It seldom ends with a kiss in the NFL. It usually ends with a kiss off.
It didn’t end well for Johnny Unitas or Terry Bradshaw or Joe Namath. It didn’t end well for Joe Montana or Brett Favre. That’s not how it works in a world as cold-blooded and heartless as the NFL.
It didn’t end well for Paul Brown either, fired by the team named for him. It didn’t end well for Bill Walsh or Bill Parcells or Tom Landry or Don Shula.
It seldom ends well for either the coaches or the players because, whether they realize it or not, they’re all what Parcells once told me — just renters. The only ones who aren’t are the team owners.
“The first time you learn you’re just a pebble on the beach it’s pretty offensive,” Parcells once explained to me. “After the second or third time you understand. We’re all pebbles on the beach.”
That this reality is now causing angst down at Camp Happy Face in Foxboro is hardly a news bulletin. The ESPN story that seemed to rock some portions of Patriot Nation had some interesting tidbits but really broke no new ground. Many of us locally have written about the growing issues there among the triumvirate that built one of the great dynasties in football history. That at least one of them, and very likely two, won’t survive that dynasty’s dying days should not come as a shock. It’s the norm in professional sports and in today’s corporate America. If you want a gold watch in 2018, buy a jewelry store.
Age is undefeated, despite what Tom Brady wants to believe. You can dedicate your life to plyometrics, good sleep habits, an odd diet, filling yourself with more water than the Hoover Dam holds back and OD on botox but you’re not going to win that fight. Will can’t beat the calendar and neither can anything else.
Bill Belichick told an associate three years ago that Brady would be a problem at the end. That is no one’s fault, including Brady’s. To overcome all that he has to reach the pinnacle of his sport required a self-absorption and a stubbornness that would never allow a graceful ending. What athlete that has soared as high as Brady walked quietly off the stage?
Michael Jordan? A-Rod? Babe Ruth? Unitas?
Did Brady’s boyhood idol, Joe Montana, give in to the will of the 49ers when Steve Young was looking better than he was? Did he once help Young learn the tricks of the trade that would make Montana obsolete? No. Why would he?
Favre was roundly criticized for allegedly not helping Aaron Rodgers during the latter’s formative years. Why would he help hasten his own demise? That’s the coaches’ job. Favre’s job, like Brady’s, was to fend off competition, not help it.
So the idea that Brady may have wanted to see Jimmy Garoppolo traded should hardly come as a surprise to anyone who understands human nature. If a trade happened, Brady’s dream of playing in one city for his entire career was likely cemented. Even if a new hot prospect came in it would take a year or two for him to understand Belichick’s intricate passing system. In the interim Brady plays and then can leave on his own terms at 43 or 44, his final goal achieved.
That Brady felt the heat of Garoppolo’s presence is a simple reality as old as time. Bill Shakespeare once put the words for it in Julius Caesar’s mouth as he whispered to his friend Mark Antony in Act 1, Scene 2 of Julius Caesar: “I want the men around me to be fat, healthy-looking men who sleep at night. That Cassius over there has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Men like him are dangerous.”
Jimmy G was Brady’s Cassius. He had the same lean and hungry look Brady had before he took down Drew Bledsoe. So why would it be a surprise that Brady was ready to use whatever leverage he had with the owner to stave off young Cassius?
Why Belichick would oppose this should not be difficult to fathom. Coaches live in the moment. Certainly they plan for the future but they live in the present. Brady may be the present but at 40 he’s not the future. Not the Patriots’ future or Belichick’s. So attention must be paid.
I wrote repeatedly last offseason that Garoppolo would not be traded. Why? Because Belichick doesn’t make moves until he has to. For 2017, he controlled both quarterbacks at cheap money. He had insurance in a sport that has little of it.
When he unloaded Jacoby Brissett it was further evidence he was going to play this hand out until next offseason, when he could always tag Garoppolo, whose agent had made clear they had little interest in signing a new deal at any price.
Normally agents say novenas in hope of getting a backup quarterback big money. Don Yee was not interested. Why? For the same reason I always argued with union head Gene Upshaw that agents should not be allowed to represent two quarterbacks on the same team. It’s the only position where what’s good for one guy is bad for the other.
If Yee wanted to remain Tom Brady’s agent, which he did, he best be careful with Jimmy G’s future not colliding with Brady’s present. That’s a tricky walk but in the end it will work out for both of them. Who it didn’t work out for is Belichick.
Belichick understands Brady’s value beyond his declining skills and growing distemper. But he also lives in a daily world that can dismiss even a Unitas, a Montana, a Landry or a Shula. To survive in such a harsh landscape, sentimentality and loyalty become words that exist only in the dictionary.
That Tom Brady wants to end his career with the Patriots is understandable. That Bill Belichick wanted to retain a guy he felt was ready to replace him is equally understandable. That Bob Kraft stepped in and sided with the player for once is too because TB12 is not only Brady’s brand it’s the Patriots’ too.
So now they sit at loggerheads, issuing a joint statement they must believe you’ll have a joint before you read if you’re going to believe it. It’s not Camp Happy Face anymore, but it really never was. It was always what ex-slugger Jim Rice once said when asked about his “friends” on the Red Sox.
He called them his associates, not his friends.
In a world of high-level competitors what else could they be? With two of the “associates” in Foxboro now realizing the end of the long road is closer than the beginning, nerves are frayed, egos are bruised and decisions are made.
This time the decision was not to Bill Belichick’s liking. He learned he’s a pebble on the beach but the truth is so is Tom Brady and everyone else in Foxboro except the guy who isn’t renting office space at Gillette Stadium — Bob Kraft.
He gets what he wants. The rest hold on until their pebble is cast aside, like all the ones before them.