Tom Brady, Aggravatingly Unbeatable Void, Calls It a Day

Let’s pose three questions designed to determine the “greatness” of a given Hall of Fame-caliber player:

1. How much did they accomplish?
2. How good at their sport were they?
3. How did they make people feel?

If you’re just asking the first question, the answer is pretty damn clear: Tom Brady, who announced his retirement Tuesday from the NFL after a whopping 22 seasons, 20 of those as a starter, is clearly the most accomplished NFL player ever. He won seven Super Bowls, played in three more (he made it to the big game half the years he started in the NFL, which is wild), won five Super Bowl MVPs, three league MVP awards, and is the NFL’s all-time leader in passing yards.

Ask the second question, it gets a little stickier. Brady parlayed a lot of advantages: a process-obsessed workaholic, he stumbled into the one coaching situation that complimented his obsessive drive, played the majority of his games in a generationally moribund AFC East, and operated behind a series of elite offensive lines. There was also the matter of his team’s… loose relationship to rules regarding surveillance and football inflation, and the weird question about whether or not his reduced Patriots salary was complemented by sketchy deals that coexisted with his being paid as an independent contractor.

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Unlike many of the players who wear the G.O.A.T. mantle (the crown they give you when you’re widely known as the greatest player in the history of your sport), he has statistical peers. Aaron Rodgers and Peyton Manning are nearly his equals in bulk production, and they sport extraordinary qualities that Brady just doesn’t have on paper: Rodgers has elite mobility and an anti-aircraft gun arm, while Manning possessed a savant-like command of mid-play adjustments. In different situations, either could have ended up with Brady’s career. Such are the ways of fate.

But then we come to the third thing.

Michael Jordan knifes through the lane and drills a mid-range shot. He is inhuman. He posts up and executes a perfect turnaround jumper on the baseline. You can practically hear the wind around him snapping due to his speed and control. He demolishes his opponents for a decade straight, bringing people to their knees through pure force of will. He is inspiring and terrifying in equal measure. To watch him, even now, after his career mutated professional basketball forever, is to be shocked by the degree of his athleticism, grace, and competitive drive. Even when Michael Jordan beat your team, he gave you the opportunity to watch the Mozart of sports. Nowadays, he hangs out in owners boxes and swills expensive tequila, radiating a low-level malevolence, but he only got to that place because he was so mind-breaking amazing that even the teams, the players, the fan bases he beat were forced to admit that they thought he was the shit. It was undeniable.

Tom Brady will not become a billionaire ex-athlete, because no one is coming away from his career with a deep well of warm feelings for Tom Brady. Watching him stand behind a really good offensive line for way too long, floating around in the pocket like a goldfish, not getting hit, right until the point when he could find one of those little receivers that Bill Belichick seemed to have forged from bones and evil spells and hitting them for first downs over and over and over was not beautiful, or dynamic, or even exceedingly clever. It just… was.

The man was not an overwhelming talent who made you see through the veil, he was just… unkillable. A normal-looking guy who seemed like he was in league with the devil. Unless you rooted for the Patriots, you regarded him with either boredom or dread depending on how well he was playing. If getting beat by Michael Jordan was like watching a samurai slice and dice a thousand foes, soaking the ground with blood that feeds the soil and gives the flowers their beautiful springtime bloom, getting beat by Brady was like getting audited: inert, stressful, and anti-climactic.

The sensation Brady created in opponents and fans was not awe. It was maddening frustration. It was the feeling of grabbing whoever was closest and screaming Jesus Christ, again?! over and over into the infinite void. At some point or another, if you were an interesting team who was trying something new, Brady would pick you apart like a crow feasting on carrion. He just stood behind that line for twenty years, waiting for his opponent to mess up. Unless you were Eli Manning, for some reason, it usually did not happen.

His Super Bowls are an index of opponent meltdowns—grown men staring destiny in the face and tripping into a pile of pig shit. In Super Bowl XXXIX, the Patriots won by three points after Donovan McNabb threw a whopping three interceptions. The Seahawks, coming off a Super Bowl victory in 2014, looked like an emergent power, the New Patriots, right up until the final moments of XLIX, when they opted to schedule a goal-line throw by Russell Wilson which landed right in the hands of Malcolm Butler.

A fanbase—a world—expressed the same lament, all at once. Why didn’t they give the ball to Marshawn Lynch, the Seahawks’ bruising, madman running back? Why even employ one of the league’s best running backs if you weren’t going to use him to get short yardage? But by the time it came out of anyone’s mouth, it didn’t matter. Brady played solid and the other team shat themselves, just like it always happened.

Brady’s signature performance happened in the Patriots’ massive comeback in Super Bowl LI. The Atlanta Falcons had a 19 point lead with less than 10 minutes remaining in the game. But fate did not care. Miscues, strip sacks, Brady appearing to not mind that the game he was playing in was the Super Bowl, the Patriots scoring on their final five straight possessions.

Brady, throwing into triple coverage, and getting away with it through an act of pure kinetic fate. Charmed. Demonic. Terrifying.

But for every best Super Bowl of all time, there is a worst Super Bowl of all time. The Patriots sucked it up in Super Bowl LIII, only notching 15 points and looking lackadaisical. Fortunately for them, they were playing the LA Rams, who were… much, much worse.

After a lengthy, bunk health science-related divorce from the Patriots, Brady joined the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Instead of having the decency to have a Patrick Ewing-on-the-Sonics washout season, he took his team to Super Bowl LV, where he played underdog to Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs.

The Chiefs won the previous year’s Super Bowl and then proceeded to have an even better follow-up season. Mahomes won the NFL MVP and was radiant, brilliant—a triple threat who could operate in the pocket, scrambling, or running into the defense. It was his moment. Beat Brady, become the king. Anyway, he didn’t. He seized up, Brady did what he normally does, he lost.

Was Brady the greatest football player of all time? Sure, why not. Was he the most accomplished American athlete of his generation? Yeah, probably. Was he a defining cultural figure during his reign, a man of his era the way Jordan was in the '90s, Ali in the '60s, the way Babe Ruth in the '20s? Yes.

Appropriate, then, that his era sucked. He won his first Super Bowl right after 9/11, clad in a red, white, and blue uniform, all while neocon demons sat in back rooms and plotted to wield the pain of all those deaths to perpetrate a series of hideous war crimes. He left as the country struggles to emerge from a hideous ongoing pandemic. In between all that, a litany of nightmares: economic meltdown, a disappointing president followed by a demagogue (that he befriended and supported), the complete and total fraying of anything resembling national unity.

The world that existed side by side with Tom Brady’s iron-fisted reign over American sports, his total domination over the country’s biggest league, was, like Tom Brady and his squads, an aggravating, tiring, regressive nightmare. Everyone is happy it’s over. Maybe, now that the avatar of an era of suffering has finally been exiled from American public life, the healing can begin under the more captivating, progressive aura of Patrick Mahomes or Josh Allen.

I can’t pretend there’s a cause and effect here—that when Tom Brady won that first Super Bowl, he set the template for the next two decades of American life, a maelstrom of disappointments. But what if I were to say that Brady was a totem of everything hateful about the era he played through? From 9/11 to the pandemic meltdown, terrible wars to demagogues and the approach of total civilizational collapse, there was Tom, square-jawing his way through it all, a big void dismantling your favorite team while the bigger void dismantled everything else.