A few months ago, when Tom Brady was beginning his career as an N.F.L. commentator for Fox Sports, a commercial aired. It begins with Brady, his face all angles, sitting at a desk in a nondescript room, looking at videos on two big monitors in front of him, laptops to his right and left, and a big TV affixed to a wall. Why he needs so much stimulation all at once isn’t totally clear, but it’s got something to do with extreme efficiency. Retired or not, the world’s greatest quarterback does not have the luxury to indulge in sequential action—one thing at a time is for slowpokes and losers.
On the TV, pundits are yelling about the hubris of his career change. “I just don’t get it,” one of them says. “Tom Brady, the broadcaster? Guy’s got everything in the world. Why do it? Tommy, why?” Thus challenged, Brady is subjected to younger versions of himself—the University of Michigan everyman, the New England Patriots hero, the little kid dressed in the uniform of his favorite team, the San Francisco 49ers—reminding him of all his effort heretofore and teasing him about the temptations of post-career laxity. “Why don’t you lay on a beach getting fat on piña coladas?” one of the Toms says. God forbid! Slim, chiselled Tom wakes from his stupor, newly determined to prove his haters wrong. “TOM BRADY IS BACK TO WORK,” the tagline reads.
It’s true, he’s back—not that he’d gone anywhere so far away—busily laboring, making money, and not so subtly surgerizing his image. He signed a ten-year contract with Fox worth three hundred and seventy-five million dollars—quite the pile to offer somebody who’s never done the job, but a name like Brady’s is priceless. His early broadcasts were slightly baffling. Alongside his announcing-booth mate Kevin Burkhardt—a truly talented play-by-play commentator—Brady would fall silent during crucial passages of a game. When he piped up, it was often in a monotone second tenor with off-kilter bursts of odd rhythm. Describing the Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott, he sounded like he might be rehearsing some slam poetry: “I think he’s gonna be dealin’ . . . with this type of pressure . . . we talked about this, with some of these young . . . offensive linemen.”
Last summer, before he started the Fox gig, he subjected himself to a very modern sort of self-serving abasement: the celebrity roast. The roast is a chance for a big shot like Brady to show himself to be a good sport—and, in enduring the burn wounds of a public round of insults, to grow a personality.
The roast plan backfired on Brady. He’d been through a recent divorce from his wife of thirteen years, the Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen. The tabloid details of the split—Bündchen and her new martial-artist paramour knock dreamboat quarterback down a few pegs and ruin his rep—provided too much material to the sharklike comics trawling for chum.
In 2018, Brady—on the back end of his tenure with the Patriots, the franchise where, alongside his coach, Bill Belichick, he made his name—had another televisual adventure. He was the star of a show called “Tom vs. Time,” which was streamed on the ill-fated Facebook Watch. Here, he was portrayed as a devoted father, a health-and-fitness addict, a gladiator raging against the ravages of professional athletics. Viewers watched him smooch his kids and train on the beach and reveal his all-consuming pickiness about what goes into his body. In one episode, Brady described his relationship with football as if it were one part romantic, one part therapeutic. “In front of seventy thousand people, I can really be who I am,” he said. “If I want to scream at somebody, I can scream at somebody. . . . It allows me to be who I am in a very authentic way.”
All these public contortions—family man, easygoing regular guy, competitor marked with a touch of psychosis—make clear a problem that Brady epitomizes 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—a kind of ambassador from a Norman Rockwell world. This is a real, red-blooded man, who takes responsibility and accepts challenges and treats others with a constant grace.
Brady wasn’t a high draft pick out of college; nobody expected much of him. By emerging from that inauspicious start to assume a Superman’s cape, he helped perpetuate the quarterback’s creation myth: that this kind of success isn’t about rote athleticism or mere intelligence or genetic inheritance. Instead, winning is the outgrowth and the evidence of hard work, high character, and a pure heart.
This persona is apparent in the career of one of Brady’s chief on-field rivals, Peyton Manning. Manning is from good Southern football stock—his father, Archie, was a quarterback for the New Orleans Saints, his brother Eli was the scrappy, courageous leader of the New York Giants, and his nephew Arch will soon be drafted into the N.F.L.—but his excellence seemed well earned. His game was full of minute 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 games and chat, Peyton comes across as a great hang, an enlightened good old boy. He doesn’t seem driven by demons or a need to dominate anyone. It’s easy to understand why his teammates all seemed to like him so much.
Brady, though, has a fishier personality and a cooler eye. His closest likeness isn’t to other quarterbacks but to the basketball superstar Kobe Bryant, who, five years ago, died in a helicopter crash at a woefully early age. Like Bryant—who turned his gym-rat nature into a tall-tale mythos like that of Paul Bunyan—Brady likes to talk about his work ethic, about how desperately he needs to win and how far he’s willing to go to fill the void. Brady, in his own telling, holds on to small slights and inflates them just enough to fuel himself to victory. “I was always kind of motivated by people that say, ‘You can’t do it,’ ” he once told his fellow ex-player Michael Strahan on “Good Morning America.” All he needs is a snippet of smack talk, the hint of an insult, or even a cross look to make him mad enough to reach the end zone. If the classic quarterback, embodied by Manning, accomplished his exploits through the force of good will, Brady—a progenitor and a product of today’s so-called hustle culture—needs grist for irritation to reach his true heights.
That’s the message behind the commercial. Through the power of broadcasting, Brady will once again obliterate his enemies—external doubters or past selves—and make them watch his coronation. All their nattering only gives him “bulletin-board material,” as the saying goes. Here, unfortunately, is some more: Brady’s not so great at his new gig. But every once in a while he will show off his sharpness. At one point during the recent playoff game between the Detroit Lions and the Washington Commanders, for example, he pointed out quickly that the Commanders had twelve players on the field, instead of the allowed eleven. “Oh, no, what are they doin’?” he groaned. More often, though, he settles for stock phrases and leaves us to imagine what he thinks of the players. His allergy to strong opinions might have something to do with an obvious conflict of interest: he’s also a part owner of an N.F.L. team, the Las Vegas Raiders. All that multitasking has its downsides.
Among Brady’s TV rivals are two former Dallas Cowboys quarterbacks: Tony Romo—who commentates jocularly on CBS and made a splash, early on, by predicting plays with uncanny accuracy before they happened—and the nineties poster boy Troy Aikman, on ESPN, who likes to play the crusty elder and get outraged at quarterbacks’ goofy mistakes. Maybe Brady needs Romo or Aikman to drop a stray negative comment that might apply to him. He’ll hit the gym, rage out, make ’em pay, and prove them—and me—wrong. ♦
