TOM VS. TIME
BRADY GIVES FILMMAKER UNUSUAL ACCESS TO HIS PRIVATE LIFE
Tom Brady was leading a tour through a set of fat binders that he keeps in his den, with each one devoted to one of the 18 seasons he has played in the NFL. This one, marked “2016,” began with a particular memento.
“I still keep this,” Brady, the New England Patriots quarterback, said, holding a document up to the camera. “It’s my suspension letter.”
That would be the missive he received from 345 Park Ave. informing him he would be sidelined for the first four games of the 2016 season for his role in the still-hard-to-believe football air-pressure “scandal” known as Deflategate. As the camera focused on Brady, his face became stuck in a smile that could be characterized as something between goofy and satisfied (and with the whiff of a smirk).
“Thank you,” Brady said, to whom it was not clear exactly. He turned the page, and next thing you know he was winning another ring.
The scene transpires early in the first installment of a new documentary series, “Tom vs. Time,” which was posted late last month via Facebook’s mobile video platform, Facebook Watch. The series follows Brady not just as he has pursued
his sixth Super Bowl championship in 2017, but also — as the title indicates — as he conducts his ongoing subversion campaign against the actuarial tables of quarterback longevity.
Filmmaker Gotham Chopra was granted sweeping access to Brady in an array of intimate settings that the inscrutable signal-caller would normally be loath to allow. There is extensive footage of Brady at his Brookline, Massachusetts, home, with his children, with his wife, Gisele Bündchen, on family retreats to Costa Rica, on a bro-trip to Montana (with teammates Julian Edelman and Danny Amendola), on a summer tour of China with his son Jack, and in the car during Brady’s commute to and from work in Foxborough.
The sequence of the Brady children singing along to Vance Joy’s “Riptide” while dad drives home from the stadium after a November win over Miami is, to use the artistic term, rather precious.
One venue where Brady is barely seen: Gillette Stadium, or pretty much anywhere in the Patriots’ facilities. For a player who has been the epitome of the Patriots team-first philosophy, Brady would seem an unlikely candidate to open such a closeup lens upon his off-field self, especially during the season — and especially for a project set to drop during the playoffs. A player not placing undo attention upon himself would constitute a first principle of coach Bill Belichick’s colorless “Do Your Job” collectivism. That is one of the many remarkable aspects of “Tom vs. Time.”
It is unclear if Brady had even told his coach about the project. The Patriots spokesman Stacey James said the team was nominally aware that a Brady documentary was in the works, and tried to be helpful in providing credentials on the few occasions Chopra sought access to home games. Beyond that, the answer of how much Brady’s bosses were informed about “Tom vs. Time” remains shrouded in some Patriot-esque mystery.
This takes on some added resonance in light of a recent ESPN report describing deep tensions between Brady and Belichick, the twin pillars of the NFL’s 21st-century dynasty. No doubt “Tom vs. Time” could provide more grist for the distraction mill that NFL teams avoid so strenuously, nowhere more so than Bunker Bill, this famously locked-down football enclave between Boston and Providence.
Putting aside any significance the series might hold in the broader Patriots Kremlinology, “Tom vs. Time” is pure candy for football geeks, celebrity lifestyle voyeurs and pretty much any NFL enthusiast curious about one of sports’ more enigmatic superstars. In the fifth installment (“The Spiritual Game”), Brady ruminates on the karmic satisfactions he derives through sports.
“I do want to know the whys in life,” Brady said. “I do want to know why we’re here, where we’re going; trying to find that deeper purpose. To live it, through sports in a very authentic way, makes so much sense to me.”
Later in the fifth episode, Brady and Bündchen sit for a joint interview in which Bündchen, a Brazilian model, describes what it is like to have to share her husband with his “first love,” football. “It really is his main love,” Bündchen says, going further. “Frankly it’s true.”
Given some of the events of this season — both around the league and with the Patriots — the first 4 1/2 installments that were available for viewing by The New York Times contained some big elephants that go unmentioned to this point.
There is no discussion, for instance, of the player protests around the national anthem that dominated much of the early season. (President Donald Trump, who ignited much of the discord around the protests, took every opportunity during the 2016 campaign to mention his close friendship with Brady.) Nor is there any mention of the midseason trade that sent Brady’s backup and possible heir apparent Jimmy Garoppolo to the San Francisco 49ers; or, for that matter, of Brady’s polarizing “body coach,” business partner and best friend, Alex Guerrero, who was reportedly told by Belichick that he was no longer permitted to work at the stadium.
Chopra said he most likely would cover some of that material in the final installments, though much of it depends on the Patriots’ playoff trajectory. “There’s still some ground to cover and a lot of the story left to unfold,” he said.