A few months ago, when Tom Brady was starting his career as an NFL commentator for Fox Sports, a commercial aired. It begins with Brady, his face at all angles, sitting at a desk in an unmarked room, looking at videos on two large screens in front of him, laptops to his right and left, and a large TV mounted on the wall. It’s not entirely clear why he needs so much stimulation at once, but it has to do with maximum efficiency. Retired or not, the world’s greatest midfielder does not have the luxury of indulging in serial action – one thing at a time is for the slow and losers.
On television, critics scream about the arrogance of changing his career. Someone says: “I don’t understand it.” “Tom Brady, broadcaster? The man has everything in the world. Why do you do that? Tommy, why? And so, faced with the challenge, Brady is exposed to younger versions of himself—the everyman at the University of Michigan, the champion New England Patriots, and the little kid wearing the uniform of his favorite team, the San Francisco 49ers—that remind him of all his efforts thus far and annoy him. His about the temptations of post-professional inaction. “Why don’t you lie on the beach and have piña coladas?” says one of the toms. God forbid the skinny, chiseled Tom wakes up from his slumber, newly determined to prove his haters wrong. “Tom Brady is back in action“, reads the slogan.
That’s right, he’s back – not that he’s gone anywhere very far – busy working, making money, without subtly improving his image. He signed a ten-year contract with Fox worth three hundred and seventy-five million dollars, which is a pretty hefty sum to offer for someone who’s never done the job, but a name like Brady is priceless. His early radio programs were a bit confusing. Along with fellow announcer Kevin Burkhart — a truly talented play-by-play commentator — Brady would go silent during crucial segments of the game. When he played, it was often in a monotonous second note with irregular bursts of odd percussion. When describing Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott, he sounded like he was rehearsing some grand slam lyric: “I think he’ll handle…” . . With this kind of pressure. . . We’ve talked about this with some of these young people. . . Offensive linemen.”
Last summer, before the Fox gig began, he subjected himself to a very modern kind of self-serving humiliation: the celebrity roast. A roast is an opportunity for a big guy like Brady to show himself as a good athlete and, through enduring the burn wounds of a public round of insults, to develop character.
The barbecue plan backfired on Brady. He recently went through a divorce from his wife of thirteen years, Brazilian model Gisele Bündchen. The details of the split in the tabloids — Bündchen and her new martial arts lover dropped the quarterback in a dreamboat and screwed his costar — provided plenty of fodder for storyboard-like stories about sharks looking for a boyfriend.
In 2018, Brady — at the end of his tenure with the Patriots, the franchise he made his name alongside coach Bill Belichick — embarked on another television adventure. He was the star of a show called “Tom vs. Time,” which aired on the ill-fated Facebook Watch. Here, he is portrayed as a devoted father, a health and fitness junkie, and an angry wrestler against the ravages of professional athletics. Viewers have seen him hugging his kids, exercising on the beach and revealing he’s very picky about what goes into his body. In one episode, Brady described his relationship with football as if it was part romantic, part therapeutic. “In front of seventy thousand people, I can really be who I am,” he said. “If I want to yell at someone, I can yell at someone. . . . It allows me to be who I am in a very real way.”
All of these generic deformities — a family man, an easygoing regular, a competitor with a touch of psychosis — illustrate a problem that Brady embodies but didn’t invent: What kind of person is a quarterback supposed to be? Football’s rarefied place in American cultural life makes the quarterback — all you need for the symbolic role I’m talking about is an arm and a smile — an ambassador from the world of Norman Rockwell. This is a true red-blooded man, who takes responsibility, accepts challenges, and treats others with everlasting grace.
Brady was not a high college pick. No one expected much from him. By emerging from that inauspicious beginning to don the mantle of Superman, he helped perpetuate the myth of the quarterback’s creation: that this kind of success is not about routine athleticism or mere intelligence or genetic inheritance. Rather, winning is the result of hard work, high character, and a pure heart.
This character is evident in the career of one of Brady’s main rivals on the field, Peyton Manning. Manning came from a good Southern football team — his father, Archie, was a quarterback for the New Orleans Saints, his brother Eli was the fearless captain of the New York Giants, and his nephew Arch would soon be drafted into the NFL — but his superiority seemed deserved. His game was full of subtle adjustments and quick decisions. He was famous for how encyclopedically he could master any playbook you threw at him. Nowadays, he owns a production company whose main product is “Manningcast”, an ESPN2 show that Peyton hosts with Eli. As they watch football matches and chat, Peyton comes across as a kind, enlightened old boy. He doesn’t seem to be driven by demons or need to control anyone. It’s easy to understand why his teammates seem to love him so much.
But Brady has a thicker figure and a cooler eye. His closest resemblance is not to other quarterbacks, but to basketball star Kobe Bryant, who died five years ago in a helicopter crash at a very young age. Like Bryant — who turned his gym rat nature into a legend as long as Paul Bunyan’s — Brady likes to talk about his work ethic, about how badly he needs to win and how far he’s willing to go to fill a void. Brady, in his own telling, latches on to small insults and magnifies them enough to fuel himself with victory. “I’ve always been kind of driven by people saying, ‘You can’t do that,’” he once told fellow former player Michael Strahan on “Good Morning America.” All he needs is a snippet of straight talk, a hint of insult, or even an angry look to get him angry enough to get into the end zone. If the classic quarterback, embodied by Manning, accomplished his feats through the power of goodwill, Brady — a progenitor and product of what today is called hustle culture — needed a grind of irritation to reach his true heights.
This is the message behind the commercial. Through the power of broadcasting, Brady will once again eliminate his enemies — outside doubters or their past selves — and make them watch his coronation. All their chatter only gives him “bulletin board material,” as the saying goes. Here, unfortunately, is more: Brady is not great in his new gig. But from time to time he will show his intensity. At one point during the recent playoff game between the Detroit Lions and Washington Commanders, for example, he quickly pointed out that the Commanders had twelve players on the field, instead of the eleven allowed. “Oh, no, what are they doing?” groan. However, he often sticks to the usual phrases and leaves us to imagine his opinion of the players. His sensitivity to strong opinions may have something to do with an apparent conflict of interest: He is also part-owner of the NFL team, the Las Vegas Raiders. All this multitasking has its downsides.
Brady’s TV rivals include two former Dallas Cowboys quarterbacks: Tony Romo — a joking CBS commentator who made a splash, early on, by predicting plays with uncanny accuracy before they happened — and 1990s poster boy Troy Aikman, on ESPN, who likes to play the tough sheikh and get angry at the blunders made by quarterbacks. Maybe Brady needs Romo or Aikman to drop a stray negative comment that might apply to him. He’ll go to the gym, get angry, make them pay, and prove them – and me – wrong. ♦
