January 2, 2015
In the back of the sixth-floor lobby of NFL headquarters on Park Ave, every model of Super Bowl ring from the last half century is displayed in an ascending row. First to last, the rings tell a story of an institution that just keeps growing and becoming more difficult to turn away from.
They begin with a single diamond on a metal band that was awarded to Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers, winners of Super Bowl 1 (engraved 1966 WORLD CHAMPIONS). As the baubles progress, like one of those metamorphic diagrams of early humans evolving into supposedly higher life-forms, the finery keeps growing in size and splash. Garish fist ornaments have become the norm. Will there be a point where the rings escape their bounds, like bodies exceeding the mortal rules of a dangerous game?
Robert Kraft in particular has been at the forefront of this arms race. He has commissioned an increasingly large and gaudy collection of Super Bowl rings, nearly the size of golf balls at this point. They are the kinds of over-the-top knuckle ornaments Donald Trump would insist on (and indeed, he received a special one from Kraft).
“This latest Patriots Super Bowl ring is the largest Super Bowl ring ever created,” the team’s website boasts in an interminable description of the 10-karat white gold rocks that Kraft had made after his team won Super Bowl 51. Its 283 diamonds are more than double what New England had fixed within their rings in 2004 and 2005. More to the point, “283” was no accident. Kraft wanted the rings to commemorate how special this particular feat was, how his “family” overcame a late 28–3 deficit to stun the Falcons in Super Bowl 51. This is how billionaires do end-zone dances.
As a pure matter of taste, Coach Lombardi would never be caught wearing one of these modern accessories. By rule, as the decorum zebras would declare, Super Bowl rings do their best work out of sight. It is the fact that you won a Super Bowl ring, not the size or glare, that gives them their authority. “Do you have a ring or not?” is the only question that matters. If the answer is no, there can be a void in an otherwise celebrated career (Dan Marino, Jim Kelly); if yes, “how many?” is the natural follow-up. Jimmy Johnson, who coached the Cowboys to two championships and won a third at the University of Miami, christened his boat Three Rings. Same with Patriots coach Bill Belichick, until he was “forced” to rename his vessel Four Rings, and then Five Rings—and oh, the painting hassles he has had to suffer through, maybe the ultimate First World Problem for an NFL coach.
Tom Brady is often asked whether he has a favorite Super Bowl ring. The question refers not necessarily to the jewelry, but to the championship itself—whether one stands above the others. He has a standard duck for the “Which ring?” question. “The next one” is what Brady says he is focused on. It was that time of year again.
The Patriots had finished the season 12–4, the best record in the AFC, and had earned a playoff bye. Brady had resisted my occasional overtures to get together during the season, but the bye week gave us a window just after New Year’s.
Brady sent me an email with the address of his mansion in Brookline, which he was living in, though the home was not yet fully realized. But when I arrived at the address the security booth was vacant. The gate at the end of the driveway was locked and nothing happened when I pressed the intercom. My phone rang. A 617 number. Tommy! A second white security gate was not opening, I explained. He told me to press a bunch more buttons and talk into some intercom.
Finally, the gate opened and I maneuvered up his driveway. The quarterback was waiting for me on his front stoop. Brady asked me what happened when I pressed the intercom button. Nothing, I said. He shook his head with the exasperation of someone who still considered himself somewhat in the ballpark of being the regular guy whose front door in San Mateo was readily opened to those who knocked. I grew up a few miles, and tax brackets, from here a few decades ago, when it was not uncommon to see Larry Bird outside his unassuming Brookline home washing his car. Brady’s place is a fortress by comparison, not that anyone could blame him in these stalker paparazzi days.
He led me into a den that doubles as a gallery for his photos and mementos. There were no signs of any MVP or Super Bowl trophies. No Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year awards, no photos of Brady with the presidents and pope he has met. As athletes’ personal shrines go, this one was quite lame, which I respected. It’s not that Brady does not appreciate souvenirs. He saves end-zone pylons from big games. He kept a ball from his first Super Bowl victory and a pair of cleats from his second. He said he had no idea where they were. His wife took over the decorating after they moved from their brownstone in Back Bay in Boston the previous year and into this 14,000-square-foot manor.
Kraft lives around the corner, less than a five-minute walk. It was Kraft who suggested that Brady consider building in this opulent Chestnut Hill enclave when Brady expressed to him an interest in moving to the suburbs to raise his kids. Brady had preferred the bustle of city living and for years was one of the few members of the Patriots to actually live in Boston, despite the forty-minute commute to Foxborough.
The Brady-Bündchen estate sits on a five-acre plot that once belonged to Pine Manor College, a bucolic campus that used to be a two-year finishing school for rich girls when I was growing up. My understimulated high school friends and I used to try to sneak on campus to crash “college parties” there. As with many women’s colleges, the bored and undersexed adolescent boys in the area (e.g., me) were compelled to give the school a sexist nickname. “We used to call this place ‘Pine Mattress,’” I informed Brady, who chuckled knowingly enough to make it clear that the name had endured, though the college began admitting men in 2014.
Brady was sporting a brown playoff beard, a beige cardigan sweater, and, on his sockless feet, a new pair of UGGs, the Australian-made sheepskin boots that he endorses. There was supposedly a bin of UGGs for guests to wear around the house, but I was not so honored. Brady stood at the window and admired the view in the back. “It’s really fucking beautiful here, every morning,” Brady marveled. “The sun comes up and it’s fucking Zen-like.” (I could fucking imagine.)
Brady led me into a backyard adjacent to the country club, one of the oldest golf courses in the United States. Much of this 5.2-acre lot used to be a wooded area, so in order to build the estate, many trees had to come down, which broke Gisele’s green heart. Brady pointed to a barnlike guesthouse that was being built next to the backyard. “My wife calls that her sanctuary,” Brady said. They often repaired there for yoga and meditation.
Brady then turned back to the golf course. “Fucking beautiful,” he again declared of the view, and was then nearly chop-blocked by his pit-bull mix, Lua, who charged past him. As we reentered the house, I noticed a big glass menorah displayed on a shelf. Interesting. “What, are you Jewish?” I teased. “We’re not Jewish,” Brady clarified. “I think we’re into everything,” he continued. “I don’t know what I believe. I think there’s a belief system, I’m just not sure what it is.” After Brady won his third Super Bowl in 2005, he betrayed a wistful anticlimax in an interview with Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes. “Maybe a lot of people would say, ‘Hey, man, this is what it is, I’ve reached my goal,’” he told Kroft. “Me, I think, God, it’s got to be more than this.” I read this quote back to Brady, nearly ten years and zero Super Bowl victories later, and he laughed at his naïveté. “I got a litany of Bibles sent to me after that,” Brady told me. “When I think back on that, what a narrow perspective I had. I’m twenty-seven. I don’t know shit.”
People throw out numbers and ages: forty-two? forty-five? Brady was sitting in his den and becoming animated as he discussed the recent history of aging quarterbacks. John Elway, the Denver Broncos’ Hall of Famer, was then the oldest quarterback ever to win a Super Bowl, at thirty-eight. At forty-one, Brett Favre had a great year with the Vikings. “He threw that interception in the Saints game,” Brady said, recalling Favre’s mishap in the closing seconds of regulation time during the 2010 NFC Championship Game. Beyond that, there is no precedent for forty-something star quarterbacks. If Brady can perform at a high level until forty-three or forty-four, would he regard that as history making? “I think so, I think so,” he said quickly enough to make clear he’d considered this already.
What jumped to my mind was how hard it had been for Favre to let go. That spectacle was tough to watch: Favre’s agonizing, his retiring, the public tears and questioning of whether he was “guilty of retiring early”; the unretirement and the different teams (and the concussions and the memory loss and the painkillers and the dick pics). “God only knows the toll” concussions had on his brain, said Favre, who was sacked more times (525) than any quarterback in history.
It’s hard to picture Brady becoming a Favre-like spectacle. If Favre is raw and frontal, Brady is refined and reserved. Don Yee had called him “genially subversive.” I was fascinated by Brady’s resistance to “the system” that underpins the football industrial complex. He was one of the first public figures I’d encountered, and certainly a rare football player, who preached the power of therapy and meditation. He has attacked the junk food staples of so many American diets, made by companies that have spent zillions on advertising with the NFL. He called Coca-Cola “poison for kids” and mocked the notion that Frosted Flakes is “actually a food.” “We get brainwashed to believe that these things are just normal food groups,” Brady said.
Brady has also been fortunate. NFL referees protect quarterbacks like fine china. Linebackers don’t talk about playing into their forties like Brady does. The only one I could name off the top of my head was Junior Seau, and given how he ended up, he is not the best example of a football player “defying age” (Seau committed suicide in 2012, at forty-three, and a posthumous examination of his brain revealed extensive CTE damage).
Perhaps Brady will feel as if he can play forever right up to the moment he can’t. “I’ve been very lucky” was Brady’s recurring message to me when I again raised the issue of concussions. I took this to mean he had not had that many in his career, though it’s never a clean measurement. “Concussion” is a broad and imprecise term, Brady says, describing a wide range of head trauma. Very few of them ever get detected in the moment, let alone reported to doctors or the public. Brady and (especially) his family are more worried about the impact of head trauma than they let on. After seeing the film Concussion, Gisele told Tom he needed to retire. She was half serious, or more than half. But they laughed it off—or Tom did—and the moment passed.
Gisele would later speak out of school during an interview on CBS This Morning, claiming that her husband had suffered a concussion the previous season—even though nothing of it had appeared on any injury report. “We don’t talk about it,” Gisele had said. “But he does have concussions.” When Brady was asked later about his concussion history, he shut down the topic. “I really don’t think that’s anybody’s business,” he said. Well, yes, except that Brady is building a health and “lifestyle” business around the example of his perfectly pliable self. Also, Brady was about to make his TB12 “brain exercises” available to paying customers.
Privately, Brady has expressed faith in Guerrero’s ability to heal his brain. He will rave about his ability to “work” the area that a concussion will disturb—as if some massage technique could treat a brain injury. TB12 also features a customized program of mind and cognition exercises, as if concussions are just another ailment, like a pulled muscle, that can be avoided with the proper “prehab.” When Brady speaks of Guerrero, TB12, and their specialized “ways,” he can project the faith of a zealot, a sense of invincibility that goes beyond naïve and might veer into hubris.
Brady has compared playing football with “getting into a car crash every Sunday—a scheduled car crash.” I’ve heard players use this image before, and doctors who have treated football injuries. The first time I heard it was in 2001, after the Jets linebacker Mo Lewis smashed into then–starting quarterback Drew Bledsoe with an impact that sheared a blood vessel in Bledsoe’s chest, put him in the hospital, and sent Brady onto the field and into football history. Fate does follow its own fickle game plan; it would be hard to think better “prehab” could have saved Bledsoe from Mo Lewis.
I asked Brady if he worried that too much of his life was wrapped up in football. This was an odd question to ask of a football player. But Brady’s investment in the game has been so total for so long, I wondered whether his age-defying quest was driven by some fear of how futile it might be to find satisfaction in anything else. Brady ducked my question, except to confirm its premise: that football is pretty much everything to him. No real hobbies. “I’m not a musician, not an artist,” he said. “What am I going to do, go scuba diving?”
Football is not merely what he plays and what he does; “football is who he is,” Guerrero had told me. Who would Brady be when there was no football? Former players lament how nothing after measures up to its exhilaration and camaraderie. “The longer you play, the more you get used to the lifestyle, and you can lose touch with reality,” said Mark Murphy, a former defensive back for the Redskins who is now the CEO of the Packers. “You have to have a purpose in life.”
Brady’s parents worry about Tommy after football—what could ever fill the void? Brady’s answer to the void is to put it off for as long as possible. Why not treat his body and time as more competitions to win, and clocks to race and rings to chase? I tried to draw Brady further out on this, but his attention was audibled to something out the window. Four men were walking down his driveway and approaching his front door, part of a team working to finish work on his house. “Okay, I need to deal with these guys,” Brady said, and we were out of time.