Brady: Gawky teen becomes best
Impregnable competitor product of intelligence and diligence and born to play greatest game NFL has seen
The entry point of Tom Brady’s professional football career made sense on Monday as he stood on the podium, confetti falling on his shoulders, and cradled another Lombardi Trophy, the totem of his fifth Super Bowl American football title.
NFL teams passed on Brady 198 times in the 2000 draft. Everybody knows that by now, but it warrants repeating.
They didn’t overlook him because every NFL team is run by idiots. There was no readily available reason to want him. He was scrawny, he couldn’t throw much of a deep ball, and he ran like a gawky teenager.
How can you blame someone for not seeing something that’s invisible? What made Brady a viable NFL player, and then a starting quarterback, and then a Super Bowl champion, and then the greatest of all time, is the same thing that landed him on that podium on Monday.
Brady is a product of intelligence and diligence, but those qualities would be rendered useless without the best of Brady.
What makes Brady, and what won him another Super Bowl, is his competitive will.
Brady had no business celebrating the Patriots’ 34-28 overtime victory in Super Bowl LI, just like he had no business becoming an NFL quarterback 17 years earlier.
The Atlanta Falcons’ pass rush harassed him and battered him. He threw a back-breaking pick-six in the second quarter. He trailed by 25 points in the middle of the third.
No football player is going to roll over in the Super Bowl, and the NFL does not permit teams to concede anyway. But there is a difference between playing and believing, between not laying down and knowing how to crawl in the right direction.
A lot of people can try hard in the face of grim odds. Few can summon the requisite poise and competence to take the measure of an impossible task and decide it can be done.
On Monday, Brady played the greatest game of football the sport has seen. Not the most perfect, nor the most artistic, nor even the most excellent. But the greatest nonetheless. He led the Patriots back from a 28-3 deficit on a stage that had never seen anything better than a 10-point comeback. He passed for 466 yards, a Super Bowl record, and completed 43 of 62 passes.
He led a 91-yard drive touchdown in the final four minutes, capped with a two-point conversion.
The numbers are stupefying, and they would not have been attainable if not for Brady’s central feature. He would not let anything that happened on Monday make him anything less than whole. The Falcons slammed