FOXBORO — The recent trailer for the upcoming Facebook documentary on Tom Brady’s fight with Father Time seemed a bit, shall we say, eerie. In fact, if the words coming out of his mouth had been uttered by Aaron Rodgers or Drew Brees, New England football fans would be chortling that both had lost their minds.
But in this part of the football world Tom Brady can do no wrong, at least not until he does. Then the whispers begin that the “Tom vs. Time” battle that is the subject of this six-part documentary on Facebook is being lost. This usually comes on the few weekends when the Patriots also lose. When they win, 40 is the new 30 and TB12 is as invincible as the Terminator. Still, to hear him sounding like a Cherokee or a Chickasaw coming out of a sweat lodge was a little unsettling.
“There’s a warrior spirit about me,” Brady says. “I’m always in competition with myself.”
While the latter may be true, the “warrior spirit” thing seemed, well, a little too New Age for a New Englander, even if he is a transplant from California.
That Brady is in competition with himself is the difficult reality for any great athlete, writer or high achiever in any walk of life. Once you’re a million-dollar salesman, for example, an $800,000-year salary begins to make some wonder if you’re Willy Loman, the faltering, 63-year-old traveling salesman made immortal in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.”
We’re all trying to cheat death for as long as possible but athletes get to do it twice. First at the fading of their talents and then again at the fading we all one day face. It ain’t easy, this Tom vs. Time fight.
So maybe that can make you a little loopy as the calendar begins to run you down, which would explain some of the recent dustups in Foxboro over the departure of young Jimmy Garoppolo and the accusation Brady’s fingerprints were on his departure ticket.
Truth be told, no one wants to see their understudy lurking in the wings, especially one who may have what you once had, which is to say the eye of the coach as well as the skills to make him take notice. Garoppolo’s season-ending five-game winning streak in San Francisco certainly made his departure more concerning and when it coincided with a five-game slump by Brady it gave some pause to ponder what the future holds.
Brady, of course, knows in pro football the future is now, so all that matters for the moment is tomorrow night’s confrontation with the underdog Titans. Win that game and move on to the AFC Championship, and Time will be put on hold for at least another week and Jimmy G will be just another chump on the sideline.
Certainly a suspect Titans defense that is among the worst in football at defending against tight ends seems made to order for Brady and Rob Gronkowski, the game’s best at that position. If Brady’s slump continues despite that edge, alarm bells will ring.
Over the final five games of the season, “40 is the new 30 Tom” played like “40 is the soon to be 50 Tom.” For the season, Brady passed for a league-leading 4,577 yards, was third in touchdowns (32) and passer rating at 102.8 and fifth in completion percentage at 66.3 percent. Those are top-flight numbers that made a lot of defensive coordinators sweat, including Tennessee’s Dick LeBeau, who has lost most of his battles with Brady.
But in those final five regular-season games a new (or was it old?) Brady emerged, one whose passer rating was 81.6 (17th in NFL); whose yards per pass attempt was 6.95 (15th); and whose touchdown-to-interception ratio was 6-5 while in the first 11 games it was 26-3. Was the late-season slump caused by the absence of weapons like Chris Hogan and, for one game, Gronkowski or a sign that, like Peyton Manning at 38 and Brett Favre at 41, Time had begun its final assault?
Brady clearly believes those five games were just a snapshot in time with a small “t.” Nothing to see here, he says, and tomorrow night he may begin the process of proving it, as he’s done throughout his career.
As he says on video from the sweat lodge, “If you’re going to compete against me you better be willing to give up your life because I’m giving up mine.”
That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but when you read his diet advice and try to ingest as much water as he claims to drink daily before going to bed each night before 9 p.m., you begin to get the idea success at the advanced age of 40 has not come without sacrifices.
Yet those five games remain. So does the odd week it’s been in Foxboro since ESPN wrote a lengthy article saying there’s trouble in paradise between Brady, Bill Belichick and owner Bob Kraft, who allegedly sided with the player over the coach on the subject of where Jimmy G would be plying his trade. And then came the issuance of the “Tom vs. Time” trailer and you heard the eerie voice of the sweat lodge warrior and it began to feel a little weird in Foxboro.
Tomorrow night, the wondering will stop. As Yoda, the original Hoodie mystic, would say, “Do or do not. There is no try.”
Nobody understands that better than Brady. That night the competition will be not only against himself but also the Titans, about whom he said this week, “You play the game because you don’t know what the outcome will be. You don’t take anything for granted. You work as hard as you can over the course of the week to prepare yourself to play, and then you have to go execute and get the job done. No one is going to hand it to us. If we win the game and advance, it will be because we earned it and beat a good team.
“I think it just comes down to how well you play. At the end of the day, it’s not about old guys are going to win or young guys are going to win, the home team, the road team. It’s really going to come down to execution. No one’s going to be able to do it for you. You’re out there, you’re in the position to succeed. Your coaches have put a lot on you. The team’s really relying on you. You’ve got to go out there and make the plays. You’ve got to make the tackles, you’ve got to make the throws, the catches, the blocks, the runs, whatever it takes. Whoever does that better is going to win the game over the course of 60 minutes.”
When those 60 minutes arrive, unless I miss my guess, it will be no sweat for the man with the warrior spirit. But if he does sweat it again for a sixth straight game, Tom Brady won’t be the only one sweating in Foxboro.
So will Bill Belichick and Bob Kraft.