Brady far from finish line
It’s not premature to start calling Tom brady the Gordie Howe of the NFL, a superstar performer who just wouldn’t retire, long after every player he’d broken into the league with had hung ’em up.
Considering the season brady has had with the Tampa bay buccaneers — and after what he said Monday during the first media availability prior to his 10th career Super bowl — who wouldn’t be shocked if the age-defying quarterback continued playing professionally at his sport’s top level deep into his late 40s?
Howe, the late hockey icon, retired for the final time at age 52 in 1980, after 26 seasons in the NHL and six in the rival WHA. Thirty-two seasons! That’s still crazy, after all these years.
brady is 43 and — health permitting — sounds intent on effectively becoming the NFL’S version of Howe. brady is also one of his sport’s best of all time, and he also just keeps on playing — often great, too — years and years after most of his original peers have called it quits.
The native Californian is now just a few days from completing his 21st NFL season, and the last 20 as his team’s starter. Several years ago, brady surprised the football world by declaring his intention to keep playing until age 45.
you don’t need all the fingers on one hand to count the number of NFL Qbs who were still starting and playing well even at age 42.
yet here we are, and brady’s 45th birthday as of Wednesday will be precisely a year and a half away. That’s it. And he’s under contract with the bucs through the 2021 season.
As with Howe, it’s not about what more brady needs to still prove to others. He’s the NFL’S winningest player (six Super bowl championships) and is widely considered the most accomplished, if not greatest, player in NFL history.
As with the greatest athletes in any sport’s history — Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Nolan ryan — brady just wants to keep proving to himself, even over his teammates, that he can do it at the highest level.
This season, brady eventually did. More and more, as he came to better understand and feel comfortable in head coach bruce Arians’ aggressive passing attack, brady performed about as well as he did during the zenith of his two-decade run in New england.
He became the first passer in NFL history to throw for as many as 40 touchdowns in his first year with a team.
So, is age 45 still brady’s end wall? Nope. He officially blew up that wall on Monday. On the video conference call, he was asked if he is now considering playing past age 45.
“yeah, definitely. I would definitely consider that,” brady said. “It’s a physical sport, and the perspective I have on that is you never know kind of when that moment (to retire) is, just because it’s a contact sport. A lot of training goes into it. And it has to be a 100 per cent commitment from myself to keep doing it.”
“There are a lot of sacrifices that my family has made,” brady said. “I’m grateful for their support. I’ve got a ton of friends who really support me, too, plus coaches and teammates. It really takes a lot of people. It’s a team sport. I’m very fortunate to still be able to do it.”