Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times. Mark Leibovich
from the Bahamas. He could become quite animated on the topic of how disgusting T and G’s diets were. “Not only can I not eat that stuff, I can’t even look at it,” he told me. I instantly loved Tom Senior, who refers to himself as “the Original Tom Brady.” He was as emotional as his son was cool, which made him a much easier read. A self-employed insurance salesman specializing in high-net-worth clients, Tom Senior spent seven years in a Catholic seminary before deciding the priesthood was not for him. He and his wife of nearly fifty years, Galynn, still live in the same house in San Mateo where his son grew up. The Bradys had three daughters, who would all become star athletes. “It was a crazy girl environment,” Mr. Brady recalled to me. “We’d have periods going on every single week.” Tommy came along last, and father and son would become unusually close.
“Tommy was my best friend,” said Mr. Brady, who started taking his son on golf outings at the age of three. When Brady chose to go far away for college, to Michigan, his father was devastated. “I had to go into counseling,” he said. After a few days, father and son convened in the living room for a tête-à-tête. They held hands. “I was crying like a baby and said, ‘Tommy, this is going to change our relationship,’ ” he recalled. “And he said: ‘Dad, I know. It has to.’ ”
Tom the son also sought professional help when he landed in Ann Arbor. Therapy was hardly the norm in the hypermasculine culture of Michigan football, but Brady sought it out with his father’s encouragement. “I went into counseling when I was in seminary for two and a half years because I come from a very dysfunctional alcoholic family,” Tom Senior told me. “Galynn and I, when we got married, we did a lot of marriage encounter sessions. It helped a lot. There’s a stigma in our society around counseling. I wanted to make sure Tommy wasn’t held back by that when he needed it.” At Michigan, Tom became close to Greg Harden, a counselor who worked with the university’s athletes. “Greg kind of sought me out,” Tom said. “I looked like this vulnerable guy that maybe he thought he could have an influence on.” Harden operated “outside the system,” Brady said. “Those are the people I want to learn from. Now, do I take every nugget of information that someone gives, no, but there’s a lot that’s applicable to me.”
Much of Brady’s career as a Wolverine was defined by the oft-told saga of how he was never named the team’s starting quarterback. Even as he apparently had earned the job his senior year, head coach Lloyd Carr made him split time with elite recruit Drew Henson. Decades later, Tom Brady Sr. remains quick to anger on the subject of his only son’s getting “totally screwed over” by the Michigan coaches. “I have Irish Alzheimer’s,” Mr. Brady said, not a clinical term. “I forget everything but the grudges.” He added that he retains a nagging desire to “punch Lloyd Carr in the nose.”
At the end of July, I met Tom and Galynn in Orange County, where they had traveled from their Bay Area home to watch one of their granddaughters play in a softball tournament. We met in the lobby of the Best Western Hotel at John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, their base for the weekend. Mr. Brady offered me a platter of fruit, eggs, and bacon that he had piled up from the breakfast buffet. He had a free voucher that he said must not go to waste—so I was a good soldier and cleaned the plate before it was time to head to the softball game.
I would follow Mr. Brady to the field in my rental car. Galynn offered to ride with me. She was raised in rural Browerville, Minnesota, and worked for a time as a flight attendant for TWA back when they were still called “stewardesses.” TWA did not allow their flight attendants to be married or to have children, so she eventually had to quit to be wedded to Tom.
Mr. Brady peeled out of the parking lot of the Best Western, leaving me struggling to follow behind him. He drove fast and sped up at yellow lights, forcing me to run red ones. It would be really bad if I got into an accident, I kept reminding myself—especially with Tom Brady’s mom in the car; I would never forgive myself and neither would Tommy, and it might damage our blossoming friendship. I slowed down and stopped trying to follow Mr. Brady, and his still-living wife and I managed to find the field on our own. We arrived without incident to find Mr. Brady waiting for us, having already laid out three lawn chairs next to a cooler of beer at 10:30 a.m.
“BEWARE THE PISSED OFF PRETTY BOY”
October–November 2014
I have a favorite old quote about Washington, D.C., from Senator Thomas Gore, a progressive Democrat from Oklahoma who served in the 1930s (and was grandfather of the acerbic writer Gore Vidal). With its architectural grandeur, Senator Gore said, our capital would someday “make wonderful ruins.” I have similar thoughts sometimes when I approach a gleaming twenty-first-century football stadium. Stadiums constitute the true measure of an NFL owner. Or “stadia,” to use the plural form the league will often deploy when discussing “venues.” The NFL loves anything that evokes Rome—e.g., Roman numerals for Super Bowls, never mind what happened to Rome.
The vast buildings rise like monuments to a market legitimized as sufficiently Big League to deserve an NFL franchise. And then you imagine these coliseums abandoned one day, as “wonderful ruins” for anyone studying the passions and priorities of a civilization after it falls. This is not a complete fantasy in certain “markets”: the Houston Astrodome, billed as the Eighth Wonder of the World when it opened in 1965, now sits forsaken in the shadow of the Houston Texans’ lustrous NRG Stadium; Detroit’s 80,000-seat Silverdome opened in 1975, was deserted after it closed in 2006, and has suffered a spectacular public decay ever since (a YouTube video of the trashed fossil in 2014 is a haunting thing to behold).
As I pursued Brady, I made my first ever trip to Gillette Stadium, the Patriots’ home since 2002. In week five of the 2014 season, I flew to Boston from D.C. and drove south to Foxborough to see the Patriots host the unbeaten Cincinnati Bengals (4–0) in a Sunday Night Football game. Patriot Place, as the larger complex is called, rises along a could-be-anywhere blotch of car dealerships, billboards, and fast-food franchises on Route 1 between Boston and Providence. No one lives at Patriot Place.
Robert Kraft described Gillette to me as a “diversified” stadium, meaning that it offers fans a diversified menu of ways (shopping, dining, game tickets) to be separated from their money. Because football is such a perfect TV sport, in both production and ratings, teams must offer extracurricular attractions to entice ticket buyers; only 7 percent of NFL fans have ever attended a game live.
People outside New England who experience Foxborough as a recurring set of the NFL TV studio might believe the town is a quaint village of greens, Revolutionary War monuments, and assorted Ye Olde tropes. Returning from commercial breaks, networks reinforce this Disneyfied version of New England with stock shots of a steeple, a cider mill, maybe a landmark in Boston, which is a forty-minute drive away. A huge replica of a lighthouse looms over the north end zone, though you’re as likely to see a real lighthouse in inland Foxborough as you are an actual Minuteman strolling through Harvard Square. In real life, Gillette Stadium is a concrete football Oz that reeks of merchandise, corporate sponsorships, and winning. Fans of the team have witnessed an astounding run of fifteen consecutive ten-win seasons by the Patriots; the stadium has sold out every game since Kraft bought the team in 1994, including pre- and postseason games. I’d still much rather watch on TV.
I arrived a few days before the game and paid a visit to Guerrero in his TB12 lair at Patriots Place. Guerrero, who was forty-nine at the time, is a practicing Mormon of Argentine descent with a master’s degree in Chinese medicine from a college in Los Angeles that is no longer in business. His philosophy is built on three components, he told me: “We work on staying physically fit, emotionally stable, and spiritually sound.” Guerrero shared with me a mantra that he and Brady invoke a lot: “Where your concentration goes, your energy flows, and that’s what grows.”
Brady is always telling his teammates to see Guerrero. It can be a tricky part to play with teammates. The Patriots have their own training, conditioning, and medical program.