That Tom Brady is playing in his 10th Super Bowl at the age of 43 is a testament to the quarterback’s indomitable drive to just keep winning.
(CBS Boston) — It’s a bit of a paradox, really, that the longer you stick around, the harder it is to stand out. That is to say, when your accomplishments surpass levels that had previously never been imagined, and when you outright refuse to go away, thus adding to that previously unfathomable list of accolades, it all somehow reaches a point where it can no longer be properly digested. Not by the human mind, anyway. The baffling numbers and records may begin as awe-inspiring, only to quickly turn into wallpaper. That hypothesis is relevant this week, of course, because Tom Brady is playing in the Super Bowl. Again. For the 10th time in 20 years. Tom Brady is old, we get it. Tom Brady wins a lot, we get it. Tom Brady Tom Brady Tom Brady. Enough. We get it. It’s understandable if the football fans — be they die-hards or casual followers — have grown sick of hearing about this one individual. And yet, while it may seem like an antithetical notion … it’s entirely possible that not enough is being said about him. Given the nature of this violent sport, this is all not supposed to happen. Given the designs of a league dead set on parity, it’s not supposed to happen. Given the sheer difficulty of simply winning football games with such unprecedented consistency, it is not. Supposed. To happen. As we know though, it’s most certainly happening. Already a winner of six Super Bowls, Brady will be gunning for one more on Sunday night. Joining a new team for the first time in his professional life didn’t stop him from reaching this point, nor did a pandemic that drastically limited the amount of work that could take place with his new teammates prior to the start of the season. When it comes to the greatest winner in football history, minor inconveniences were simply not going to stop him from getting what he wants. Nothing ever has, and even at 43 years of age, that has not changed. In that sense, without a preseason or spring camps and OTAs, Brady’s impact upon joining the Bucs was more gradual. A 7-9 team a year ago, the Bucs started the season with a 7-5 record. They took a bye week to regroup, and they’ve gone 7-0 since. Now, listen: Yes, obviously, one man cannot win football games by himself. And there have been times throughout Brady’s career where he’s tallied a checkmark in the “W” column thanks to defense, a running game, or special teams play that has, quote-unquote, bailed him out. That’s how things work from time to time. Yet if you look across his entire career, and you find 230 regular-season wins (44 more than any other QB), and you find 33 playoff wins (17 more than any other quarterback), you at some point have to reckon with the fact that none of this is coincidental. Tom Brady’s teams win because Tom Brady is a winner. And when the person manning the most important position in team sports exudes that level of obsessive fixation on winning, well, the results speak for themselves. The indomitable drive is not necessarily something that can be quantified, but developing it is something Brady stated openly as a goal, way back when he was merely a one-time Super Bowl champion at age 24. “When you talk to all these people, you realize, ‘Now I know why this guy’s done what he’s done.’ You can see why. There’s a competitiveness, there’s a spirit about ’em,” Brady told NFL Films’ Steve Sabol in a now-legendary 2002 interview. “John Elway makes people feel like that. And he made his teammates feel like that, and his coaches. Everyone else believed in him, and everyone else was like, ‘Hey man, if I’m on your side, we’re gonna win.’ When you’re around people like that, you just kind of feel like, you know, man, I’m sitting next to the man.” Players can try with all their might to develop that natural presence. But really, you either have it or you don’t. Even at a young age, Brady had it. That’s how he earned a spot on Bill Belichick’s roster in 2000, and it’s why the head coach didn’t go back to the proven veteran with the record contract in 2001 after Drew Bledsoe recovered from his injuries. When a player has it, you don’t ignore it. You ride it for as long as humanly possible. Belichick and the Patriots rode it for 19 years. Through it all, the one constant has been Brady’s insatiable appetite for more. In that same Sabol interview, Brady shared his famous Michigan equipment manager story, a tale he has spun countless times thereafter. “I had an equipment manager in college, and he had been at Michigan for 25 years or so,” Brady said, starting a story you’ve surely heard by now.
