Belichick has become its own perverse attraction. He is not just his usual smirking, grunting crank, but something more here—a talking halitosis that you could actually see and (barely) hear. He exuded a kind of personality antimatter with its own gravitational pull.
At the previous year’s league meeting in Arizona, Belichick had shown up twenty minutes late, and his rudeness had triggered a small tantrum by the Daily News’ NFL writer Gary Myers (the brunt of which was felt by the Patriots PR shield Stacey James). Whether related or not, Belichick showed up more or less on time in Boca. He wore a light blue Johns Hopkins lacrosse hoodie and mumbled something at the outset in tribute to the just-retired Patriots linebacker Jerod Mayo. “We’re happy to add all the players that we’ve added,” Belichick said about some recent addition to the team. He slurped between words. (“When we’re out there, we’ll see how it goes.”) He smacked his lips. A reporter tried to place an NFL Network microphone in front of Belichick, which inspired his pièce de résistance of the morning and a viral video clip for the ages: Belichick moved the NFL Network mic as far as he could reach and then cleared away a bunch of tape recorders in front of him with his forearms.
Belichick’s valet Berj Najarian, who had been huddled with Schefter against a nearby wall, walked over at one point and placed a cup of icy water in front of the coach to warm him up. Finally, a Patriots beat reporter, Tom E. Curran of Comcast SportsNet New England, managed to get a small rise out of Belichick by asking where the coach’s breakfast rated on his list of favorite things to do. “It’s just part of the exciting week that is the NFL owners’ meeting,” Belichick said in a way that could be described as buoyant for him but deadpan for anyone else. Curran’s Comcast colleague Ray Ratto, a longtime Bay Area sportswriter, observed via Twitter that Belichick could have used his forty minutes more wisely by setting a league employee on fire. “Missed opportunity there,” Ratto lamented.
A few minutes later, Belichick stood up, threw his backpack over his right shoulder, latched on to Berj like a teddy bear, and departed the premises.
July 2014
What to make of Tom Brady?
The Patriots quarterback has been defined by competing narratives for years. Neither is that compelling except in their incompatibility. The first is the familiar against-the-odds construct: Brady as the not-great high school player, up-and-down college quarterback, and 199th pick in the draft who caught stardom out of nowhere. Now over two decades of dominating a league designed to thwart dominance, a second narrative has taken hold: Brady as fairy tale and anti-underdog. He might be the most envied man in America: he dated an actress (Bridget Moynahan, with whom he has a son), married, and had two children with a Brazilian supermodel. His net worth is well into the nine figures and he plays for a team that always wins.
Tom Brokaw, the legendary newsman, tells the story of going through cancer treatments a few years ago and generally feeling like crap. He would, on his daily walks through his Upper East Side neighborhood, pass a bus shelter adorned with Brady’s likeness on an ad poster for UGGs. “Fuck you,” Brokaw would make a point of saying to the poster. “It was less an attack on him and more a catharsis for me,” Brokaw explained, “but Brady was the perfect object.”
Being a sports fan, generally speaking, can require a faith both blind and durable. Being a Boston fan has made this easier, in some ways, with our gaudy prosperity of late (ten rings combined this century from the four Boston/New England teams—and yes, we’re counting). But the birthright is not without its embarrassments. You love your kids and try to be proud. Yet marrying my sports identity to glum, rude, and possibly devious characters like, say, Belichick can get exhausting. (I know, fuck me, Boston fans are tiresome enough without the self-pity routine.)
Brady’s cultivated elegance could also be a bit much. He is “that perfect blend of goofy and handsome that makes you feel simultaneously inadequate and superior,” wrote a car blogger named Matt Posky. Posky was disgusted upon learning that Brady had signed a lucrative endorsement deal with Aston Martin, the British luxury automaker preferred by Bond, James Bond. It is, apparently, a vehicle held most sacred among car bloggers (like this guy Matt Posky), and it was not just any Aston Martin car that Brady was hawking, but a DB11 model that sold for $215,000. Aston Martin’s partnership with Brady would be long-term, according to the company’s press release, and the campaign would emphasize the quarterback’s “affinity for the love of beautiful.”
It went on: “Brady will seek to share visualizations of where he sees beauty in his sporting moments, what he sees as beautiful in life, and what continues to compel him to pursue greatness.”
By contrast, Eli Manning has a deal with Toyota and Aaron Rodgers is a pitchman for Ford.
Even in his younger, underdog days, Brady was always a skewed fit with his townie worshippers. While he managed to exhibit his own kind of sheepish grace within the parochial madhouse of Boston sports, Brady could seem as far away as any athlete I’d ever rooted for. This went beyond the shout-in-the-canyon remove that investing emotionally in a pro athlete will always entail. He was one of those everywhere-but-nowhere people. He would write a celebrity self-help book, promote exotic diets, and get called the NFL’s answer to Gwyneth Paltrow. Who could identify with a man photographed in GQ holding a baby goat? Brady didn’t belong to any world I would ever know. It seemed unlikely I would get close enough to venture a guess.
Yet here was an email in my inbox. From the Greatest of All Time (GOAT). “Tom Brady here” it said in the subject heading.
This was, in retrospect, where my expedition into the NFL began: New York, July 2, 2014, a few weeks before the Patriots were scheduled to start training camp, relatively innocent days for the NFL Reality Show. Ray Rice had only been suspended two games at that point. No one had accused Brady of cheating, or knew that the air pressure in footballs was something anyone could care about. He had yet to lend his name, at least publicly, to any Aston Martins, TAG Heuers, or Donald Trumps.
I’d been trying to meet and write about Brady for a few years. It was a Hail Mary pursuit, I always figured, but at the very least, trying to get to him had become an occasional side project. About four years earlier, I had struck up a sporadic phone dialogue with Donald Yee, a sports agent in Los Angeles who had represented Brady since he entered the NFL in 2000. Yee had built his NFL clientele in part by signing up lower draft picks with marginal NFL prospects—the football equivalent of penny stocks. In that regard, Brady turned into a payoff for the ages.
Brady remained loyal to Yee through his career while Yee has, not surprisingly, clung to his asset like a toddler to a blankie. He fit no archetype of the hustler agent in the Jerry Maguire mold. And while being full of shit is an occupational hazard among sports agents, I found Yee to be full of shit in such counterintuitive and even refreshing ways that I took a liking to him.
Yee grew up in Sacramento as part of a Chinese American family that emigrated in the 1850s. His ancestors sold herbal medicines. In scouting talent, Yee told me that he looked for less traditional and “more Eastern” qualities in the college players he wished to attract. Those qualities included a mixture of quiet confidence, even temperament, and “outward tranquillity,” he said. (A more likely explanation is that Yee’s services were not in great demand among first-tier college prospects, so he took a flyer on a bargain-bin QB from the University of Michigan and got lucky as hell.)
I told Yee I was interested in writing about Brady even though I was not
