Mr. Wonderful was sitting in the lobby bar of a fine but undetectable New York hotel, the sort of place with an invisible facade, uninviting minimalist furniture and lighting so dim it induces blindness, the better to discourage lurkers and gawkers. But even this was not enough cover for Tom Brady, who was hunched in a large gray overcoat in the furthest chair from the door, trying to further invisible-ize his wonderful self. It's a funny thing watching Brady try to shrink. For one thing he's 6 feet 4 and 225 pounds, and for another, he's a giant of a sports figure.
It's hard to name a more glamorous, exalted job in the world than a winning NFL quarterback. The Prince of Wales? Pagan god? Brady, 27, will be chasing his third Super Bowl victory when his New England Patriots meet the Indianapolis Colts in the playoffs today. The price and the reward for this is a phosphorous level of exposure, both invited and uninvited.
It's what provokes his New England Patriots teammates to label him, with jeering affection, Mr. Wonderful. So does the fact that he's possessed of inescapable, head-turning good looks. This topic causes Brady to curl up even more, sort of the way a garden slug does when you pour salt on it. Brady, himself, doesn't think he's so wonderful. "I never felt that one day in my life," he says, "and I think if I did I'd be in trouble." The chief motivation of his career, he says, is in fact, "Insecurity."
While most players at his age and this stage in his career are making their names, Brady is making a name for himself as a cringing idol -- and a determinedly regular guy. When he talks about what he does for a living, he starts a sentence by saying, "One day, I was driving to work . . . "
In fact, you would think he is nothing more than the fourth- or fifth-best quarterback in the league, judging by the far greater attention others received this season. Pittsburgh rookie Ben Roethlisberger is undefeated as a starter and is easily the league's current media darling. Indianapolis's Peyton Manning, who set the single-season record for touchdown passes, is in so many commercials it seems like they play on a continuous loop during NFL telecasts. Even the mother of Philadelphia quarterback Donovan McNabb gets more TV face time than Brady through soup commercials.
But that's the way Brady likes it. "I think the things that are important to me are very different than the things that might be to some people who enjoy the fame and the accolades and the awards," Brady says. "I love playing football and that overtakes everything."
Brady has been known to turn down seven-figure deals, not wanting more than the three national endorsements he has with Gap, Sirius satellite radio and Nike. He said he believes taking on more would drain him and distract him from his real job, winning games for the Patriots, who pay him $5.5 million a year. He's not represented by one of the mega talent agencies, but rather has stuck by a comparatively obscure agent, a Chinese American named Don Yee. "He doesn't gorge himself on fame," Yee says.
It's not that Brady does not partake in the advantages of stardom. His steady girlfriend happens to be an actress, Bridget Moynahan. One reason he was in New York was to appear on the David Letterman show. He will be a guest star on "The Simpsons" in February and has sat in the VIP box with Laura Bush for the State of the Union address. He's even met the pope.
He likes the finer things. He drives a Cadillac Escalade, carries a man purse, and wears a $1,200 silver bracelet. And he once made the unpardonable mistake, one no NFL player should, of admitting in a magazine interview that his favorite restaurants are ones that serve creme brule.
Still, you see a lot less of Brady than you might, and the reason is that he believes he's simply a better quarterback when he lays low and is all about football. "I guess I always feel there's someone hunting me down," he says. "Someone always right on my footsteps. I never had a lot of great ability. If I don't really work at it . . . there's some strengths and plenty of weaknesses and if I don't play to my strengths I'm a very average quarterback."
He has decided the trick to the job, to managing all the iconic junk and distortions without losing his self and his edge, is selectivity. "You have to pick spots and pace yourself or you can get so bogged down," he says. "When you get in your car, that's when you get a reprieve."
Some of Brady's reticence is also strategic. He's the quarterback of a team that has won two Super Bowls by being famously devoid of superstar egos. The Patriots are largely role players and low-round draftees with slavish work ethics: 39 members of the team were either undrafted free agents, or drafted below the third round. In view of this fact, he's wise to stifle his fame. "The only way you know he's been on a magazine cover is if you're walking through an airport and happen to see it," says Patriots wide receiver David Patten.
If Brady has a philosophy for handling himself and his career, it's this, according to Yee, "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down."
On the rare occasions Brady plays the cover boy, his friends and teammates usually make him regret it. Take the Gap ad. All of sudden, you couldn't open a glossy magazine without seeing the ad, featuring Brady in a low cut athletic shirt that seemed to show off his . . . cleavage.
He walked into the locker room and it was plastered everywhere, including over the door. "I did this thing for Gap and they just killed me over that, killed me," Brady says. "We'd be on the team plane and somebody'd be flipping through a magazine and they'd hold it up in the air." Brady would slide down in his seat.
"It's embarrassing," he says. "And I asked for it."
As for the issue of his looks, that's simply baffling to him, the stuff of vapid romance. "I mean, I've been photographed," he says, "and I look at it, and I say, damn, that's a good picture. But that's not me."
Still, it would be a mistake to confuse Brady's self-effacement with self doubt. He is 48-14 as a starter, and 6-0 in playoff games.
In just his fourth season, he's become the NFL's all-time leader in overtime wins without a defeat, with a 7-0 mark. And 15 times he has led the Patriots on game-winning drives in the fourth quarter.
"You never hear it out of his mouth publicly, but you'd be crazy to think he's strictly got an oh golly shucks mentality, I'm just John Q Public here for the betterment of the team," says his lifelong best friend Kevin Brady (no relation). "Obviously, he wants to be considered one of the best, and he wants to be considered great. What other guys around the league are doing is wonderful. But not for a moment does he think he's not capable of that as well."
Lessons at Home
With three older sisters and a father of firm ethical valuations who once studied to be a missionary Roman Catholic priest, there wasn't much chance "Tommy" Brady would get a big head and start mistaking himself for the baby Jesus.
In the Brady home, games reigned supreme alongside faith. Tom Sr. spent two years at Maryknoll Seminary in Chicago, an institution that specializes in foreign aid, before graduating from the University of San Francisco, going into finance, and settling in San Mateo, Calif., with his wife and four children. On Sundays, if the family took two cars to church, "We'd race," says the middle sister, Nancy. Whoever got home first would run to the front doorstep and hold a finger up in the air.
"Yeah, well the funny thing about that was, they only lived about two blocks from church," Kevin Brady says.
Tom Sr. says that as soon as you got a high opinion of yourself there was a sister "to knock the crap out of you." Maureen, now 31, was an all-American softball player at Fresno State. Nancy, 30, won a scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley to play softball. Julie, 28, went to St. Mary's (Calif.) on a soccer scholarship. Their mother, Galynn, was a nationally ranked amateur tennis player. Tommy was a fully indoctrinated competitor as a toddler.
Tom Sr. made golf his weekend game of choice, and it was on the golf course that he first saw that his son had an interesting brand of steel in him. One afternoon he entered them in a father-son tournament. They were playing an alternate-shot combo when Tom Sr. chipped in from off the green. As the ball dropped in the hole, Tommy had a fit because he didn't get to play another ball. On the next hole Tom Sr. chipped again, this time to within six inches of the cup. Tommy walked up to the ball, and, instead of tapping it the cup, he swung his putter as hard as he could and knocked it off the green. "What did you do that for?" his father, asked, incredulous. "If I knock it in I don't get another shot," Tommy said.
It was a pattern that would repeat itself: Brady doggedly choosing to compete the hard way. He went to Junipero Serra High School, a private Catholic academy with an illustrious list of sports alumni that includes Lynn Swann and Barry Bonds. His freshman year, Brady barely made the freshman football team and was the backup quarterback on a team that went 0-7 and he never scored a touchdown. "The only reason I played my sophomore year was because the guy who started before me quit," he says. His final two years the team went 6-4 and 5-5. "And I wasn't very good."
But he won scholarship offers from both Michigan and Berkeley. At Michigan, he'd have to compete against no fewer than six other quarterbacks for playing time, while Berkeley assured him of a chance to start. "I'd have said, 'I'm going to Cal,' " his father says. "I'm not a dummy." Brady chose Michigan.
At Michigan, he was seventh on the depth chart. As a sophomore, he developed a case of the sulks and decided maybe he'd made the wrong choice. "I wasn't playing that good and I wanted to put that blame on somebody else," he says. To Brady, it seemed like his turn always came on long yardage. He went to see Coach Lloyd Carr to complain about his playing time. "I just don't feel like I'm getting my shot," he said, and told Carr he was thinking of transferring. "You can do that," Carr said. "But I don't want you to. I want you to stay and compete and worry about yourself and quit worrying about how the other people are doing."
Brady saw a sports psychologist and explained that everybody else got reps with the first team, when it was third and four, and he was always given reps with the second-string line when it was third and eight. "What's wrong with that?" the psychologist said. "If you can do it when it's third and eight, everyone knows you can do it on third and four." It was a piece of advice he never forgot. "And that's how it is today," Brady says. "You can look at one way, and not get a bit better. Or you can put it on yourself to get better."
A second piece of advice came from his father, who was firmly against transferring. Brady called his father and said, "Maybe I should come home and see what I can do there." Tom Sr. informed him he had his priorities out of whack. "You said you chose Michigan because you wanted to be a graduate of Michigan," he said. "Not because you want to be a football star."
Brady stuck it out, became the starter and went 20-5 over the next two seasons, throwing for 35 touchdowns. But he was overshadowed as a senior when Michigan brought in the most highly prized high school player in the nation, Drew Henson, and Brady found himself splitting the starting job to keep Henson happy. NFL scouts were scared off; they figured Brady must have some hidden flaw, otherwise why would he be fighting for the job as a senior?
On draft day, Brady and his agent Yee watched, appalled, as round after round passed. They figured him for a fourth-rounder or better. Instead, it was the sixth round before New England picked him. He was the 199th player selected overall in 2000. It's a day neither of them have forgotten.
"In the modern history of the NFL, it's probably the greatest piece of scouting malpractice that's ever been," says Yee, "if you proceed on the assumption that most teams want to draft the quote 'franchise' quarterback,' and they spend inordinate time scouting this issue and watching tape and talking to people."
Brady didn't sulk this time. He told friends such as Kevin Brady, "I'm on a team and I'm happy and I'll just work my . . . off to get on the roster and stay on." By the end of camp, Brady had made a believer out of the most important person in the Patriots organization, Coach Bill Belichick. He was just a rookie with a $295,000 salary, but he was elevated to back up a $30 million franchise quarterback, Drew Bledsoe.
As an undervalued workhorse, Brady fit right in with the rest of the Patriots. The locker room was chock full of guys just like him. It was the franchise philosophy not to be seduced by pure, highly paid talent and marquee personalities, and instead to go after overlooked low rounders, bargain-basement studs and grateful role players. They were a utilitarian bunch, and an egalitarian one, too.
"I've competed my whole career," Brady says. "I'm a sixth-round draft pick. I mean I guess you always have your chip on your shoulder when you don't. . . . Look, a lot of the guys on our team are guys who were undrafted. Late-round picks. Guys who fought to get where they are. Chip guys. You might not have the best athletic skill but you have a pretty big heart and you'll do whatever it takes to win."
So it was entirely fitting when Brady became the soul of the team. In a September 2001 game against the New York Jets, Bledsoe took a bad hit and sheared a blood vessel in his chest. Brady was their new starter. Everybody figured the Patriots were done, except Belichick, who said, "I don't think I'm going to be standing here in 10 weeks talking about all of Tom Brady's mistakes."
The rest is lore. Not only did the Patriots go 11-5 and win the Super Bowl, defeating the heavily favored St. Louis Rams, but Belichick was entirely correct in his prediction about Brady. The kid never made a mistake. On or off the field. He threw 162 straight passes without an interception. And when the press clamored for him, he demurred. "Coach, I'm 23 and I have no right to talk for this team," he told Belichick. "I shouldn't be talking for them."
Brady's ability to avoid missteps, both on the field and in the locker room, is his most significant and underestimated quality. According to Belichick, Brady's success is a matter of two words. "Discipline and consistency," Brady says. Only rarely does he make the game-killing mistake, and it's usually a result of extreme pressure that makes him employ his weakest feature, his slow feet. "When I get reactionary, it's not good," he says.
What Brady lacks in obvious physical genius he makes up for with subtleties like vision, anticipation and a chess-like spatial intelligence. The accuracy of his arm can only be ascribed to God-given hand-eye coordination. (He was a good enough baseball prospect that he was drafted out of high school by the Montreal Expos.) Throw in good habits, and nerve, and you have almost the perfect quarterbacking organism. "If I feel like I'm a step ahead of the defense, then I feel like I can execute really well," he says. "You get up under center and you look at the defensive front, you look at the coverage, and you know the play you have called, and you know how your guys are aligned and you know the situation, the down and distance. You know the opponents, who you're throwing against, and you pick your best matchup. That's what it is. You keep eliminating guys. You say 'I can't throw here, I can't throw there, so these are the guys I'm looking at.' And you drop back and as soon as you see he's open you let it go. . . . Late games? Those situations are a lot about preparing and execution and confidence."
It's not the sort of stuff that fills record books with passing records. It just fills cabinets with trophies, and the guys in his locker room with belief.
Picking His Spots
The trouble with greatness is that Donald Trump starts calling you, and so do the celebrity golf tournaments, and beauty pageants and local car dealers. Pretty soon if you're not careful, you're another wasted guy with more invitations than accomplishments.
After the first Super Bowl victory, Brady accepted every invite and every endorsement deal. After the second one, he went to Europe. Alone.
He spent a week in London by himself, touring the museums. His girlfriend met him, and they went to Paris, Florence, Rome and Venice. For three weeks, he sat at sidewalk cafes and read newspapers and novels, just another twenty-something American in black jeans sipping coffee and checking out church spires. He went to the Uffizi, and the Accademia. "I was pretty much anonymous," he says. "You get so wrapped in your life you don't let yourself do that."
He only used his celebrity pull one time on the trip. He was on the phone to his parents from Rome and they asked him what he'd done that day. He was rattling off the sights he'd seen when his girlfriend said, "Aren't you going to tell them about the pope?"
"Oh yeah, yeah," he said. "Hey, I met the pope!"
If Brady has learned anything between trips to playoffs, it's that he'd rather hit golf balls with his friends than in celebrity pro-ams, and that fame can be a career killer. A 9-7 season after the 2001 Super Bowl taught him that. So did a case of exhaustion from trying to make strangers happy. The convenience store where he stopped every morning for his orange juice on the way to work turned into a Sharpie Party. He was signing autographs for a huge throng outside the Patriots' locker room one day, and he couldn't get to everyone. As he walked away, he heard a guy say, "What a jerk."
"Do you pay attention to that, being a person that people always look at?" he asks, uncertainly. "It can be very demoralizing."
So he'll trade some luxury for anonymity. Last summer when he got back from Europe, he slipped down to New York to go to a Yankees game with his friend Kevin Brady, who was working in Manhattan as a banker. Kevin told him the easiest way to get to Yankee Stadium was by subway. They jumped on the No. 4 train, and it was packed. Brady stood there, noticeably towering over the other passengers, in 85 degree heat, with no air conditioning, hanging on to a strap. Suddenly, a couple of kids noticed him and started whispering. "Is that . . .?" There was the Super Bowl MVP, sardined into a subway car. "I don't believe this," Brady said to Kevin. He tried to turn his face away, but he couldn't move his neck. The train was too crowded.
Finally, one of the kids spoke. As he opened his mouth, Brady winced in anticipation.
"We're Eagles fans," the kid said.
Brady just smirked with relief.
He's learned that his preferred hangout isn't some nightclub or even a restaurant with creme brule on the menu. It's his home in Quincy, Mass., near the water, where he lives in an ungated community. Brady bought another house three doors down, and gave it to two of his sisters.
There is no one place Brady would rather be than the Patriots' locker room. He lingers there, for three and four hours after practice, with his offensive linemen playing uproarious games of dominoes and backgammon. "Every day you go in there and you can't get a seat," Brady says. Brady has by his own admission broken several backgammon boards by slamming his hand on them. "Which isn't the smartest thing," he says.
It's by all accounts a close locker room, as their two Super Bowls in three years attest, and that's in no small part due to the fact that the biggest star on the team remains their most determinedly regular guy. Brady is known to spend as much time in the weight room as a lineman, and when he's not running the offense, he's running laps on the sideline. "When he comes here, man, he comes to work, you know what I'm saying?" Patten says. "Everything that's required for other players that's maybe not required for the quarterback, he does." When Brady gets too much attention from the media, center Dan Koppen has a habit of interrupting him in rudely creative ways, which invariably reduces Brady to giggling. Once Koppen tossed a small talking box in his locker that kept repeating, in a mechanical voice, "You're talking out of your . . . " Once not long ago, Koppen showered him with Silly String while he was talking to a battery of TV cameras. Brady loved it. "He truly understands he's one of 53 cogs in the wheel," his father observes. "He owes as much to Dan Koppen as anybody owes him, and he understands that."
Last week, even as the Patriots prepared to meet the Colts and Manning in the playoffs and the pressure mounted, it was obvious that the privacy of the locker room was Brady's happiest refuge. He was beaming. "Whatever's going on in your life, this takes control of it," he said. "It almost enhances your awareness." He strolled through the room in a getup of thick gray sweats cut off at the knees, with a conspicuous growth on his chin, his hair curling in an unstudied way that was the product of genuine unkemptness, not gel.
Brady keeps shunning the light. But if he keeps winning, it will come to him anyway.
