Tom Brady’s Endgame
There is a certain YouTube clip that I watch from time to time, when I need a pick-me-up, or when I’m in a giddy mood and want to push it further—to the upper reaches of euphoria. The video, from 2018, is titled “Eagles strip sack on Tom Brady - Local Announcers / Multiple Languages,” and it captures seven seconds from the fourth quarter of Super Bowl LII, as witnessed by stunned sportscasters across the globe. On one side were the New England Patriots, led by the clutch quarterback Brady and coached by Bill Belichick, a partnership that had produced five Super Bowl rings. On the other were the hobbled Philadelphia Eagles, my home team, with a second-string quarterback named Nick Foles (Carson Wentz, the team’s top draft pick from 2016, had been sidelined by a torn A.C.L.) and a coach, Doug Pederson, who had previously only ever been in charge of a high-school team (which never won a state championship during his tenure). As Brady gets ready to throw, in what most presumed would be a game-winning drive, it happens. The Eagles defender Brandon Graham fends off a Patriots offensive lineman, reaches his left hand out, and knocks the ball loose from Brady’s grip. “Fuhmble! Fuhmble!” the announcers in Germany scream. “Incroyable,” the French commentators say. “Tom Brady bereft on the turf,” the Australians observe of the legendary quarterback, who by then was sitting on the field in shock.
It is a testament to Brady that whenever I watch this clip I feel a touch nervous. If anyone could break open the space-time continuum to retrieve a loose ball and connect with the tight end Rob Gronkowski for a first down, it would be him. By the time he retired, in 2023, Brady had seven Super Bowl rings, the most of any player in the game’s history; his first came in 2002, his last, two decades later. He seemed immune from time itself, as though he were part god. That the quarterback who first found the Patriots’ Achilles’ heel in a Super Bowl was Eli Manning—the younger, bumbling brother of football’s true prince, Peyton Manning—added to the sense that Brady could only be taken down by an accident of fate. After Super Bowl LI, when Brady’s jersey was stolen from a locker room, the Patriots’ owner, Robert Kraft, compared the heist to “taking a great Chagall or Picasso.”
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As if all that weren’t enough, in 2009, Brady married Gisele Bündchen, a woman for whom the moniker “supermodel” was deemed insufficient. New York magazine dubbed the Brazilian glamazon, who has a reported net worth of four hundred million dollars and twelve hundred magazine covers on her résumé, an “Über-model.” She frequently posted photos of herself on social media doing yoga on the beach, like Forbes’s richest water sprite. After the Eagles converted Brady’s fumble into the franchise’s first Super Bowl victory, she congratulated every player in green she saw on her way out, leaving them so awestruck it was a wonder that the Patriots hadn’t sent her into the tunnel before the game instead. And she wasn’t just beautiful; she was warm and whimsical. Bündchen, who had two children with Brady, told People magazine, “My kids never got sick when I was breastfeeding. If they had something in their eyes, I’d put milk in their eyes.” She was, you might say, the ultimate catch.
And so it has fascinated observers of football and celebrity marriages alike that, when Bündchen nudged her husband to retire, after he won his fifth Super Bowl ring, in 2017, he did not go one further and set Gillette Stadium on fire. Brady did eventually retire, in February of 2022, only to “unretire” forty days later. By August, the couple were living apart, according to tabloid reports. By October, they were divorced. That winter, Brady said that he was retiring “for good.”
Since then, his image has taken a harder hit than any he endured on the field. He popped out of a coffin in a cheesy W.W.E.-inspired skit at Fanatics Fest. He appeared in a Pizza Hut commercial shouting, “Hut!” (Get it?) His attempts to be an on-air sports analyst have underwhelmed. “As a broadcaster, Tom Brady isn’t just Capt. Obvious,” the former Fox Sports commentator Skip Bayless tweeted. “He’s the Commander in Chief of Obvious.” Brady has become a punch line, and the jokes always seem to circle back to his split with Bündchen. One fan referred to his post-retirement antics as “divorced dad side quests.” In Netflix’s 2024 “Roast of Tom Brady,” the comedian Kevin Hart said, of Brady’s final season, “When you got a chance to go 8–9, and all it will cost you is your wife and your kids, you gotta do what the fuck you gotta do.”
Still, I didn’t expect “Brady: An American Story and the Price of Greatness,” a new biography by the former Sports Illustrated journalist Lars Anderson, to tell the story of Touchdown Tom’s life through the prism of his divorce. The book—surprisingly intimate despite the fact that Anderson didn’t have access to the golden couple—reads like “Scenes from a Marriage” with a lot more blitzing. It opens with Bündchen and Brady’s first date, in 2006, at the West Village wine bar Turks & Frogs. Anderson writes with exactly the amount of restraint you’d expect of a man whose subjects are a football legend and a Victoria’s Secret model, which is to say—he leaves every metaphor on the field. That night, Bündchen’s eyes were “the mossy green of a primeval forest” while Brady’s were “the glacial blue of a winter sky.” Over drinks, he tells her that he intends to play for ten more years and would be happy to win just one more Super Bowl. Anderson tries to understand why, in the end, Brady couldn’t stick to the game plan, even when the woman whose teeth “glistened with the flawless geometry of freshly fallen snow” asked him to.
The quarterback who averaged a 64.3-per-cent completion rate over his career was almost never born. His father, Tom Brady, Sr., had studied to become a priest. Born in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in 1944, he left home at fourteen to attend a seminary in Chicago, but, Anderson forewarns, he had “wandering, lustful eyes.” A Latin instructor urged him to reconsider his path: “Mr. Brady, you ought to propagate the faithful, not propagate the faith.” Brady’s mother, Galynn Johnson, had grown up on a dairy farm in Minnesota; in high school, she was a cheerleader. In 1968, Johnson was twenty-two, working as a flight attendant for Trans World Airlines, and living in San Francisco, when, one day, there was a knock at the door. It was Brady, Sr., then a travelling insurance salesman. The two soon married and moved to San Mateo, where they had three girls—Maureen, Julie, and Nancy—and then a boy, Thomas Edward Patrick Brady, Jr., born on August 3, 1977.
By most measures, Brady’s childhood was idyllic. (On Google Street View, the home where he grew up resembles, fittingly, the house from “The Brady Bunch.”) But Anderson paints a picture of a boy living in the shadow of his athletic-superstar sisters. Maureen made the U.S. Junior Olympic softball team, Julie was a starter on her college’s soccer team, and Nancy won a softball scholarship to Berkeley. In contrast, Brady was scrawny, slow, and repeatedly picked last for games. Maureen later recalled to the Eagle-Tribune a time when “some boys were throwing a football around our street and they told Tommy to go deep. He ran all the way down the street waiting for the football and they turned around and left.”
Tom, Sr., stepped in. When Brady began playing football in high school, his father hired the head coach at the College of San Mateo to train him. He also enlisted a video editor to create a sizzle reel for college scouts. In December of 1994, Billy Harris, who was on the coaching staff at the University of Michigan, noticed a “mystery tape” on his desk. He was used to receiving film from high-school coaches, but this had been mailed from a residential address. Harris hadn’t heard of Brady. “Nobody on the recruiting trail was mentioning him,” he told the Athletic in 2020. The university recruited Brady only after its top pick, Bobby Sabelhaus, pulled out at the last minute. (Sabelhaus, who never played in the N.F.L., is now a real-estate agent in Nantucket.)
At Michigan, Brady began as the seventh-string quarterback. “The coaches don’t believe in me,” he told Greg Harden, a counsellor in the athletic department. “You’re right, they don’t,” Harden said, before offering a mantra: “If it was to be, it was up to me.” Brady became a relentless preparer. He did one drill, wherein he would drag his planted foot after throwing the ball, so many times that the nail on his big toe came off. His senior year, during a nationally televised game against Notre Dame, Michigan was trailing at halftime. The coach, Lloyd Carr, replaced the team’s hot-shot sophomore quarterback with Brady. The crowd let out a “wave of boos,” Anderson writes, “the instant his cleats hit the grass.” Brady responded with a fourth-quarter, game-winning comeback.
His ability to produce in big moments was one of the “intangibles” the newly hired Patriots coach Bill Belichick kept seeing in scouting reports. The tangibles were less stellar. At a scouting combine ahead of the draft, Brady had registered the second-slowest forty-yard dash for a quarterback in the event’s history; one coach complained that he looked “more like a damn aluminum siding salesman than a professional quarterback.” The night of the 2000 N.F.L. draft, as the sixth round began, Brady was lying in bed beside his father in his childhood home, realizing that he might never play professional football. Then a call came. The Patriots were selecting him in that round, at No. 199. (Only one Super Bowl-winning quarterback had ever been drafted lower.)
According to Anderson, a key part of the Patriots’ winning formula was Brady’s sense that Belichick had plucked him from obscurity. Anderson quotes Lee Smith, who briefly played alongside Brady in 2011; if Brady had been a first-round pick, Smith suggested, “he could have told Belichick to kiss his ass whenever he’d jump on him. But instead Tom had to impress Belichick.” He went on, “And when your star player is walking on eggshells around the head coach, everyone on the team is doing the same thing, which is what Belichick wanted.” Brady’s history of being undervalued helped him bond with the offensive linemen, who are often treated more like equipment than people, bodies there to protect the brains, i.e., the quarterback. “He’s one of us,” the offensive tackle Clint Oldenburg said during Brady’s first season.
It helped that Brady’s teammates saw him put in the work. One morning, the Patriots safety Rodney Harrison thought that he had finally beaten Brady to the gym by arriving at 5:30 a.m., only to find him watching film in a meeting room and jotting down notes. “Good afternoon. Did you enjoy sleeping in?” Brady asked Harrison, grinning. In Anderson’s hands, scenes like this read as foreshadowing the marital discord to come, as does a sound bite he includes from the documentary “Tom vs. Time”: “If you compete against me, you better be willing to give up your life, because I’m giving up mine,” Brady says.
In 2002, during his second season, Brady became the youngest quarterback to win a Super Bowl, leading the Patriots to a 20–17 finish over the St. Louis Rams. They won again in 2004, and yet again in 2005. (I watched the latter game, against a Donovan McNabb-led Eagles team, through tears.) With fame came curiosity about his personal life—“His favorite color was blue. He really, really loved onion rings,” Anderson writes—and new opportunities. He shadowboxed Muhammad Ali at a charity event. He made a cameo in the Farrelly brothers’ film “Stuck on You” at the urging of the Patriots fan and Boston native Matt Damon. He judged the 2002 Miss U.S.A. pageant in Gary, Indiana. Donald Trump, the pageant’s owner, told the press, “Let me tell you, if one thing stands out about Tom Brady, it’s that he loves those women. And guess what? They love him, too.” That hadn’t been true before; Brady’s teammates, who recalled his failed attempts to pick up women at Boston bars, were taken aback when, during a flight on a private jet to Hawaii for the Pro Bowl, a call came from the “American Pie” actress Tara Reid’s personal assistant, asking whether Brady would like to take Reid out on a date.
Fame also brought out Brady’s quirks. He began working with a “body coach” named Alex Guerrero, whom his teammates referred to as “Mr. Miyagi” from the film “The Karate Kid.” The two developed a strict diet-and-exercise regimen that became known as the TB12 Method. Brady abstained from sugar, caffeine, refined flour, dairy, and “nightshades,” a food group that includes tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant. He began to experiment with fashion. When mocked in the locker room for carrying what looked like a woman’s purse, he yelled back, “It’s a European handbag!” He filled his locker with cologne and aromatic emollients. “I’ve never seen too many Caucasian brothers with cocoa butter,” his teammate Deion Branch told USA Today at the time. The Patriots wide receiver Wes Welker said, at a press conference, “He’s probably the toughest metrosexual I’ve ever come across.”
Like David Beckham before him, Brady needed a partner who could understand highlights and the spotlight. In December, 2006, Brady, freshly broken up with the “Sex and the City” actress Bridget Moynahan, received a call from Ed Razek, the chief marketing officer of Victoria’s Secret. (Razek was the subject of a 2020 investigation by the New York Times into sexual harassment at the lingerie company; he denied all wrongdoing.) Razek told Brady that he had a “girl version” of the star quarterback. Razek also called Bündchen—whose five-year, on-and-off relationship with Leonardo DiCaprio had come to an end—to say that he had a “boy version” of her. By January, Bündchen was smitten enough to attend her very first game of American football, a playoff matchup with the San Diego Chargers. (In the 2021 ESPN+ documentary “Man in the Arena: Tom Brady,” she admitted, “It was the most boring thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I was, like, ‘What are they doing? Why do they stop all the time? Where is the goal?’ ”) A month later, they were vacationing together in France. While there, Brady received a call from Moynahan. She was pregnant. Anderson takes pains to back up Brady’s claim that things were over with Moynahan by the time he met Bündchen at Turks & Frogs, writing, “A certified obstetrics nurse estimated that, based on the infant’s being born at forty weeks, the date of conception would have been close to November 29, 2006, at least two weeks before Brady’s blind date with Gisele.” That summer, Brady’s first child was born.
Bündchen and Brady were married in a small ceremony in Santa Monica in February of 2009, followed by a vow renewal two months later in Costa Rica. “Each guest was gifted a copy of Don Miguel Ruiz’s pop-psychology guide The Mastery of Love about overcoming emotional wounds,” Anderson notes.
Brady was completely under her spell. “You’re lucky you married a witch,” she told him. She gave him “protection stones,” altars for his locker, and new mantras to chant. She “concocted special liquid drops he’d release into his mouth,” Anderson recounts. (We never learn what’s in them.) Brady’s enemies were hers, and, unlike him, she could drink on game day. After the Patriots lost to the New York Giants in Super Bowl XLVI, she was heckled by fans who shouted, “Eli owns your husband!” Bündchen, “emboldened by a glass or two of wine,” Anderson writes, shot back, “My husband cannot fucking throw the ball and catch the ball at the same time.” Her retort made headlines around the world. “I thought I was, like, mild—what I said,” she recalls in “Man in the Arena.” “I mean, it’s true.”
She stood by her husband through Deflategate—Brady’s only major scandal, in which it was discovered that the Patriots were using balls with less air than N.F.L. guidelines required—even when it drew unwanted attention to her. The New York Post ran a front-page story titled “COVERUP!”; alongside a picture of Brady, it featured a paparazzi photo, allegedly of Bündchen disguised in a burqa as she entered a Parisian plastic-surgery clinic. Like him, she could stay calm in the pocket. “She is always looking at, you know, the positive side of everything,” Brady’s oldest sister, Maureen, said. “She always says, ‘Why is this happening for me?,’ not ‘Why is this happening to me?’ ” She also helped in material ways. The Patriots were able to surround Brady with an unusual level of talent because he could accept a salary below that of other élite quarterbacks. “My wife makes a lot of money,” he told Jimmy Kimmel.
I’m a fan of books about sports. (I once almost created a podcast on the subject; I planned to call it “The Bookie.”) The best ones situate athletes in history. Buzz Bissinger’s “Friday Night Lights” is about high-school football the way that the documentary “Hoop Dreams” is about basketball. Both capture the shrinking aperture of opportunity in a country founded on the idea of limitless possibility. David Maraniss’s “Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe” considers how the Native American football legend wrestled with what it meant to be “all-American.”
The ambitions of Anderson’s book are slight by comparison, its stakes those of a preseason game. Brady is a man who began playing professionally at the dawn of a new millennium, but you wouldn’t know it here. In his era, the football field became the site of a bold act of protest against racial injustice, yet the name Colin Kaepernick does not appear once. (In 2017, Brady did not join his teammates who kneeled during the national anthem, though he did lock arms with others, in a small show of solidarity.) Anderson rushes through Brady’s relationship with Donald Trump. In 2015, a week after a MAGA hat had been spotted in Brady’s locker by reporters, he said that he hoped Trump would win. “There would be a putting green on the White House lawn,” he quipped. (The next year, when an Instagram user asked if Bündchen and Brady supported Trump, she responded, “NO!,” and Brady skipped the Patriots’ White House visit after winning the Super Bowl in 2017, citing “personal family matters.”)
We hear about Brady’s teammate Aaron Hernandez being arrested for homicide, but Anderson doesn’t bring up the player’s subsequent suicide or the autopsy finding of Hernandez’s severe case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The closest we get to any discussion of C.T.E. comes from Bündchen. “He had a concussion last year,” she said to Charlie Rose in 2017. “He has concussions pretty much every—I mean, we don’t talk about it, but he does have concussions. And I don’t really think it’s a healthy thing for your body to go through. . . . I’m planning on having him be healthy and do a lot of fun things when we’re, like, a hundred, I hope.” It was a shocking claim, as there was no record of head trauma on any of Brady’s injury reports, which would have required that he comply with the N.F.L.’s concussion protocol; her allegation prompted an inquiry by the league.
There’s no sense in Anderson’s book that Brady is a man of our age, except in the worst possible ways. Brady could choose when to retire, but some of his own fans were deprived of that option. Michael Livieratos, a Patriots supporter, put his life savings into FTX after seeing his hero promote the cryptocurrency firm. (Sam Bankman-Fried paid Brady fifty-five million dollars for sixty hours of promotional work, and Gisele eighteen million to appear alongside her husband.) No, the big question of the book seems to be this: Can a man really claim that he’s won it all if he fumbled Gisele? I must confess I took some pleasure in seeing a man subjected to the narrative that the end of his marriage is a life-defining moment, his most important story. If he were a woman, this book would be a best-selling memoir.
Anderson, noting that Bündchen’s star sign is Cancer, quotes an astrological report from the summer before their divorce that appeared in Cosmopolitan: “Honest, raw conversations will be necessary as power struggles and hidden agendas are exposed. This is your opportunity to transform the dynamics in your closest ties.” When Brady arrived at training camp ahead of that year’s season, the coaching staff found him “gaunt and cadaverous,” Anderson writes. In 2025, a little more than three years after their split, it was reported that Bündchen had married her jujitsu instructor, Joaquim Valente. Soon after the news broke, Brady posted a selfie on Instagram from a car, wearing a sweatshirt that read “Forever Young,” with the song “1-800-273-8255,” by Logic, playing in the background, the title a reference to the national suicide-prevention hotline.
In the end, it’s Bündchen’s objections to Brady’s insatiable desire for more—more rings, more wins, more record-breaking—that give the book its heft. Brady retired at forty-five, when he was the oldest starting quarterback in N.F.L. history. He played his final seasons with Tampa Bay, which I could understand; perhaps he hoped to prove that he could win a Super Bowl without Belichick, and he did. But he wanted another, and another—which does, one could argue, tie him to this moment in our country, when no quest for more feels out of bounds. In “Tom vs. Time,” Bündchen tells the camera that football was her husband’s first love. “And I think it’s, like, his main love, really,” she adds. Brady jokes that if she had it her way, after his Super Bowl LI victory the pair would have moved to Costa Rica, where as of late she has been photographed walking hand in hand along the beach with Valente. She was done with this “American story.” How many more times could she say, Enough, you already have enough. ♦