Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times. Mark Leibovich
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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 a sportswriter. I was aware that Brady almost never did interviews. Yee said Brady preferred talking to people outside his usual field, so that was encouraging. It was also clear to me that Yee wanted me to think that he, himself, was more than just some fast-talking operator. The job of being a sports agent, Yee said in an interview with Sacramento’s Sactown magazine, allowed him to be “very creative in the sense that it’s very fun to try to procure a client that you have a big vision for and then see the client paint the picture.” Yee compared his work to “a white canvas” waiting to be realized. “Then I see what I would consider to be a beautiful painting. And then I try to find the person who can paint that.” I figured maybe I could humor Yee enough so that he might help me become a speck on the beautiful canvas of Tom Brady’s life.
Yee told me to keep in touch. We checked in every year or so. Yee once tried to pitch me on doing a magazine story on another of his clients, an extreme wheelchair athlete I’d never heard of (Aaron “Wheelz” Fotheringham) who I guess is a big deal in “the extreme wheelchair” space. Then, a few days before the Fourth of July weekend in 2014, Yee called out of the blue and asked me if I wanted to grab lunch with Brady in New York the following Wednesday. Uh, sure, I said, I would do my best to be available, maybe move a few things around.
I made reservations at a restaurant in SoHo called The Dutch. Brady approved, via Yee, which I took as an affirmation of my class and refinement. But then Yee went dark and stopped answering my calls and emails for several days. Part of me wondered if I was being pranked. I took a train up to New York from my home in Washington on the night before the appointed Wednesday. Brady’s email was waiting for me when I woke up the next morning. He offered robotic pleasantries, as if the email were composed by Siri.
“Good morning,” it read. “I hope you’re having a good week.” We confirmed our lunch. But an hour later, I received another email from Brady. He said he wanted to call “an audible” (audible!) and asked if we could meet at his apartment instead of the restaurant. Sure, sure, I said. Where was that?
Twenty-third and Madison, Brady said.
I was in the cab on the way there when it occurred to me that any number of homes might be found at Twenty-third and Madison. So I emailed Brady back to ask for a more precise address.
“Hahaha, I wish I knew the address,” he replied.
Brady didn’t know his home address? Another point in favor of the prank theory. At the very least, Brady’s casual ignorance of this most basic personal data reinforced the notion that he did not dwell in the pedestrian realm of slobs who must remember street addresses. He wrote back that he lived in the only skyscraper on the block, next to a McDonald’s. Rupert Murdoch had apparently paid $57.25 million for four floors in the building.
I admit to having been nervous. In fact, I don’t recall being this nervous before interviewing anyone in my entire career—and I’ve interviewed presidents, a bunch of CEO and celebrity types, and even the guy who used to host The Apprentice. Sports pedestals are funny that way. Athletes often constitute our earliest objects of allegiance. Staying starstruck is an indulgence of our arrested developments, even for jaded middle-aged reporters—sweaty ones, in this case.
This was one of those de-luxe apartments in the sky that the elevator opens directly onto and takes up the entire floor (forty-eighth). Brady stood waiting for me. He wore a newsboy cap, tan corduroys, and a V-neck sweater over a T-shirt (in retrospect, the newsboy cap was sort of ridiculous). He is six-foot-four and appears taller in person. That’s partly because it’s hard to determine a football player’s height when he is seen on TV surrounded by other large persons. But Brady also stands tall as a default posture. Nothing about him slouched.
My goal for this visit was to convince Brady to let me check in with him during the season for a magazine profile (and also, if I’m being honest, to become his best friend). His young son and daughter were running around. Brady introduced me to a nanny, whom he addressed as “babe.” He calls a lot of people “babe,” apparently, both male and female. He said “awesome” a lot.
We moved to a side parlor with a view of Midtown Manhattan. Brady left for a minute and then returned with a plate of almonds and water in two blue bottles. Gisele, I had read, had endorsed the supposed health benefits of spring water kept in blue bottles that are exposed to direct sunlight. “Yeah, she puts the bottles of water in the sun and it energizes or charges them or something,” Brady confirmed. I took a sip and felt myself energized.
We talked about football, about Boston, about the Bay Area, where Brady grew up (where I used to live) and the University of Michigan (which we both attended, ten years apart), and our kids (we both had three). It became evident that Brady and I were the same person and had lived the exact same life.
Brady kept talking about “taking care of my body,” “preparing for football,” and leading a life that would “optimize” his ability to endure an NFL season at “peak performance.” He mentioned “lifestyle choices” that he wanted to promote. He had started a health, fitness, and wellness enterprise—TB12—with his closest friend, personal guru, and “body coach,” a guy named Alex Guerrero. “TB12 is a way of life,” Brady said, increasingly giving off an infomercial vibe.
He was quite conspicuously pitching a new product—the product being the lifestyle that works for Tom Brady. Not only that, Brady is betting that TB12 would help him play longer and better than anyone else ever has. But this formula need not only be exclusive to superstar quarterbacks. It can work for you, too, whether you’re a weekend tennis player, would-be marathon runner, or just someone who’s willing to pay to be more like the quarterback for the New England Patriots. Brady would be the product’s chief lifestyle missionary and poster child.
On the surface, it all sounded straightforward; Brady and his friend Alex were starting a high-end gym and fitness program. But he was also trying to convey something loftier here. He was determined to subvert the expectations of how long a superstar quarterback could play like one.
“The decisions that I make, about what to eat and what to drink and when to sleep, those are choices not everyone wants to make,” he said. “They’re