Tom Brady’s Endgame

By most measures, Brady’s childhood was idyllic. (On Google Street View, the home where he grew up resembles, fittingly, the house from “The Brady Bunch.”) But Anderson paints a picture of a boy living in the shadow of his athletic-superstar sisters. Maureen made the U.S. Junior Olympic softball team, Julie was a starter on her college’s soccer team, and Nancy won a softball scholarship to Berkeley. In contrast, Brady was scrawny, slow, and repeatedly picked last for games. Maureen later recalled to the Eagle-Tribune a time when “some boys were throwing a football around our street and they told Tommy to go deep. He ran all the way down the street waiting for the football and they turned around and left.”

Tom, Sr., stepped in. When Brady began playing football in high school, his father hired the head coach at the College of San Mateo to train him. He also enlisted a video editor to create a sizzle reel for college scouts. In December of 1994, Billy Harris, who was on the coaching staff at the University of Michigan, noticed a “mystery tape” on his desk. He was used to receiving film from high-school coaches, but this had been mailed from a residential address. Harris hadn’t heard of Brady. “Nobody on the recruiting trail was mentioning him,” he told the Athletic in 2020. The university recruited Brady only after its top pick, Bobby Sabelhaus, pulled out at the last minute. (Sabelhaus, who never played in the N.F.L., is now a real-estate agent in Nantucket.)

At Michigan, Brady began as the seventh-string quarterback. “The coaches don’t believe in me,” he told Greg Harden, a counsellor in the athletic department. “You’re right, they don’t,” Harden said, before offering a mantra: “If it was to be, it was up to me.” Brady became a relentless preparer. He did one drill, wherein he would drag his planted foot after throwing the ball, so many times that the nail on his big toe came off. His senior year, during a nationally televised game against Notre Dame, Michigan was trailing at halftime. The coach, Lloyd Carr, replaced the team’s hot-shot sophomore quarterback with Brady. The crowd let out a “wave of boos,” Anderson writes, “the instant his cleats hit the grass.” Brady responded with a fourth-quarter, game-winning comeback.

His ability to produce in big moments was one of the “intangibles” the newly hired Patriots coach Bill Belichick kept seeing in scouting reports. The tangibles were less stellar. At a scouting combine ahead of the draft, Brady had registered the second-slowest forty-yard dash for a quarterback in the event’s history; one coach complained that he looked “more like a damn aluminum siding salesman than a professional quarterback.” The night of the 2000 N.F.L. draft, as the sixth round began, Brady was lying in bed beside his father in his childhood home, realizing that he might never play professional football. Then a call came. The Patriots were selecting him in that round, at No. 199. (Only one Super Bowl-winning quarterback had ever been drafted lower.)

According to Anderson, a key part of the Patriots’ winning formula was Brady’s sense that Belichick had plucked him from obscurity. Anderson quotes Lee Smith, who briefly played alongside Brady in 2011; if Brady had been a first-round pick, Smith suggested, “he could have told Belichick to kiss his ass whenever he’d jump on him. But instead Tom had to impress Belichick.” He went on, “And when your star player is walking on eggshells around the head coach, everyone on the team is doing the same thing, which is what Belichick wanted.” Brady’s history of being undervalued helped him bond with the offensive linemen, who are often treated more like equipment than people, bodies there to protect the brains, i.e., the quarterback. “He’s one of us,” the offensive tackle Clint Oldenburg said during Brady’s first season.

It helped that Brady’s teammates saw him put in the work. One morning, the Patriots safety Rodney Harrison thought that he had finally beaten Brady to the gym by arriving at 5:30 a.m., only to find him watching film in a meeting room and jotting down notes. “Good afternoon. Did you enjoy sleeping in?” Brady asked Harrison, grinning. In Anderson’s hands, scenes like this read as foreshadowing the marital discord to come, as does a sound bite he includes from the documentary “Tom vs. Time”: “If you compete against me, you better be willing to give up your life, because I’m giving up mine,” Brady says.