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Moving the Chains
Tom Brady and the Pursuit of Everything
By Charles P. Pierce Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2006 Charles P. Pierce
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-70711-8
CHAPTER 1
ON THE AVENUE OF THE FLEAS
SEPTEMBER 8, 2005: NEW ENGLAND 30, OAKLAND 20 RECORD: 1—0
THE COAT livened up the first week of the season.
Just before the opening game against Oakland, Brady was profiled in GQ magazine. The piece caused no little stir because, at one point, while attempting to establish his bona fides as a regular guy, Brady gave a non-denial denial to a question about whether he scanned the Internet looking for dirty pictures. This prompted a spate of TOM SURFS FOR PORN! headlines, most notably in "Inside Track," the gossip column produced by two indefatigable women in the tabloid Boston Herald. But the pictures accompanying the article were what were bound to bring out the inner Marx brother in any teammate—especially, it seems, in offensive linemen.
They were the usual fashion magazine photos—glossy and softly lit, and nearly recognizable as depictions of an actual human being. With someone apparently under the impression that Brady had an independent film debuting at Sundance this year, the quarterback was posed in a variety of high-end leisure clothes. He was shown dreamily doffing a yachting cap. Even more inexplicably, he was photographed holding a baby goat.
It turns out that the goat photo was something of a surprise. Brady was taken to a farm. Someone handed him a goat. Someone else took his picture. The magazine published it, and the overall effect was that of Orlando Bloom in the role of Mr. Green Jeans. His teammates noticed, as he was sure they would.
The day after the magazine hit the stands, Brady brought the team up to the line of scrimmage, only to discover that tackle Matt Light and center Dan Koppen had fastened the goat photo to the backs of their jerseys. Practice convulsed for a long moment, and nobody laughed harder than the guy with the goat.
The mastermind of the plot was probably Koppen, a redhead with a determined slouch to his jaw and middle school mischief in his eyes. A lineman as bright as he is deft, and as deft as he is strong, Koppen is Brady's backgammon rival, and one of his best friends on the team. As the center, he has to make all the calls for the offensive line, especially those regarding Brady's pass protection, so Koppen and Brady spend hours together on the practice field and in the film room trying, among other things, to keep Brady upright and intact.
Koppen's entitled, then, to these moments of hilarity with his quarterback. It wasn't the first. After Brady hosted Saturday Night Live the previous April, in the course of which he did one skit in his underwear, he found the Patriot locker room festooned with Jockey shorts. Koppen was the prime suspect in that caper, too.
Brady's first touchdown of the 2005 season came with 2:05 left in the first quarter against Oakland. Up until that moment, his performance had been fitful at best. Once the smoke from the pregame bombardment had cleared, he had missed open receivers on three occasions in the first quarter, including a pass to Deion Branch on which Branch had left two defenders behind on a route that took him to the middle of the field. Brady overthrew him by half a yard.
Branch is a quick, smart receiver who can turn an eight-yard pass into a twenty-yard gain. He was the Most Valuable Player in the previous season's Super Bowl, catching eleven passes for 133 yards against the Eagles, including a critical nineteen-yard reception that led to the field goal by Adam Vinatieri that proved the difference in the game. His connection on the field with Brady is not dissimilar to that between Brady and Koppen, born, as it is, from endless sessions on the practice field. On a third- down-and-eight situation from the Oakland 18-yard line, Branch broke off a sharp cut to the outside, and Brady hit him in the end zone for a 10—7 New England lead. Brady sprinted the eighteen yards in order to be one of the first to jump on Branch's head.
Oakland responded almost ten minutes later with a 73-yard pass to Randy Moss, the vastly gifted, and vastly truculent, wide receiver who'd come to Oakland after making Minnesota too hot to hold him. In many ways, Moss is the antithesis of Branch: eight inches taller, thirty pounds heavier, and explosively athletic, especially in midair. On this play, with New England defensive back Tyrone Poole stumbling in his coverage, Moss simply tapped the ball over Poole's head as though he were playing beanbag with a child. The touchdown put Oakland ahead briefly, but Brady hit Tim Dwight with a five-yarder to give New England a 17—14 halftime lead. The Patriots stretched that to 30—14 before Oakland scored a meaningless touchdown with 3:04 left to cut the final margin to 30—20. Brady threw for more than three hundred yards for the ninth time in his career, completing twenty-four of his thirty- eight passes.
Much of the talk in the locker room after the game was of the Visa commercial that had debuted on the telecast that night, and of how the offensive linemen had stolen the show from their quarterback. This is something of a karmic earthquake. After all, there is nobody simultaneously more important and more anonymous than an offensive lineman. With very rare exceptions,including John Hannah, a Hall of Fame guard for the Patriots who is reckoned to be the greatest offensive lineman ever to have played the game, even the NFL's formidable myth-making machinery breaks down on the topic, usually treating a team's offensive line as a mass of undifferentiated muscle. If the FBI really wants to hide a cooperating witness, football coaches say, it should train its canaries to trap-block.
"You have to know what's right for you," Koppen explained. "You're in high school, right? You're old enough to know, and smart enough to realize, that you don't have the physical abilities to be a receiver or anything like that. If you love to play the game, you've got to play it whenever you can.
"You pretty much fall into it. I don't think in backyard football, what are you going to do? 'Hey, I want to play center'? No, I don't think so. It's picked for you, probably. Everybody wants to grow up to be the wide receiver, or the running back, or the quarterback. But whether it's because you're bigger than the other kids at a younger age, or you just get bigger in high school, the offensive line is just someplace where they put you."
However, the commercial was different. They were all individual performers, each of them sharper and more vivid while wearing a face mask than their quarterback was in his suit. He was upstaged, and he appears to have loved it. "It was a long day, working with those five guys," Brady says. "They'll never be actors. I don't think we'll win any Emmys for that thing, but we had a lot of fun doing it. I love having those guys around. They got asked to be in the commercial, and I think that's always kind of flattering to be asked. Hopefully, it put a few bucks in their pockets.
"But those guys never pay for anything."
There are quarterbacks whose standing with their teammates never would have survived the goat photo and the GQ spread. There are quarterbacks whose images as matinee idols and public figures of conspicuous decency would have put their football credibility into a debt they could never repay. They would have been ridiculed, culled from a herd whose attitude toward issues of gender never has been an enlightened one. That's never happened to Tom Brady, in whom people invest themselves for reasons that seem to be beyond envy or greed, or any of the easy categories of the game.
"Tommy is a traditionalist," muses Robert Kraft, the owner of the Patriots. "But, he's a what? What do they call it now? That term they use in gossip? Metrosexual? Something like that, but at the same time, he's an old-time football player. You can connect with him and feel that you have a special bond with him. He's soft and gentle, but he can be really, really tough when he has to be. It's a terrific balance of him almost being naive at times, but, when it comes to that border, he knows how to be pragmatic. He's such a competitor, but he can cuddle a baby, too."
It's hard to imagine, say, George Halas ever talking about his quarterback that way, and it's hard to imagine, say, Doug Atkins not laughing his head off at the old man if he did. But, almost from the start, Brady has managed to be beyond ridicule without being above it. He'll hug his sisters, or a teammate's mother, and get teased about it, and the episode will pass without hanging around his neck. In seminaries, theologians talk about charisma in ways that involve the laying on of hands. Politicians have managed to transmute the sacred into the profane, kissing babies for the cameras. Brady's is a secular charisma derived from authenticity.
Brady's toughness is beyond question. His teammates marvel at his coolness in those scrambled moments in which the quarterback has to be the only one standing still in the middle of what is really little more than an organized riot. Opponents respect his ability to take a fearful pounding and come back at them again on the next play. "I would never take a cheap shot at him," says Jason Taylor, the talented Miami defensive end who is one of Brady's best friends in the league.
"Quarterbacks," says Bill Belichick, sounding very much the way a former defensive coordinator should, "are going to get hit."
Nevertheless, given the attention that accrues automatically to the position, even the toughest quarterback can lose his teammates, most often by carrying himself above the grunts who sacrifice themselves to keep his uniform clean. Bobby Layne, the legendary hellion who quarterbacked the Detroit Lions in the 1950s, once explained to the writer Myron Cope how he'd learned to play quarterback in the fullest sense of the position.
"I learned one thing playing for the New York Bulldogs," Layne said. "I found out I wasn't gun-shy. I could stay in the pocket and get hit and it would not bother me." Layne also learned to divine the essential nexus for any quarterback between the ability to hang in the pocket to throw the ball on Sunday, and a willingness to pick up the dinner check the night before. "I was making more money than anyone else on the club so I always allocated a certain part of my money to spend on the players," he said. "I wasn't trying to be a big shot and I don't think any of them thought I was trying to be one."
In many ways, between the GQ article and the Visa commercial, what Elwood Reid, that former offensive lineman turned Michigan professor, identified in his classroom played out on an immensely bigger stage. This was someone with enough substance to him to render the usual methods of culling the herd irrelevant. Brady's character had moved him beyond those simple dynamics without placing him beyond the individuals who made up the herd. The herd invested in him, and he invested so much in them as individuals that their mutual investments in one another added up to a profound sense of being teammates. In every sense, including both the catholic and the Catholic ones, charisma inevitably involves someone wishing to make contact finding other people willing to receive it. And football is, after all, a contact sport.
"All I ever wanted," Tom Brady says, "was the camaraderie, to share some memories with so many other guys. I mean, if you choose to alienate yourself or put yourself apart, you know, play tennis. Play golf."
This was someone who saw deeply into the bonds that hold people together, who saw so deeply into the concept of being a teammate that he saw all the way down to that abiding confidence that is the strength of the best families. All successful teams refer to themselves as families without ever realizing the weight of what they're saying, as though "family" is merely a group of like-minded people with a common goal. And that's one of the problems with metaphors. Sometimes, they oversimplify.
The lineage of quarterbacks is as much a question of nature versus nurture as is any other genealogical spelunking. The dynastic Mannings—Archie, Peyton, and Eli—are one example, as are Bob and Brian Griese, and Phil and Chris Simms. The line that leads to Tom Brady, though, may trace itself back not to a great- grandfather calling signals for the Canton Bulldogs, but to Jim Walsh, a Catholic priest born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on February 24, 1867. Walsh attended Boston College High School and, eventually, Boston College, where he showed promise as a debater and as a journalist. He dropped out of BC to study bookkeeping, but abandoned that and enrolled across the Charles River at Harvard. Eventually, however, he found his way to St. John's Seminary in Brighton. He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest on May 20, 1892.
From the start of his priesthood, Walsh sparkled with missionary zeal. In 1907 he founded a magazine dedicated to the foreign missions. In 1910, at a eucharistic congress in Montreal, Walsh met a kindred soul. Thomas Price was a North Carolinian inculcated by his mother with a deep devotion to the mother of Christ. (In fact, Price credited the intercession of the Blessed Virgin with saving him from a shipwreck on his way to the seminary in Maryland.) Acting independently, both Walsh and Price recognized a need in the Church for a seminary that would train young men specifically to work overseas. In 1911 Pope Pius X formally blessed what the two priests called the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, which became known as Maryknoll for short, after the plot of land on which Walsh and Price had established their seminary in Ossining, New York, not far from the New York State correctional facility there—which was known, also for short, as Sing Sing.
The Maryknoll order was an immediate success. Its first missionaries set sail for China in 1918. The organization also developed an order of nuns and an order of lay missionaries. From its start, the spirit of Maryknoll was of a Catholicism that reached out to the rest of the world, that was active in that world, a spirit that was far more democratic than it was hierarchical.
Not long after the order was founded, Maryknoll opened another seminary, this one on the grounds of an estate donated to the order in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, twenty-two miles west of Chicago, a former outpost for Protestant circuit-riding preachers. It was in some ways a foreign mission itself; Glen Ellyn didn't even have a Catholic parish for the first sixty years of its existence. The Maryknoll Seminary soon became a local landmark, not merely for the grace and beauty of its grounds but also because it gave Glen Ellyn its very own ghost story. Rumor had it that a monk had hung himself in the seminary's bell tower, and that you could hear him moaning in the night. It was also rumored that, on the anniversary of the monk's death, the walls of the bell tower dripped blood.
In 1962, Thomas Brady, an eighteen-year-old Catholic schoolboy in San Francisco, found himself fascinated by Maryknoll and its mission work. He was a second- generation Californian from an intensely competitive and intensely spiritual family. "Coming up in grammar school, I learned about them, and I absolutely fell in love with them," he recalls. However, his father, Harry, had the chronic Irish problem with expressing deep emotion. He simply didn't. His son vowed not to seal himself up that way, but to raise himself and his children to be open in all ways to the world around them.
"You learn from that how not to repeat the mistakes [of your parents]," says Stephen Pope, a cousin who is now a professor of theology at Boston College. Pope's sister, Barbara, spent eight years as a Maryknoll lay missionary in a Venezuelan barrio. "It was a fairly tight-knit, but not suffocating, Irish Catholic family, and it was a fairly big one, full of vocations to the priesthood. That competitive, driving side of the Irish character? Well, the Bradys have that in spades."
In 1962, Tom and his brother Phil were both at Glen Ellyn with the intention to become Maryknoll priests. They brought with them not only their fiery competitive bent but their high spirits as well. In the yearbook for his freshman year at Glen Ellyn, amid all the timorous, anxious smiles of his classmates, Tom Brady is grinning as if he just made a great deal on something very expensive. He played soccer and, with his brother, worked as a groundskeeper at the golf course that had remained part of the seminary's property from the time of the original bequest. There is perhaps something of the Divine Hand in the fact that Tom Brady went to a seminary where he could still get a round in.
In 1965 the changes in the Catholic Church wrought by Pope John XXIII's Second Vatican Council had reached Glen Ellyn. In calling the council, the pope famously urged that the windows of the Church be flung open to the world. Perhaps the council's most singular departure was its ultimate insistence that the Church ought to abandon its rigidly hierarchical structure and accept that it actually is what the council called "the people of God."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Moving the Chains by Charles P. Pierce. Copyright © 2006 Charles P. Pierce. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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