By Sally Jenkins
The Washington Post
PHOENIX — You’ve never seen Tom Brady in a moment of honest panic. Oh, you’ve seen him get hit, and be furious about it. But have you actually seen him in a state in which his heart rate clearly doubled? No, you haven’t. That’s the whole issue in this Super Bowl: whether the Seattle Seahawks can fluster a man who plays the game as confidently as if he is modeling trousers.
It’s an interesting thing to watch a pretty boy chase greatness with such implacable focus. Brady’s best asset as a quarterback may be that, in a life so full of distraction, he completely knows what his real business is. He is in his sixth Super Bowl, seeking a fourth ring, and the glossy advertisements and the magazine fascination with his marriage are all just handsome tailoring thrust upon him compared to that. They are more the price of his career than the reward of it. The truth is, he’s a football purist.
“Tom is a classic,” Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll said.
Brady’s New England Patriots teammates once nicknamed him Mr. Wonderful, with mocking affection, for the shower of bounty and adulation that comes his way. Yet even they are taken aback at how purposeful he remains at the age of 37, with three children and a world-renowned beauty for a bride. “He’s a three-time Super Bowl champ that has everything, this and that, and you would think he would go through the motions,” Julian Edelman says. “But no.”
If Brady enters the elite company of just two men who have won four Super Bowls, Terry Bradshaw and Joe Montana, it will be because he remains one of the most rigorous workers in the league, who has toiled toward Sunday’s game with a visceral single-mindedness for 10 years now. That’s how long it’s been since he last lifted a Super Bowl trophy, and in the meantime, he has extended his career with an attention to detail that can only be called obsession. He hired a holistic health specialist. When most quarterbacks his age began contemplating retirement, he employed a private quarterback coach, Tom House, who coaxed Nolan Ryan’s throwing arm into his mid-40s, and began flying him in for workouts.
All of it was calculated to get Brady to the peak of this Sunday — and then he suddenly came down with a head cold. He has convalesced while educating himself exhaustively with film study of Seattle’s defenders, between homemade health remedies involving a lot of garlic.
“I just watch and watch and watch until I get tired, and then I go to sleep, “ he said earlier this week. “When I wake up, I watch more.” He got up from the bed or left his digital studies only to practice — in which he demonstrated the same scrupulous attention to the pettiest detail with his teammates.
“Tom’s the ultimate technician,” wide receiver Danny Amendola said “He’ll come in, and if our split’s a couple of inches off, he’ll get us right.”
Brady’s worst fear is that he will leave something undone — something unstudied, or unnoticed that could make a difference in a close one.
“This game, you hate to play anything less than your best because you rack your brain for all the things you wish you could have done better,” he says. “‘If I made this read’ or, ‘If I would have thrown it here on this play.’ That’s what you deal with the rest of your life.”
It has become rote by now to state that Brady was just a sixth-round draft pick, and to say it with a smirk as if it’s a curious little anomaly in his NFL biography. His agent Don Yee once called it “the greatest piece of scouting malpractice that’s ever been.”
It’s a good line — but the only trouble is that it suggests that Brady’s talent was there all along. It doesn’t explain the extent to which Brady’s career has been an act of self-will, a thing of his own construction. A few years ago, I asked Brady if he thought he was born with certain unequally distributed gifts.
“I never felt that one day in my life,” he said, “and I think if I did I’d be in trouble.”
The chief motivation of his career, he said, was “insecurity.”
“I guess I always feel there’s someone hunting me down,” he added. “Someone always right on my footsteps. I never had a lot of great ability. If I don’t really work at it … I’m a very average quarterback.”
Anyone who wants to understand how Brady plays with such confidence should focus, ironically, on that nagging sense of inadequacy. He doesn’t panic not because has a great arm or the legs of a javelin thrower, but because he has studied so hard.
“I don’t like snapping the ball when I think there is going to be a bad play,” he said this week.
The sense of striving has dogged him since he was a kid, long before he was an NFL draftee. All three of his elder sisters were college scholarship athletes, and his mother, Galynn, was a nationally ranked amateur tennis player. Any time he got a high opinion of himself an older sister would “knock the crap” out of him, according to his father Tom Sr. On Sundays, the family took two cars to church, and would race. Whoever got home first would run to the front doorstep and hold a finger up in the air.
As a freshman at Michigan, he started out seventh on the depth chart. He almost transferred as a sophomore when he decided he wasn’t getting a fair shot. His coach, Lloyd Carr, told him to “worry about yourself and quit worrying about what other people are doing.”
He sought out a sports psychologist, to whom he whined that everyone else got reps with the first team, while he only got reps with the second-string 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 — the rosetta stone to everything that happened after.
“You can look at it one way, and not get a bit better,” Brady remarked, in telling the story. “Or you can put it on yourself to get better.”
He has never stopped getting better.
“He has shown that it isn’t where you start, it’s how you finish,” Carroll says, “and he’s finishing in famous fashion.”
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