At 43, Tom Brady wants to become the greatest athlete in history

This is not a story about sports. It’s a story about fame, and money, and what you do once you meet luck, and play against the odds, and the throne and the inheritance struggles, and the individual within the group, and what is one step above all, and old age, and being a modern man, and how you persevere For twenty years now, a gang of 11 thugs has wanted to take you down so that it would not rise again. forever. It’s a story about the American dream, about a dynasty. But it’s still a story from the world of sports, so let’s get the sport off the table first.

On the night between Sunday and Monday, at Super Bowl 55 in Tampa, Florida, Tampa Bay Bakers led by 43-year-old quarterback Tom Brady will face Kansas City Chiefs starring 25-year-old Patrick Mehomes. This will be Brady’s tenth Super Bowl and he will try to win a seventh ring. Imaginary numbers. Mehomes is the reigning champion. He will not only try to recreate the win, but put an end to Brady’s twenty-year rule in the league, and declare: The old king is still alive, but it’s time for the new king. But how did we come to this power of Brady? And what will a victory over the young contender for the crown do to his status in the world of sports?

Let’s go back to 18-year-old Tom Brady. A boy from California, last son after three daughters. He can walk to college 50 miles from home, but chooses Michigan. Is the seventh quarterback on the list. His soul freezes. It turns on the heating in the house to the maximum and does not lower. No one is able to come and visit him. But Michigan is good for him.

Brady builds himself. In the gym and especially in the video room. For hours every day he examines the defenses, thoroughly learning how to be the most balanced, the most focused, the most accurate one hundredth of a second before the defenders knock him down. He understands that the most important thing in football is to be a leader, to make others follow you with their eyes closed, to understand what it means to be an example. He does not get a chance until his third year (including one championship), and as soon as he gets the team he joins the roster of local star Drew Hanson, an 18-year-old with a stronger, more athletic hand, and with a father who intervenes in every step of his way. “This is the greatest quarterback talent I’ve ever seen,” says Michigan coach Lloyd Carr.

In one of the games, Brady fell behind against Syriquez. 111,000 people whistle at him and demand to replace him with local talent. Brady’s sisters are sitting in the stands weeping bitterly. For the next two years Hanson and Brady fight each other for the role, but in the end Brady takes over. The NFL scouts are keeping an eye on him, but he’s still skinny and muscular, he’s accurate but he’s not a strong hand. The reason a 22-20 year old draft is one big casino is that no one can really appreciate what these kids have in a box over their shoulders.

198 players, including six quarterbacks, are selected ahead of Brady in the 2000 draft. He was selected in the sixth round out of seven. Not exactly someone who was predicted to be great. New England Patriots coach Bill Blichik is betting on him. He already has an excellent quarterback named Drew Baldesso, and he has nothing to lose. The prediction for Brady was that he would survive a few years in the league and then retire. This is a prediction that has come true, for Drew Hanson.

Brady arrives in Boston on days when the city’s sports fans are miraculous and lock the door twice whenever they feel hopeful. Larry Byrd retired a long time ago, two Celtics players are dead, the baseball team is cursed with the “Curse of the Bambino” (Babe Roth) and has been waiting for the championship for more than 80 years. Hope always becomes a blow of disappointment, and in general what hope can be hung on a child from California, skinny and unathletic, with a not strong hand, growing up in the sun?

Everyone needs in life this moment of luck. And the luck of the Patriots, Blichik, Boston and Brady is an injury that nearly killed Drew Baldesso in 2001. Brady gets the keys to the group. His connection to Blichik is immediate, almost divine. Brady plays Blichik on the pitch. They both work harder than anyone else in the league, they both know the opponent by heart, they both have no life other than football.

Already in his first year as a developing player, Brady wins every chance, including the clear favorite St. Louis in the Super Bowl. It breaks the shape of the city’s championships, and opens the pipeline for the other teams’ championships. Within a few years he becomes almost illiterate to Shakespeare. Brady takes the drop of luck he received and locks her in a room. Luck becomes part of his character.

Not only do Brady and Blichik start a dynasty, but they build what is called the “Patriots Road.” Owner Robert Kraft, who bought the group in 1994 for $ 170 million, sees his property doubling in size. New England wins two more championships (2004, 2005). Players are willing to give up money to win championships with it. Brady, still fueled by the fuel of “who said I can’t do it,” gives up millions on his contract, at a time when other quarterbacks are squeezing their clubs to the end, earning his entire career far less than his market value. “They will use the money to bring in good players,” he explains of his decision. Belichik continues to bet on drafts. He replaces high picks with much lower picks to disperse the risk in his investment. Brady gets reduced talent, but he can’t complain: that’s how he got to New England himself.

Boston fans love him even though he’s a Golden Boy who publishes Calvin Klein’s underwear. Before him, their heroes were always from the working class. Rival fans hate and appreciate him. “We played well today,” a New York fan told a radio station after a losing game, “but well it’s not enough against quarterback Menachem Schneerson.”

After the 2005 championship something strange happens. More and more talented players are coming to the team, Brady is portraying himself more as a quarterback, showing all his abilities as an individual. But in all these nine years the team has failed to achieve a championship. This does not stop him from becoming one of the great icons in American sports and culture: with his perfect haircut, dimples, socket in the chin and teeth from the dentist’s poster, he is exceptionally beautiful, he is known for his diet and psychedelic training regimen, he eats only healthy, ice cream Avocado, struggling with old age. New York defense? Brady wins time. He stays young forever. He advertises the “pear” boots. He’s the perfect metrosexual. He earns less than his wife.

Two women walk near the Great Wall of China. They pass Brady, and one of them loses it out of enthusiasm. “Who is it?” The other asks her. “Why should I know him?” “It’s Giselle’s husband,” the first answers her.

In 2014, in the fourth game of the season in Kansas, Brady played a terrible and bumpy game. Jimmy Garpolo replaces him. The newspapers ask if the period is over. By the end of the season he is already winning his fourth Super Bowl. In 2017 Brady wins another championship, this time after a crazy comeback against Atlanta. He changes prefix to age 40. Then wins another championship. Brady has always said he wants to play until the age of 45, and there have been those who have argued that this is talk stemming from recurring injuries to his brain stem. This is a crazy forecast for a football player.

Since changing prefixes, Brady has achieved numbers (20,766 yards, 142 touchdowns, one MVP and three trips to the Super Bowl) that only thanks to him would he have entered the Hall of Fame. He loses one more Super Bowl, then wins the Sixth Super Bowl. In 52.6 percent of the seasons he started in the lineup he reached the Super Bowl. This is a higher percentage than Michael Jordan’s shooting percentage from the field. sick. And he achieves all this in the most competitive and egalitarian league in sports, with wage-ceiling rules and a free-player market that almost completely guarantees that no dynasties will be formed.

Last season New England lost to Tennessee in the regional semifinals. The last delivery in the game is by Brady. She is kidnapped and Tennessee gets another seven points. New England need to make a decision: whether to give Brady a long-term contract, with all the money and bonuses he deserves for all the concessions he has made in the past for the team and also give him a little more talent around him. But New England and Litchik are a cynical bottom-line club. They never hesitated to release those who had lost a step or those who did not suit them financially. They showed Brady the door and actually told him: We do not think you have it anymore.

At 43, Tom Brady does what many American retirees do: he goes down to Florida. Some sun, some relaxation, some bingo evenings. One stop before the end. Brady chooses Tampa Bay because he recognizes talent and potential there, but this is a team with no culture of wins, with a negative balance the season before, which has not won a playoff game since 2002, has not seen a playoff since 2007.

Brady becomes a missionary. He takes “The Patriots Way” and passes it on to another club. “In the fifth game of the season, in Chicago, we got the enlightenment,” said one of the team’s players. “We were behind the whole game and we didn’t play well, and Tom was just crazy. He didn’t yell at us where to run, or who to block. He just yelled at us’ follow me, ” learn from me how to win.” Tampa Bay had a chance to get back in the game in the final seconds, Brady failed in the last delivery but stayed on the field because he thought he had more experience. “We were on the field lines and we were shocked just to look at him,” says the same player, “he was in a complete trance, in a frenzy of emotions. “It was a stunning moment of inspiration for all of us. You have to understand: football is not basketball. One player cannot make an impact unless that player has the ability to change an entire club’s culture.”

Tampa Bay never stops winning. It reduces to a minimum the number of offenses against her and the loss of the ball. The path of the Patriots holds that you do not defeat yourself. Instead of going to die in Florida, Brady reaches the Super Bowl again with three away games in the playoffs, two of them on legendary quarterbacks in their own right – Drew Breeze and Aaron Rogers. Brady suddenly speaks of age 47 as a realistic age for him to play. His accomplishment this year parallels that Michael Jordan would have finished his career in Chicago, going to Washington and taking it to the finals. We know exactly what happened there. And all this Brady achieved in the Corona season, without proper preparation, with many restrictions and in a new team, after playing his entire career in a single club.

On the way he separates himself from Blichik. He not only proves he still has it, but proves that the Patriots way is mostly Brady’s way. Belichick and New England end the season in a negative balance. Throughout his career, in the years when Brady has not played for him, Blichik has a negative balance of wins versus losses. Brady reaches the tenth Super Bowl (his successor, John Elway, there are only five), in a twenty-year retirement. It’s inconceivable, probably in a football career. Just for the context: When Brady won his first Super Bowl, Patrick Homes, his opponent on Sunday, was in compulsory kindergarten.

His story is so stunning that America is willing to forgive him for everything. For all the cheating affair with New England, for the fact that he abandoned a wife and child in California, for his friendships with Donald Trump. Everything is forgiven him. Is the last agreed white hope.

In the final, as mentioned, he will face champions Kansas City and Patrick Mehomes, the best quarterback in the league and who is considered a challenger to Brady’s numbers. “It’s like the older Michael Jordan would have met the young LeBron James in the NBA Finals,” former TV and quarterback commentator Tony Romo called the meeting. The odds are a bit in Humus’ favor, but if Brady’s career has taught us anything, it’s not betting against him, especially now that he’s playing with the money of the house, and he’s sitting alone building levels in the Olympus of sports, “The greatest athlete in team sports”, in places where zucchini peels are eaten to keep the body fit and new challenges are set in motion to continue to find the springs of youth.

Mehomes will come on Sunday to demand what he deserves. It’s time, he would tell Brady. This chair belongs to my generation. to you. But Tom Brady is not playing against Humus. He plays against history, against immortality.