Patriots' Tom Brady Loves To Play Catch

By ESPN

(This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's February 6 Super Bowl Preview Issue. Read the whole story in that issue).

Tom Brady is addicted to playing catch. Ask any of his friends or teammates and they will testify to this. He loves playing catch the way some people love fly-fishing. It's a physical act that feels, at times, almost spiritual. He's not a snob about it. He'll happily play catch with his wife, his kids, his friends, with Hall of Fame receivers or with journeyman dreamers who barely sniffed the NFL.

At the start of the 2016 NFL season, when Brady began serving his four-game Deflategate suspension, he wasn't allowed to have contact with anyone on the Patriots, or anyone in the NFL. So he and his trainer, Alex Guerrero, came up with an idea. They reached out to Ryan McManus, a 5-foot-11 receiver who had played at Dartmouth. The Patriots had invited McManus to rookie camp in 2016 but ultimately cut him. Now he was working in marketing for a company selling robotic tackling dummies. McManus ran great routes and had great hands. He didn't have the prototypical NFL body, but he had the talent to keep Brady sharp. The chance to work out with Brady was the chance to keep his NFL dream, however improbable, alive. McManus couldn't say yes fast enough.

Brady shields his privacy, the byproduct of living most of his adult life in the fishbowl of modern fame, but it's hard to hide when you need a giant football field to really stretch out and launch rainbows. They picked a high school field in Brookline, Massachusetts, hoping to go mostly unnoticed. Someone captured one of their workouts on video, then slipped it to TMZ, offering us a glimpse into Brady's short stint in NFL exile. Guerrero watched as two men, at opposite ends of football's food chain, played catch in the September sun.

It is not luck, or accident, that Brady is the best 39-year-old quarterback of all time. What often feels mundane is actually the result of this kind of incalculable repetition. Even when forced to be away from the professional game for a month, Brady couldn't resist the comfort of the routine. Whether you view the man on that field in September as a cheat serving a long-deserved suspension, or a role model unfairly maligned in a league power struggle, the road to his record seventh Super Bowl began right there.

Brady has been called many things in his 17 seasons in the NFL: the Greatest Quarterback of All Time; the biggest celebrity in our most popular sport; a Cinderella story whose eventual departure will represent the end of an era. But perhaps the most interesting way to view him, in the late autumn of his career, is by acknowledging how improbable it is that he became the most reliable lightning rod in football, if not all of sports. He's a Rorschach test in shoulder pads, and we'll likely keep arguing about what he means long after he's gone. This is a hard concept for many New Englanders to accept, but you can, in just about any bar, office or classroom in America, start an argument over some aspect of his life: his legacy, his marriage, his ethics, his political views, his diet, his critics or even the behavior of his fanatical defenders.

As quarterback of the most successful NFL franchise of the modern era, Brady has crushed millions of hopes, one precisely thrown curl route at a time. It's only natural that Jets fans, Ravens fans and Dolphins fans (to name just a few) would harbor a normal, healthy enmity for the biggest lion in the Serengeti.

That isn't to say he hasn't brought some of it on himself. He is a magnet for schadenfreude. He has become, especially in recent years, one of the game's most ardent whiners when it comes to lobbying for flags. There is scarcely a back judge in the NFL who hasn't felt his verbal wrath after what he perceived to be a missed call. And while Peyton Manning and Aaron Rodgers have certainly unleashed their share of blistering screeds at Ed Hochuli and friends, when Brady does it, it seems to bug his peers more. "I've never seen any quarterback look to the referee right after he gets sacked more than Brady," Broncos defensive end Antonio Smith told reporters last year. "Every time he gets sacked, he looks at the ref like, 'You see him sack me? Was that supposed to happen? He did it a little hard. Please throw a 15-yard penalty on him. Get him fined.'"

Brady also isn't immune to getting caught up in the occasional dirty play. The Ravens were privately pissed in 2010 when Brady dove at Terrell Suggs' right knee while the linebacker was jogging well behind the play on a reverse. (The two have a history of mutual loathing.) They weren't thrilled again when, in the heat of the 2012 AFC Championship, Brady slid spikes-high into safety Ed Reed's thigh. Brady was fined $10,000 and later called Reed to apologize.

The animus goes deeper than that, though. What made some people so eager to pounce on Brady during Deflategate wasn't their desire to see the NFL strictly enforce a minor rule like the air pressure in every football. It was the desire to see Brady's carefully cultivated persona revealed as fraudulent. People delight in unearthing hypocrisy.

There is one important but mostly forgotten scene in the Deflategate mess. It came after the Patriots outfoxed the Ravens in the 2014 AFC divisional round, using only four offensive linemen and declaring one receiver ineligible to create confusion for the Ravens' defense. Brady threw for 367 yards and three touchdowns. Baltimore coach John Harbaugh was annoyed, feeling the Patriots had exploited a loophole in the rules. He predicted the league would make such tactics illegal in the offseason, and he was ultimately correct.

When informed of Harbaugh's comments, Brady couldn't resist offering a cheeky dismissal and twisting the knife. A smile spread across his face as he spoke. "Maybe those guys gotta study the rulebook and figure it out," Brady said. Within a week, someone -- the Ravens deny it was them -- turned that statement around on Brady. The Colts insisted the league check the PSI level in Brady's footballs during the AFC championship game, and leaks, allegations, depositions, lawsuits and mayhem followed. It was a kangaroo court, in a way, with the outcome barely taking into account the evidence. If there's one statement Brady would take back, it might be that dig about the rulebook.

Like so many Greek tragedies, it's the hero who sets his misfortune in motion with a glint of his own hubris.

Sunday, February 5

Super Bowl

Atlanta vs. Boston, 5:30 p.m. (FOX)