In Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, he wrote about a chaotic life that arose when he reached a level of fame that transcended music. People weren’t just hounding him. They weren’t just gawking or taking pictures. They were handing him a guitar on cue and asking him to change the world. They were begging him to use his voice as a means to achieve some greater level of humanity he wasn’t even sure existed and stopped looking for.
That was his cue to exit.
In reality, he said he wanted, “Little League games, birthday parties, taking my kids to school, camping trips, boating, rafting, canoeing, fishing,” and wrote, “sometime in the past I had performed songs that were most original and influential, and I didn’t know if I would ever do it again and I didn’t care.”
AP Photo/Chris O’Meara
Eventually, with time, that kind of pressure receded. Dylan talked about the comfort of regressing to “Legend and Icon” because “Prophet, Messiah, Savior—those were the tough ones.”
The passage should, in some ways, make us think of Tom Brady who, again, toes the line between his past and future. The Buccaneers lost 31–14 to the Cowboys on Monday night, ending a season that was never going to live up to anyone’s expectations. On this night, Brady threw his first red zone interception in four years. He was shut out in the first half of a playoff game for the first time since 2001. He is 45 years old. He will have suitors in free agency if he so desires, or, he can walk away from the sport that, from a public perspective, has defined the first half of his life.
He is still at the point where franchises would hand him a football and expect him to change their own miniature universes. It is still weird when he loses and that fact is not-so-stealthily marketed as such by the league that employs him. Defeating Brady is now some sort of strange touristy right of passage for quarterbacks who weren’t born when he was drafted. Defensive backs who pick him off ask him to sign the ball after games. With all this has come a complete and total lack of a private life, any decision free of public scrutiny and any moment that is in some way not about him.
If he’s ready, he can start the process of recession, from Football Messiah, to Icon, to Legend, to person, who has his own things going on outside the confines of professional football. He can work toward that peace and contentment, where he can be left alone (figuratively) if he so chooses. He can start the long path toward a day when people don’t care what companies he’s invested in, what hats he has hanging in his locker, whose phone number he has on speed dial or who he’s tagged with in Instagram photos.
This time last year, Tom Brady Sr. was blaming the hounding of the press for his son’s muddled retirement, even though that explanation is difficult to fully digest given what we now know about the Dolphins and Sean Payton. But perhaps this time around, we should listen anyway. We shouldn’t treat Tom Sr. as some kind of media antagonist but as a father recognizing both the incredible gifts and sacrifices of fame for his son. Even though, reflexively, we will want to know everything about what Brady is doing next, and even though Brady may already have the whole thing set up, we should do our best to let him make this decision in peace. A cease-fire, if you will. If we, a football viewing, reporting, tweeting, watching society can give a gift to the person who has transformed the world in which we work, it ought to be absolute silence and feigned disinterest.
It’s not unprecedented. The great Chris Mortenson of ESPN sat on Peyton Manning’s retirement news for a night while Manning dined out as a player one last time. It was a matter of feeling a certain way, and that was respected. What’s a few weeks for Brady? He signed a $375 million deal with a television network for post-career work, so it’s not like we’ll be in the dark for long.
It feels better than the alternative, and this is coming from someone who needs news to make a living. Brady said in 2021 that he lies publicly all the time anyway. Maybe because he thinks it’s fun. But maybe it’s because he thinks he needs to. Dylan was the same way. He’d change his voice or put out records he didn’t think people would listen to or appear to change religions so they’d leave him alone. Maybe this is just Brady’s strange, roundabout way to say “please stop asking because I don’t know the answer.”
We’re all trying to figure out what’s best for us and the people we love every day, but Brady’s decision to play or not to play again is different. It’s agreeing to plunge yourself back into a world where everyone and everything depends on you, where everyone loves you or loathes you, where everyone owns a piece of you and tries to alter the legacy that you’ve, in many ways, sacrificed your life to build. The alternative is diving off a proverbial cliff of uncertainty, away from structure, away from regiment, away from the ways in which you have typically defined meaning and pleasure.
Brady, in a 2005 interview with 60 Minutes, likened retirement to being an astronaut coming back from the moon. What’s left after that?
“I’m always trying to figure out ways to fill a day with things I like to do,” he said at the time. “And when I play football during those seven months out of the year, it’s easy. You get up, you come here … you’re focused, you’ve got a goal. You’ve got something you’re trying to accomplish. And when that’s done, you don’t have 80,000 people screaming your name.
“What’s it going to be? I mean, I don’t know.”
There is a difference between walking away from a sport when you are among the best at something and walking away from a sport when you are the sport, when the proverbial fairytale sold to a generation of kids is loosely based on your life’s story.
Dylan figured it out, even though it took an all-out escape. Brady doesn’t seem there quite yet, but given what’s on the line, he deserves some solitude to plan one if he sees fit. He has given the game enough. He has taken on an immense psychological weight over the course of two decades. It’s time for him—for us—to digest all that. It’s time for the Football Messiah to decide what he wants to be.
