19 REASONS THIS SEASON WILL BE SUPER
Presaging ageless Pats QB pointless
With Tom Brady warming up on the sidelines and getting ready to step into life as a 40-year-old, I thought it might be a fun exercise to see if I could find the first journalist in history to put it out there that the Patriots’ iconic, Hall of Fame-bound quarterback is getting old.
Ever the clever one, I consulted a newspaper archive at my disposal and typed the words “Tom Brady” and “getting old,” and then sat back and waited for the results.
The lucky winner was an old buddy of mine — Steve Kelley of the Seattle Times.
The date of the column: Nov. 21, 2001.
Brady was 24 years old at the time.
In fairness, Kelley wasn’t even writing about Brady’s age. What he filed was one of those pieces-of-my-mindtype “notes” columns we all know and love, and the “getting old” bit had nothing to do with Brady. It was related to an item about a brouhaha that was going on in the NBA at the time: The league was fining players for wearing their shorts too low.
“I admit I’m getting old,” Kelley wrote, “but I agree with the NBA. Shaq, Kobe, Tracy McGrady and the rest of those who were fined $5,000 should be wearing shorts, not culottes.” So there. As for the Brady line in the column, here’s what Kelley wrote: “New England Coach Bill Belichick, who takes care of quarterbacks with the same gentility baggage handlers take with our luggage, botched it this week when he declared Tom Brady, not $100 million Drew Bledsoe, his quarterback for the rest of the season. What happened to the idea of playing them one at a time?” My. The point here isn’t to ridicule Kelley over a throwaway line from a notes column that ran nearly 16 years ago in a newspaper on the other end of the country. Kelley, who retired three years ago (I guess he really did get old), was a hugely entertaining columnist during his days at the Times.
And anyway, the snipe at Belichick about sticking with young Brady instead of returning the QB job to a healthy Bledsoe, he of the infamous Mo Lewis hit in Week 2, has nothing to so with TB12’s upcoming 40th birthday. Except that it does. Let me put it to you this way: Happy birthday, Tom Brady! Your career is going to end exactly as it began: A lot of people are going to doubt you!
Right? Brady arrived in the NFL as a sixth-round draft pick, and it was such a non-story that it barely made it into the papers. And even then, it was a dot-dotdot item at the end of the beat writers’ notebooks. One former Pats beat writer — and I’ll only give you a hint as to who it was: Michael Felger — referred to Brady as “a curious selection given the presence of Michael Bishop and John Friesz on the roster.”
Brady spent the 2000 season wearing a baseball cap and carrying a clipboard. He appeared in one game and completed one pass. It wasn’t until 2001, after the Lewis hit landed Bledsoe in the hospital, that Brady emerged as Belichick’s starting quarterback. And as is evidenced by Steve Kelley’s one-liners column, there were voices outside New England who wanted, or expected, a healthy Bledsoe to reclaim his perch as the No. 1 passer in Foxboro.
Now look where we are: Brady is about to turn 40, and that’s a ripe, old age if you happen to play professional sports for a living. And if your professional sport happens to be football, 40 is 80.
I remember being shocked in 1998 when Steve DeBerg, age 44, signed with the Atlanta Falcons. DeBerg had been a fine quarterback in his day — in 1979, in his second NFL season with the San Francisco 49ers, he led the league with 347 completions — but by 1998 he was a retired journeyman who hadn’t even played in five years. Yet he appeared in eight games for the Falcons in ’98, even starting a game.
And I was amazed by it all — a 44-year-old guy serving as a backup quarterback, and even playing a little.
But Brady is no backup and he hasn’t had the benefit of sitting out for five seasons to allow whatever’s broken or bruised to heal. He’s been doing the heavy lifting of being a first-rate, first-string NFL quarterback for most of this century, and even now he shows no signs of slowing down.
Yet the talk is out there — he’ll be done soon. If not this year, then next year. It’s Jimmy Garopplo time, right? Right?
Someday, everyone will be right about Tom Brady.
For the time being, everyone has been wrong.