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Contents Introduction Two Drives, Three Faces PART ONE The Problem With Metaphors Chapter One On The Avenue of The Fleas Chapter Two The Big House PART TWO The Universe of Quarterbacks Chapter Three Whose Loss is Spergeon Wynn Chapter Four The Clown College Chapter Five Other Voices, Other Lockers Chapter Six The Congressman¿s Tailgate PART THREE A Tough Time To Go Sledding Chapter Seven Treatment Days Chapter Eight Bunker Man Chapter Nine Endgames INTRODUCTION: TWO DRIVES, THREE FACES. The teacher was not optimistic. This was a roomful of knuckleheads. There were a couple of hockey players and there were four or five baseball players, who were always the worst, a sense of entitlement on them as thick as pine tar on a bat. There were a handful of football players. There even were 10 unsuspecting students. This was a Composition Class at the University of Michigan, but it was stratifying by attitude into an unruly homeroom from some godawful high school in the land of Beavis and Butthead. The class had as much to do with a college education as frogs did with opera. This was babysitting, is what it was. This was not prejudice. The teacher wasn¿t theorizing from the faculty lounge, sherry and contempt dripping from his lips. Eight years earlier, he¿d been one of them, a scholarship offensive lineman, a grunt in the service of Big Blue, a cog in an athletic combine that had entertained over 40 million people since first Wolverine team went 1-0-1 in 1879. He had sat in classes like this. He had bullied the teachers. He had blown off the reading. He¿d been a dumb jock. Looking back, he thought himself a thug. Elwood Reid was a football apostate. He had come to Michigan from the same high school in Cleveland that had produced Elvis Grbac, a quarterback who¿d thrown for 6480 yards at Michigan, and had helped win the 1993 Rose Bowl over Washington before moving on to a career in the NFL. Reid arrived in Ann Arbor bursting with words and ideas, and they were stronger in him than was the pull of a sport that seemed to have little use for either one, but a sport that had left him, as he put it in a magazine piece years after leaving Michigan,¿with this clear-cut of a body.¿ Ultimately, Reid would turn his years at Michigan into a novel, If I Don¿t Six. It was a roman for which no clef was necessary. The hero was named Elwood Reilly, a freshman offensive lineman at Michigan with a jones for Marcus Aurelius whose gradual disillusionment with football is the story¿s arc. ¿They don¿t show the bumps and bruises on television,¿ the fictional Elwood Reid says at one point, ¿or the long practices, cortisone needles as big as tenpenny nails, the yelling, and hours of boring film meetings where you watch the same play a dozen times until the coach feels that when you go home and close your eyeballs, the play¿s going to be running on the back of your eyelids.¿ So Reid knew what he was looking at in his classroom full of knuckleheads. He knew what was looking back at him, as though it were a kind of funhouse mirror in time, where the years bent and showed him the reflection of the person football had tried to make of him. But the sport had failed. The reflection he saw in the faces of his students was of a person he¿d never be again. Reid noticed the skinny quarterback right off. He didn¿t dress the way the other jocks did ¿ a style that generously could be described as workout casual. The quarterback was polite. He was sincere. ¿He¿d read the material that I didn¿t give a shit about in that class when I took it,¿ Reid recalls. What was even more interesting to Reid was the reaction of the other jocks in the class. He¿d seen the really heartbreaking ones ¿ the ones that established their own territory through a kind of armored ignorance. They not only did not do the reading. They were conspicuously proud that they hadn¿t, and openly contemptuous of anyone who had. ¿They make fun of you,¿ Reid muses. ¿That¿s the way they cull you from the herd.¿ The quarterback was different. He dressed differently. He spoke differently. He even brought his books to class. Reid thought that the other people in the class would eat him alive. He thought, at best, the quarterback would get himself a reputation around Ann Arbor as a kind of dropback Eddie Haskell. At worst, he¿d get his ass kicked, literally and figuratively, for the next four years. For good and ill, football is a great leveler. In no other sport is the balance between personal achievement and collective accomplishment so exquisitely delicate. In no other sport is the conflict between the two so consistently volatile. It¿s a dangerous business in football to stand out in the wrong way. To Reid¿s surprise, even the most disruptive people in the class did more than leave the quarterback alone. They seemed to look up to him. In fact, they seemed to look up to him more because he wasn¿t acting like they were ¿The pull of the pack is to act a certain way,¿ Reid says. ¿And he wouldn¿t do it. He took things seriously, and he was very gracious, so I figured, here was a guy who was going to go through the (football) program and then go find a life for himself. ¿I said to myself, look at this guy. I¿m going to help this guy. I want to open his eyes. So I made sure he read all the essays. I was little harder on him than I was on the other guys. I told him to pay attention in class, because that¿s the thing that I didn¿t do.¿ Five years later, in 2001, the skinny quarterback led the New England Patriots to a surprising win in the Super Bowl over the St. Louis Rams. Two years later, he did it again, this time over the Carolina Panthers. The next year, he did it a third time, defeating the Philadelphia Eagles. He became the biggest star that football had. He became celebrated for his ability to stand out at the top of his profession while maintaining an almost fundamentalist belief in being a teammate. It was very strange to see played out on a vast stage the same thing that happened in that classroom full of knuckleheads, thought Elwood Reid, who had become a novelist and a screenwriter. It was very strange to see what had become of the kid who always brought his books to class and who never was given any shit about it, even from the people who ¿ whether they knew it or not -- already were dedicating their lives to giving shit to people about things like that. Because there was something about him that connected. Because there was something about him that was real. *** *** ¿I remember that class,¿ Tom Brady says, leaning against a fence one summer¿s day, as the New England Patriots round into the last weeks of training camp before the 2005 season. They had won the previous two consecutive Super Bowls and were preparing to try to win their third, which would secure the team¿s place even more firmly as one of the greatest in the history of the National Football League, and Brady even more firmly in the ranks of the league¿s greatest quarterbacks. Over the previous four years, Brady had been the starting quarterback for the Patriots and, in the three Super Bowls that they¿d won, he¿d been the Most Valuable Player in two of them, In that time, the team won 21 consecutive regular-season games, an NFL record. This success was all the more remarkable given the history of the Patriots, once so lost and bedraggled a franchise that they were forced to play a home game in Birmingham, Alabama because no stadium around Boston would have them. Now, though, the team draws thousands of people just to watch it train at its facility outside Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, an otherwise sleepy little town south of Boston, just about on the upper bicep where Massachusetts flexes itself into Cape Cod. They show up, in the height of the high summer, more than 52,000 of them a week. to watch football practice which, on its most exciting day. can fairly be said to make the main reading room of the Boston Public Library look like Mardi Gras. They show up, and the young girls scream for Tom Brady the same way that the 50-year old men do, except at a higher pitch. On the field, the team moves through its drills, grouped by position, and then all together again. Whenever a player, or a group of players, make a mistake, they are told to run a lap around the entire field. When the various miscreants pass a small knoll that rises behind one end zone of the practice field, the fans sprawled thickly on the grass give the passing screw-ups a standing ovation. Nothing the New England Patriots do these days is wrong, not even the things they do that are, well, wrong. This is strange enough altogether. There is nothing more boring than watching football training camp. Unlike basketball, where people scrimmage, or baseball¿s spring training, which involves playing actual games, nobody who comes to football training camp actually sees anyone play a game of football. ¿I remember when I was playing lacrosse in high school,¿ New England coach Bill Belichick once recalled. ¿I couldn¿t wait for practice because I got to PLAY LACROSSE. Football practice isn¿t like that.¿ Instead, football players train in crushing heat in order to perform in shattering cold. They toughen themselves for December in August. People come to training camp in order to see the players, not the game itself. It is a festival of individual attention before the season begins, and the personalities of the players are subsumed by the team and by the grind of the season. Brady has come over to the fence to discuss a book ¿ this one, to be precise. He is at the top of his profession. Earlier this spring, he had signed a xx-year contract extension for xx million. He has hosted Saturday Night Live, where not only did he sing, but he performed a skit in his underwear. He is dating a movie star. He is 26-years old. He is a substantial presence, 6-4 and 225, almost 30 pounds heavier than when he sat in Elwood Reid¿s class at Michigan. (On page 156 of the school¿s 2005 media guide, there is a picture of Brady, cocking his arm to throw. He appears to be wearing his big brother¿s jersey.) He favors actor Matt Damon a little, but he has a Kirk Douglas cleft in his chin. More to the point, there is about him a genuine sense of the present. He has that gift for which the average politician would gladly sell that portion of his soul not yet sublet by lobbyists ¿ the ability to make the person he is talking to feel as though the rest of the world has fallen away and there is only this one conversation happening anywhere. ¿To tell you the truth,¿ Brady says. ¿There¿s only one real problem I have with this. ¿I don¿t know if I¿m old enough for a book like this.¿ Old enough. It¿s not a simple answer. It¿s an answer with some thought - and, therefore, some substance -- behind it. It¿s an answer indicating that, despite his accomplishments and his honors, and despite all the extraneous celebrity sugar that¿s come his way, he will not be completed on anyone¿s terms but his own. In his answer, there¿s a glimpse of something restless in Tom Brady, something visceral that resists summing up, something that insists on the primacy and integrity of an individual journey. But it is an interesting answer. In fact, it is just interesting enough an answer to make sure that the project moves forward. It¿s an answer that moves the chains. *** Each chain is precisely 10 yards long. There¿s a tall upright at either end. There is also a third upright with numbers on it. The uprights are called the ¿sticks.¿ The officials who keep the uprights that are connected by the chain are called the ¿rod-men.¿ The official who keeps the other upright, which is called the ¿down indicator box,¿ is called the ¿box-man.¿ Across the field are auxiliary chains and sticks, and auxiliary rod men and box men with them, so that players can look at either sideline and determine the state of play. When a football team makes a first down, one rod-man places his stick in the ground parallel to where the ball has been placed. The other rod-man extends the chain to indicate to the team and to the spectators how far they have to go to another first down. Once a team passes that second stick, it gains a first down and the chains move. The object of any offense is to keep the chains moving. It¿s within the movement of the chains that football finds its soul. It¿s within the movement of the chains that football players see most clearly how they are bound together. When an offense is moving the chains, it keeps its defense off the field, rested and ready, while exhausting the defense of the other team. When an offense is moving the chains, its success is easily defined in calibrated achievements, 10 yards at a time, one after another after another again. Each player gains confidence ¿ in himself and in what comes to be seen as an inexorable whole. This confidence can become an almost physical force-- something Newtonian, like gravity or inertia. (¿An offense in motion tends to stay in motion, except when acted upon by an equal or opposite force, which is usually a linebacker with blood in his eye.¿) In fact, an offense relentlessly moving the chains is said often to be going ¿downhill.¿ The constant progress shortens the game. ¿Time of possession¿ is one of the most beloved statistics among football coaches. Moving the chains bends time itself to a team¿s will. Tom Brady moves the chains. It¿s the first thing the New England Patriots and their coaches saw in him, back in 2000, when he was a sixth-round draft pick ¿ and a fourth-string quarterback -- playing on the scout team with players who hadn¿t been around long enough yet to be considered cast-offs. The scout team¿s job is to simulate the offense of the upcoming opponent. However, after practice, Brady and the scout team would practice the New England offense. ¿They¿d go through the plays and, if somebody got something wrong, he¿d correct them,¿ recalls Belichick. ¿You could see them getting better. They moved on you.¿ Almost two years later, in the Superdome in New Orleans, playing with the starters in the biggest game of his life, at the end of a very strange football season, Tom Brady moved the chains as far as you can move them. The Patriots were sitting on their own 17-yard line, tied at 17-17 with the heavily favored St. Louis Rams with 1:01 left in regulation time. Their defense, which had smacked the velocity out of the Ram offense all evening, was literally on its last legs, having just surrendered a touchdown on which at least one pursuing New England defender simply collapsed as though the air had gone out of him. The smart play was to let the clock run and take a chance on winning in overtime. In fact, John Madden was recommending that very thing on national television while Brady, Belichick, and offensive coordinator Charlie Weis huddled on the sidelines. ¿It was a 10-second conversation,¿ Weis recalls. ¿What we said is we would start the drive and, if anything bad happened, we¿d just run out the clock.¿ Both Belichick and Weis agreed that the Patriots should try to win the game immediately ¿ in part because of the exhausted state of their defense, but mainly because they knew that, even if he didn¿t get the team a chance to win, Brady was not likely to make a mistake that would cost them the game. The bare-bones play-by-play does not do justice to what happened next. Consider the play described as: ¿2-10 NE 41 (:29) T. Brady pass to T. Brown ran OB at SL 30 for six yards (D. McCleon, Little) Pass 1, Run 5.¿ Obviously, Brady hit receiver Troy Brown with a pass that Brown carried six yards down to the St. Louis 30-yard line before being forced out of bounds. What¿s missing is the moment on the previous play that made this one possible, Brady read a blitz by a St. Louis linebacker and threw the ball away. (¿T. Brady pass incomplete,¿ says the official record.) What¿s missing is the fact that Brady noticed that St. Louis had rushed only three of their defensive linemen, dropping a defensive tackle into pass coverage, the way he¿d seen them do it on all that film with which he¿d seared his eyeballs over the previous week. What¿s missing is how he bought enough time for Brown to ¿clear¿ the unwieldy defensive tackle and get free, how Brady took a tiny, instinctive up in the pocket, to avoid an onrushing lineman that he felt more than he saw, enabling him to find Brown for the completion. ¿There are a lot of little things that go into it,¿ says Bill Belichick. The movement is missing. There¿s no sense in the words of the constant, forward motion, or of the burgeoning confidence that was its primary accelerant. Two plays later, with seven seconds left, Brady ¿spiked¿ the ball, deliberately tossing it to the ground in order to stop the clock so that New England would have time to kick the winning field goal. In this situation, most quarterbacks simply slam the ball to the turf and walk off the field. However, on this occasion, Brady bounced the ball gently up in the air, caught it, and handed it to the official. (¿T. Brady pass incomplete¿ reads the play-by-play sheet again.) Up in the luxury suites, Robert Kraft, the owner of the Patriots, and the man who had redeemed the franchise from its history as one of the greatest screwball comedy acts in the history of professional sports, was stunned by the coolness of the gesture. On the next play, Adam Vinatieri came on and won the game for New England with a 48-yard field goal. Two years later, in Reliant Stadium, deep in the industrial savanna outside Houston, Brady did much the same thing against the Carolina Panthers. This time, the Patriots were favored and this time Carolina can be said to have tied THEM, 29-29, on a late touchdown pass. However, this time, New England was gifted with a bizarre kickoff that went out of bounds on their 18-yard line, giving them only about about 50 yards to travel to get into position for another field goal try. They got the ball, again, with 1:09 left in regulation. This time, the pivotal play came with 14 seconds left, a third-down-and-three situation from the Carolina 40-yard line. Again, Weis and Belichick worked on a vulnerability they¿d spotted earlier in the week. Carolina would play man-to-man coverage near the line of scrimmage while sending two defensive backs deep, what the coaches called Cover Five. At the line of scrimmage, Brady read the defense. Receiver Deion Branch would be open underneath the deep coverage. Branch lined up in the slot between another wide receiver and the line of scrimmage. The cornerback was playing him to take away the middle of the field, so Branch broke out and down and away, toward the near sideline, Brady hit him for 17 yards and a first down. The chains moved. Vinatieri kicked another gamewinner. A year later, in Jacksonville, Brady and the Patriots beat the Philadelphia Eagles to win their third Super Bowl in four seasons. And this is the oddest irony about moving the chains -- the quarterback is the only player anywhere on the football field whose job specifically requires him to stand still. Even the most mobile quarterback usually has to stop to throw the ball. This means that the quarterback has to perform a task made up of a half-dozen finely jeweled movements while a thousand pounds of hostile beef is running around him with its hair on fire. ¿Think about it,¿ says Steve Nelson, a former Patriot linebacker and now the coach at tiny Curry College outside of Boston. ¿The quarterback¿s the only player on the field that has to worry about his elbow pointing the right way to do his job.¿ And it¿s what the quarterback does when he¿s standing still that gets the chains to move. Ultimately, the moving of the chains can add up in years to a journey. By resisting easy summation, Tom Brady commits himself to that journey on his own terms. He declines to be defined by the limits of his profession. He declines to be the vessel for anyone else¿s virtue. Somehow, in there, is the balance he struck that Elwood Reid noticed in that classroom full of knuckleheads in which Tom Brady was the only one who brought his books to class. He will live life ¿ and be successful ¿ on his own terms, and he will not be culled from the herd. He will be a star and he will be a teammate. He will be smart and handsome and rich and popular and he will be one of the guys, too. He will move the chains in his life, constantly, so that he will determine its ultimate definition. In this, he sets himself up for a journey through public life that¿s fueled by formidable contradiction. He will live a normal life, albeit one that includes a movie-star girlfriend and a condominium that priced out last year at $4 million. In this, he is perfectly consonant face of the mythology that his performance has helped the New England Patriots create and market about themselves ¿that, in a day of stylized individualism, the Patriots and their quarterback are a team with red-state family values playing the bluest state of all. That much of this is cant ¿ as has been most of the red-blue punditry that¿s fouled the public discourse for over a decade ¿ is merely another paradox driving his life. Can anyone be humble if they talk about being humble on 60 Minutes? Can anyone be another teammate when the team¿s success works at the same time to exalt him individually? How can any football team be a family when a great deal of the family¿s success depends on grinding up some of the children and tossing them away? There are material rewards, certainly, but they come with the realization that physical destruction is as central to football as it ever was to boxing. (Which is why so many of the pious calls to ban the latter ring so hollow when they come from people who glorify the former.) That realization can lead to a soul-killing destruction in which the player commodifies himself until the essential parts of the person grate together the way the bones in a knee will when the cartilege is removed. The key is to keep the material rewards and the public adulation under control in such a way that the essential person is not lost, and so that they don¿t act as an anesthetic so powerful that the player doesn¿t realize that the physical destruction has darkened his heart and bled into his soul. Keep moving. Keep moving. This is the journey Tom Brady¿s taken on for himself. It began in a family wherein the spirit and documents of the Second Vatican Council mean as much to his development as any playbook ever has. It moved along to college, where the whims of incompetent coaching nearly brought it to an end. It proceeded into the NFL, where it benefited by a brutal injury to another quarterback, and where it has now arrived, finally, at the opening game of the 2005 season. A Thursday night at home, against the Oakland Raiders. In its game presentation, the NFL is what the Roman Empire would have been had it developed the Jumbotron and unmistakably gay-themed fight songs. In fact, there¿s an entire academic study waiting to be done on the phenomenon of half-sockless male sports fans bellowing along in high macho howl to one song written as an anthem for gay pick-up spots (¿YMCA¿) and another one ¿¿Rock And Roll, Part II¿ by Gary Glitter ¿ that was the only hit for a convicted kiddie-porn tycoon who, at the very moment his song is blasting across Gillette Stadium, is on his way to a couple of decades in a Vietnamese prison for having transferred his hobby to Southeast Asia. Tonight, the NFL¿s in full voice. Rapper Kanye West was dropped at the last minute because he¿d said unkind things about President George Bush¿s reaction to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, but he was replaced by Santana and the Rolling Stones, and we indeed have arrived at that dark day in which the Stones are the safe play. There are fighter jets and fireworks. The teams come out onto the field as completely obscured by smoke as Pickett¿s division was when it stepped off out of the woods at Gettysburg. Outside the press box at Gillette Stadium hang a series of television monitors. These enable the sportswriters to follow the action, especially the slow-motion replays, since the height and funky corner location of the press box make watching the actual play on the field problematic. One screen carries the actual television broadcast seen in people¿s homes. Another one carries the raw feed. At this moment, Tom Brady is on both of them. On the broadcast monitor, he is sitting in what appears to be a high-toned restaurant, surrounded at his table by his actual offensive linemen, who are in full uniform. It¿s a commercial for VISA credit cards, and the linemen are metaphors for the various forms of consumer protection offered by the card. Brady is in a suit and he¿s the straight man. ¿Do metaphors pay?¿ Brady asks. ¿Ha, ha,¿ the linemen laugh in reply. ¿No.¿ On the monitor next to this one, there is a low-angle shot of Brady live on the New England sidelines, with fireworks exploding far above his head. It¿s the kind of hero shot in which the NFL specializes; there are moments in which the league can make Leni Riefenstahl look like she worked for Bavarian public-access television. It¿s hard to tear your eyes away to look all the way down to the sidelines at the actual person, slapping high-fives with his teammates, his face a bright burst of joy that you don¿t need a television to see. This is where the journey truly happens, down on the field. Everything else is side trips and diversions, -- roadside amusements, lflea markets and reptile farms. He fought hard to begin the journey and he will fight just as hard to determine its direction. Ultimately, he¿ll determine its end. After all, in some ways, his career is already complete. He¿s won three Super Bowls, more than any other professional quarterback except Joe Montana. He¿s rich. He¿s famous. He will be inducted one day into the Pro Football Hall of Fame even if he gives the whole thing up tomorrow and joins the Carthusians. But he will not stand still, except for those moments when he has to stand still in order to move the chains. ¿Is there a perfect game out there?¿ Brady muses. ¿It¿s got to be at the highest stakes. It¿s has to be a game that means a lot, and it has to come down to the end, probably a game where you have to keep digging and digging. You don¿t remember the ones you win 35-17. You remember the ones you win 38-35. A two-minute drive. They score. You score. Those are the ones that are memorable. Who wants everything to come easy?¿
Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication:
Brady, Tom, 1977-.
Football players -- United States -- Biography.