Massarotti: Patriots Fans, Allow Tom Brady His Due
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS) - Tom Brady has been invited to celebrate 50 years of Super Bowls with the greatest players in the history of America's greatest game, but this is apparently how some Patriots fans want it to go: they want Brady to say no. They want him to boycott. They want him to thumb his nose at the league and the commissioner that spent so much of the last year dragging Brady through the mud.
Here's a question for them:
Could you possibly be any more selfish?
Shame on you, Patriots fans. You've reached a new low. (OK, so maybe not all of you.) Brady was an unknown sixth-round pick when he came to Foxboro in 2000, and he has turned himself into the greatest player in Patriots history, arguably the greatest player ever in all of Boston sports, maybe the greatest player in the annals of professional football. Brady earned his place among the true greats, worked for it, relentlessly hunted it down. And Thursday, according to reports, Brady did in fact indicate that he would attend Sunday's halftime ceremony celebrating the men who have been the Most Valuable Player of the Super Bowl.
Admittedly, here is the problem with these ceremonies now: there are so many of them, so many fraudulent celebrations like the eight-year anniversary of the 2004 Red Sox – eight years? – that we have begun to treat them like the neighborhood potlucks. It's hard to distinguish one from the other anymore, and so they all stopped being special.
But this one? This one is different, Patriots fans, and it's different the way the 1999 All-Star Game was at Fenway Park. That night, Major League Baseball celebrated its All-Century team with an unforgettable display on the Fenway Park infield. For sure, that event had an unscripted magic, the best ballplayers in history gathering around a fading Ted Williams. But you get the point. Every so often, we need to slow down and even stop, to acknowledge what the games have meant to us, to marvel at the performers, to take notice of how far we have come.
Fifty Super Bowls.
Fifty.
Is there any player who deserves to be part of that celebration more than Brady? Is there anyone who has traveled farther? Brady was a sixth-round pick, No. 199 overall, a man who might just as easily have been Mr. Irrelevant. Now he might be the greatest player in the history of the league. Brady doesn't just deserve to be a part of Sunday's celebration so much as he deserves to be the first man in line. No other quarterback has played in as many Super Bowls as Brady (six) and no quarterback has won more (four). Only Joe Montana has won as many Super Bowl MVP awards as Brady has (three).
Now America is gathering to celebrate the golden anniversary of the greatest single game in sports, and Brady is supposed to skip a party that is as much about him as any player in the history of the game? Please. Stuff a sock in it. Brady should do this for himself and for no else, for his parents and his coach, for his teammates current and past. He grew up in the Bay Area, learned from watching Montana, dreamed his dreams there. Now he gets to come back with a resume as thick as the NFL rulebook, still at the top of his game, all as his greatest contemporary, Peyton Manning, plays the final game of his career.
And Brady gets to look at the crowd, amid a collection of quarterbacks that will include Montana, Terry Bradshaw, Troy Aikman and more, with the kind of trump card that none of the others possesses.
And I'm not done yet.
The absurdity of Deflategate? The seemingly never-ending tug-o-war tussle with commissioner Roger Goodell? That story goes continues. The lawsuits go on. But no matter what happens, Brady has given the Patriots 16 sensational years of service, set a new standard for the league, given fans in New England the kind of dominance no one ever could have envisioned when the Patriots were the laughingstock of professional sports in a tin can of a stadium on the northbound side of Route 1.
As much as anyone – and maybe more so, Patriots fans – Tom Brady has given you that.
Allow him his due.
Please do not ask him for more.
