The retirement announcement wasn’t a true surprise — how can it be, when it involves a 45-year-old football player? — but boy, it was something.
Tom Brady walked away from football early on Wednesday morning, with a simple video post, on his phone, on a beach, fighting back emotion, and none of us should expect a reversal, not this time.
So, um, what now?
This isn’t really a time to reflect on his litany of achievements, because that all happened last year, when he quit football, then realized he needed it and took one final shot at boosting his impossible legacy even further.
Perhaps, for a guy who came to epitomize time, both by defying it and by playing through so much of it, this should be about the moment, the right now and what comes from here.
It can be about the reality that there will be another NFL season beginning in seven months, and Brady won’t be a part of it, and that hasn’t been true at any point since the turn of the millennium.
There are some things you can tell from a video message and other things you can’t, but unless Brady has suddenly morphed into a world-class actor, this was real and raw and he felt every bit of it.
Did he get this on the first take? Who knows, but he sure looked like he was struggling to hold back the tears and that it was a battle he’d have lost if he’d kept talking much longer.
“I won’t be long-winded,” Brady said. “You only get one super-emotional retirement essay, and I used mine up last year.”
Brady has been a constant for so long but an outlier for most of it. He was never truly part of the NFL furniture, because the things he was doing and the level he was at were so different from the normal.
Just as the NFL quarterback space was skewing drastically younger, there he was, still at the top, tilting the average age ever further with each passing year.
As QBs commandeer ever-increasing sums for their services, there he was, taking team-friendly contract after contract, all designed with a singular aim: to win.
Even with all the struggles the Tampa Bay Buccaneers went through this season, there was no sense that Brady was past it, more that he was grounded in a situation where there was no run game help to relieve the pressure and less offensive line strength than before. Few doubted that in the right spot he could have survived and thrived, even in his age-46 season.
Finally, though, it was enough, from a player for whom enough was never enough. Three Super Bowl titles certainly weren’t enough, and he shed tears in the locker room after losing to the Giants in the Super Bowl in early 2012, wondering if he would get another shot.
He did, of course, winning three more in New England, but then six proved insufficient. So he added another in Tampa Bay, of all places, the franchise with the worst winning percentage in football history.
Even this year, an 8-9 record didn’t prevent him from being right up there, collecting 4,694 passing yards and 25 touchdowns, the yards mark bettered only by Patrick Mahomes and Justin Herbert, combined age 51.
It is also fact that as Brady put together streaks of incredible consistency, he did so against the backdrop of natural change. He won a Super Bowl as a young, single guy, and also as a father of three, two decades apart.
Once the Bucs were eliminated by the Dallas Cowboys in the wild-card round, there were rumors linking Brady with various teams; Miami, San Francisco and Las Vegas all appeared on the radar. What a testament to him, that he was still viewed as a prized free agent, after all this time. None of those franchises would have been getting him for the PR boost alone. If you sign Tom Brady, it’s because you think he can take you to a Super Bowl.
What we do know is that Brady is and has been a bridge between various NFL generations. When he made his debut in 2000, Minnesota Vikings kicker Gary Anderson was still in the league. Anderson is now 63 years old.
It already feels strange that we won’t get to see Brady play in games anymore, and to do so was unmissable television for a long, long time. Whether it was rooting fervently against him during his stretch on the New England Patriots, or for him during the Tampa years — and there were a lot of neutrals who fell into both those categories — you couldn’t take your eyes off Brady, the ultimate crunch-time player.
Always clutch. Still so, even now.
There is no set formula for how a sporting great is supposed to announce their retirement. This one was brief, to the point, heartfelt — yep, he nailed it.
Even in retirement, he’s still Tom Brady. Would you expect it any other way?
