Tom Brady doesn’t retire, he just stops playing

The NFL’s most handsomely gilded career has ended, at age 44, after 22 seasons and an astonishing seven Super Bowl titles, but it won’t be the last we see of Tom Brady.

Tom Brady Picture: AFP

Tom Brady stops, it turns out!

It really did seem like he might play forever. There were moments when it appeared this ageing former underdog from San Mateo, California, would shatter every remaining expectation about athletic longevity.

Super Bowl champion at 24. Five more Super Bowls – and then a final one last year, at age 43. Brady mocked all accepted, earthly timelines. He no longer had the game’s strongest arm, and he always ran like a mailbox, but he was an infomercial for defiant senior stamina – Jack LaLanne in Under Armour cleats.

I thought there was at least a 12 per cent chance he’d be playing decades from now. I’d be sitting there with my great-grandchildren, regaling them about Brady’s early days with the New England Patriots, and one of the kids would pipe up: Great-grandpa, what was Tom Brady really like as a quarterback?

And I would reply: What was he like? Kiddo, Tom Brady’s got a game this afternoon. He’s 88 years old – and barely looks 39.

It won’t happen, alas. Football’s most handsomely gilded career has ended, at age 44, after 22 seasons and an astonishing seven Super Bowl titles.

Tom Brady guided his teams to seven Super Bowl wins – six with New England Patriots, one with Tampa Bay Buccaneers Picture: Getty Images

Brady’s poorly-disguised retirement rippled out over the weekend, and was finally confirmed Tuesday. It felt both unsurprising and strange to comprehend. A hyper-focused, nutritionally-monkish football icon will step aside for a fresh chapter of free Sundays, sleeping in, and maybe even a few empty carbohydrates.

That Brady walks away on his own terms is a final defiant act. Football players don’t often get to decide when their careers end. Football decides it for them. It’s a punishing game, cruel to bodies and brains, and only the most fortunate are allowed to gracefully exit as Brady does here, still shining at the peak of his powers. This is a bigger blessing than any of those gaudy rings that clutter his hands.

Perhaps Brady’s greatest achievement in the NFL is to retire in good health Picture: AFP

His legacy? Fairly endless. Two decades in the sport gave Brady time to play every role. He was the overlooked Wolverine. He was Foxborough’s fresh breath of air. He was admired. Imitated. Feared. Despised. Respected. Awed. He was the afterthought, the surprise, the phenom, the star, the enemy, the beloved, the embattled, the misunderstood, the veteran, the geezer, and finally, the undisputed GOAT. Greatest of All Time is the most irritatingly over-deployed acronym in sports, but Brady fits the bill.

There’s nothing left to prove. There hasn’t been anything for Brady to prove for a good, long while, but that didn’t keep him from keeping on, even past his stunning farewell from Bill Belichick and New England. That Buccaneers coda was a triumph: a Super Bowl in Year One, and right to the edge of another run in Year Two. At an age when he should have been tossing Little League batting practice, Brady led the NFL in passing yards and touchdown throws. A couple of weeks ago, he brought the Bucs back from 27-3 vs. the Rams. He didn’t diminish one bit.

Brady was loved, loathed, feared and admired throughout his career but is the NFL’s greatest ever quarterback Picture: Getty Images

It feels like he’s always been here. And yet the inner person remains a mild mystery. Brady kept himself buttoned up in New England, embodying the Grumpy Lobster Boat Captain’s stern, team-first code, and it was only in the Florida sun that he began to loosen up … to a point. This summer, I interviewed Brady one-on-one, and his rhetorical jukes remained crisp. Brady’s a Jedi of answering questions in precisely the careful, manicured way he wants to answer them – to deliver the essence of a Tom Brady experience, without offering a heap of the Tom Brady inside.

Who can argue the technique? It worked for him, and outside of the comical frenzy of Deflategate, for which Brady got a four-game suspension, he stayed out of trouble. The strict diet, exercise regimens and pliability massages were fodder for lots of jokes, but they also appeared to work. Brady aged like a Bond, though without the martinis. I wonder if, out of football, he’ll embrace a fatherly pot belly, start leaving his dress shirts untucked, and wear rubber gardening clogs to the hardware store. Somehow, I doubt it.

Brady with his wife Gisele Bundchen in 2019 Picture: Getty Images

How will his playing days be remembered? Take your pick, the list is long. If you rooted against the Patriots – or, more specifically, Brady’s Patriots routinely removed your heart and punted it out the window – he made you scream into the night. If you rooted for the Patriots, you probably have a child named for him, or at least a pet.

The span of his career is outrageous. There are plenty of Brady fans – plenty of recent teammates, too – who don’t remember the Michigan platoons, his flabby combine, the draft day demotion, the Drew Bledsoe injury succession, or the iffy Tuck Rule versus the Raiders in the snow. Lots of fans hopped aboard the Brady Experience along the way. Just as there are older Brady fans from New England who can recall the grisly, pre-Brady, pre-Belichick, pre-Bledsoe wilderness, there are young Bucs fans who will remember Brady strictly in pirate flags and pewter.

He won’t fade from memory now. Brady’s been a constant in the public eye, the athlete-as-celebrity if there’s ever been one, with a supermodel mogul spouse, Gisele Bündchen, and a pretty place among the stylishly admired. Brady wants to sell you clothes now, and plenty of other stuff. He wants you to be healthy. He wants you to be fashionable. I bet we start meeting the inner Brady more, and he’ll have a lot more colourful stuff to say. He won’t be a stranger. Tom Brady isn’t playing football, but he probably stays forever.

The Wall Street Journal