Brady will hope to emulate Romo rather than Henry
SOME guys get all the breaks. The life of Tom Brady already seemed like the American dream made flesh. The handsome and clean-cut Californian, of Cavan and Cork stock, whose rare athletic gifts made him arguably the greatest quarterback of alltime, with seven Super Bowl rings to prove it. He also happens to be married to one of the most glamorous women in the world in supermodel Gisele Bundchen.
Brady, along with his New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, created one of the greatest sporting dynasties. And when he wasn’t wanted in Boston any more, after leading them to six Super Bowls, he headed down to Tampa Bay and won it for them – at 43 years of age.
And now it has been revealed that Fox Sports have signed Brady to a $375million deal over 10 years to be their lead analyst one he retires. To put that in context, his entire earnings over 23 years in the NFL come to $320million.
‘We know he loves to study NFL film’
Brady did retire a few months ago but it was pretty short-lived. After a heartfelt statement of wanting to spend more time with his family, the quarterback went back on his decision within a couple of weeks. When Tampa Bay Buccaneers take the field at Dallas Cowboys for the opener of the 2022 NFL season on September 11th, the 45-year-old Brady will be their quarterback.
So, Fox have shelled out an absurd amount of money, which dwarfs what he ever earned on a football field, and they don’t even know when Brady will be starting his new job. It could be next year. Or in three years. What is even more significant is that they don’t even know if he will be any good at analysing games on television.
Does that even matter? Brady looks good in front of the camera. He is the biggest name in America’s most popular sport — and love of the NFL is the only thing that now unifies the increasingly divided United States. Fox are just pleased to have the AllAmerican hero on board. Will they even care what comes out of his mouth?
Veteran sports broadcaster Bob Costas was on CNN last Wednesday articulating some reasons why a broadcaster has blindly paid such a ridiculous sum to someone without knowing if they are up to the job.
‘He’s a mega-celebrity,’ Costas said. ‘People who don’t know a screen pass from a field goal know who Tom Brady is. And he will be a corporate ambassador for Fox Sports. How good an analyst he will be remains to be seen, but we know he loves to study NFL film and loves to get into the minutiae of the game.’
As much as he is living the American dream, Brady is not some kind of modern-day Gatsby. He had to work hard to make himself into a cultural touchstone. Famously, he was the 199th pick of the 2000 NFL draft. Six quarterbacks had been selected before the Patriots took a punt on him as back-up to Drew Bledaoe, whose subsequent injury in a game against the New York Jets changed NFL history.
Nothing was handed to Brady and those who know him well reckon that he will take the same hard-working attitude to the commentary booth. He will be meticulous in how to do the job, but even so, that’s no guarantee it will work.
‘I wonder if Brady is too nice a guy to be up in the booth, slicing and dicing and criticising all the guys,’ Boston sports hack Mike Lynch, who has known him for more than 20 years, suggested on the Bloomberg Business of Sport podcast. And there’s also the whole question of what makes a good pundit.
Former Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo has made his name as the best NFL analyst around and recently signed a 10-year deal with CBS worth a mere $180million. Romo’s great gift is that he doesn’t state the obvious and has got a knack for predicting plays before they happen. Romo has set the bar high for Brady.
And while Peter Canavan’s sharp and incisive analysis makes the Gaelic football coverage on BBC and Sky Sports much more enjoyable, the greatest players don’t always make great pundits. We all remember the hullabaloo when Sky signed up Thierry Henry. The Premier League’s greatest ever player was now going to be its chief analyst. What could possibly go wrong?
As it turned out, quite a bit. For all his French elegance and sophistication, despite the fact that he looked good on the screen and was clearly intelligent, Henry’s analysis of football matches was fairly dull. He didn’t excite or thrill and was never a threat to Gary Neville or Jamie Carragher.
The feeling that Henry was still too close to some of the players and was content to sit on the fence. And that’s the risk that Fox run with Brady. While he appears to have a voice in Florida now that he is away from Belichick’s paranoia, there is a big difference between speaking your mind after a game and speaking it in a commentary booth. He will have to put his own stamp on reading a football game — and make it accessible to the millions of people watching around the world. His good looks and megawatt smile aren’t going to help him with that.
The NFL is supposed to be in hibernation at the moment but in truth, America’s sporting monolith never sleeps. All you need to do is flick on Sky Sports NFL channel and see hours of programming devoted to it, despite the fact that all the players are on holidays. Everything is an event, everything is analysed to the nth degree. Even something as mundane as the release of the schedule for the upcoming season — which was dissected for hours last Thursday night.
But the thing is that Tom Brady’s record-breaking deal was actual news. It showed the significance of the NFL in the States, the on-going soap opera that unites everyone. And who knows? Maybe Brady will be good behind a microphone and be able to call a game as well as Tony Romo. He might be so good as to disprove F Scott Fitzgerald’s theory about there being no second acts in American life.
After all, some guys get all the breaks.
Henry was content to sit on the fence