose I feel like I’m losing in pursuit of what my life is. The joys of winning are great but I sweep them under the rug so fast that there’s a brief moment in time where I enjoy the experience of it. And then I’m thinking about the next game and about winning again.”
So what if he wins again? What then? Or what if the opposite happens and there’s no more and this is all there is? What if, as his critics say, his powers really are beginning to wane and the end is finally nigh? Brady’s motivation has always been the same.
“I don’t need exterior motivations. The ones inside of me are enough,” he says with that steely look so many vanquished foes have seen. “You’ve got to block out the noise because none of that helps you win.
“What motivates me is ‘I could or should have been better’. I have all this knowledge, played so many games, had so many experiences, had so many teammates, had so many gameplans, I could be, I should be perfect.
“I see myself out there and I think to myself ‘man, I’m still doing it better than I’ve ever done it’. So why should I stop?”
