What Has Passed
Quarterback milestones since
Tom Brady’s NFL career beganAPRIL 16, 2000
Tom Brady is drafted
in the sixth round, 199th,
by the Patriots.MAY 9, 2000Tr e y Lance,
the
No. 3 pick
of the
2021 draft,
is born.Brady is, you might say, committed to the role. His
organizing football principles are largely unchanged.
Same for his leadership traits and his character. And yet
in other ways Brady is a much different man than that
28-year-old bachelor. Handed the cover from 2005, he
smiles. “I think I recognize that person,” he says. “But
there’s so much more to me now.”
He is the best-ever practitioner of the most important
position in his sport—perhaps in all sports. But let’s be
clear: This award is not for life-
time achievement but based on
Brady’s body of work over the last
12 months. This is not an aging
athlete admirably hanging on. This
is an athlete who may never have
performed better.
IT HAPPENED NOT EVEN
two years ago and already it car-
ries a historic ring, cemented into
those hinge-point New England
moments, deserving of its own
shorthand, right up there with
revere rides through town,
tea dumped in harbor and
sox exorcise curse and, for that
matter, from fall of 2001: backup
qb br ady thrown into fr ay.
On March 16, 2020, as COVID-19
was just ramping up in the U.S.,
Brady drove to the home of Patriots
owner Robert Kraft to make official
what he had decided privately months before. As Brady
recalled to Howard Stern, “I was crying. I’m a very emo-
tional person.” After 20 unbroken years with New England,
brady to become free agent.
Brady didn’t arrive at the decision easily. He knew
well that this stay-or-go athlete dilemma tends to yield
mixed results. The player with whom he always will be
bracketed, Peyton Manning, left Indianapolis for Denver,
won a Super Bowl and never played another NFL down.
That was nearly six years ago. The day Brady won his
first Super Bowl, in 2002, Michael Jordan was playing,
unmemorably, for the Washington Wizards. And Brady
still winces when he recalls when, as a teenage 49ers fan
in San Mateo, Calif., he learned that his idol, Joe Montana,
was decamping late in his career to Kansas City.
Two days after Brady met with Kraft, Arians sat in his
home with Bucs general manager Jason Licht. For months
they had been running point on
a recruiting mission they called
Operation Shoeless Joe Jackson.
(Field of Dreams...get it?) That
afternoon Brady called Arians, who
passed the phone to Licht, who
recalls that when Brady began the
conversation, “Hey, babe,” it was
safe to assume the Buccaneers had
their man. “It was a phone call, and
it was during COVID,” says Licht.
“But it was one of the biggest
moments in franchise history.”First came the yuks. Brady was going to Florida,
because...Florida. Where else do well-preserved
Northeasterners go when it’s time to throttle back? Then
came the cynicism. Brady was availing himself either of the
state’s lack of personal income tax or the congenial weather
or the Buccaneers’ soft expectations. Here was a franchise
that, pre-Brady, had an all-time winning percentage of .386
(267-424-1), the worst of any major men’s U.S. pro team.MA
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“Our team here, I THINK THERE ARE MORE
VOICES,” Brady says of one difference between
Tamp a Bay and New England. “And it’s fine.
There’s different ways to be successful.”
SPORTSPERSON OF THE YEAR