12

by Casey Sherman

  The Patriots were now leading the Rams 14–3.

  “At that point, we were feeling pretty darn good about the score,” Brady recalled later. “We went into halftime thinking it’s gonna be tough for them to beat us.”61

  In the third quarter, the Patriots defense continued to swarm Kurt Warner and his receiving corps, shutting them down once again while stretching the lead with an Adam Vinatieri field goal. But by the fourth quarter, the Rams had finally made adjustments and were prepared to mount a counterattack. Warner cut the lead with a two-yard touchdown run and later hit receiver Ricky Proehl with a twenty-six-yard completion and touchdown. An extra point would tie the game 17–17. The Rams now had the momentum and their swagger back. Just before kickoff, Proehl had predicted a St. Louis dynasty in the making, and now in the final minutes of the game, Rams cornerback Dexter McCleon sat comfortably on the bench and shrugged, saying, “Tom Brady? Overrated.”

  On the opposite sideline, meanwhile, kicker Vinatieri was smiling. He placed his arm around the equipment manager. “They screwed up,” he told him. “They gave us too much time.”

  As Brady took the field deep in his own territory with no time-outs left, coordinator Charlie Weis was once again in the quarterback’s ear with an all-too-familiar order. “Hey, take care of that ball!”

  At that moment, Brady’s mentor-turned-rival Drew Bledsoe piped in.

  “Fuck that!” Bledsoe told his replacement. “Go out there and sling it!”

  His enthusiasm wasn’t shared by TV commentator and legendary coach John Madden.

  “Now with no time-outs, I think the Patriots with this field position, ya have to just run the clock out,” Madden told a worldwide television audience. “You have to play for overtime now.”

  “We were huddled on the field after a play stoppage,” Jermaine Wiggins remembered. “Charlie, Drew, and Tom are over on the sideline going through their communication. We’re out on the field wondering what’s gonna happen, and Tom finally joins the huddle and says, ‘Listen, we’re gonna drive the ball down the field and win this football game.’ Everyone got kind of hyped. We were like ‘Let’s go!’ We talked about ball security, making sure we got out of bounds, not making any critical mistakes, but Tom got it set in our minds that we were going to go down and kick that field goal.”

  Number 12 almost got strip-sacked on the first play as he barely completed a short shuffle pass to running back J. R. Redmond.

  “I don’t agree with what the Patriots are doing right here,” Madden continued. “I would play for overtime.”

  Tom Brady wasn’t listening. He threw another completion to Redmond to secure a first down. The Patriots needed to march another forty yards to get into field goal range. On the next play, Brady found Redmond once more for yet another first down. The running back fought his way out of bounds at the 40-yard line to stop the clock with thirty-three seconds to go.

  “Now I kinda like what the Patriots are doing,” Madden exclaimed.

  Brady was pressured on the next play and was forced to throw it away. But he got right back to work and hit Troy Brown for a big gain with just twenty-one seconds remaining. On the following play, Brady avoided a Rams blitz and dumped the ball to Wiggins, who fought his way to the 30-yard line.

  “Tom says to me, ‘Hey, I’m coming to you on this one.’ This was because I was the closest one to him in the trips set we were running. Tom knew this would be the easiest throw,” Wiggins recalled. “We could safely get seven or so yards to set up Vinatieri in a more comfortable distance. I would just have to catch the ball, secure it, get down, and get the ball to the referee so we could spike it. They dropped defensive end Leonard Little into coverage to my side, so when I started running a return route against this guy, he’s not used to being in coverage. He thinks I’m running across the field, so he starts to turn and run and I just put the brakes on. It was pitch and catch, easy money.”

  They were now in field goal range with twelve seconds left on the clock. Number 12 took the ball from center Damien Woody and spiked it with seven seconds remaining.

  Brady and the Patriots weren’t playing for overtime. They were playing to win. The young quarterback embraced the historic moment. This is for the world championship, he thought to himself.

  John Madden was now a believer. “I’m telling you, what Tom Brady just did gives me goose bumps.”

  Those Patriots fans who were listening to the game on the radio could not see Brady’s mastery, but they could hear it through the enthusiastic play-by-play calling of longtime announcer Gil Santos, who like them had suffered through decades of humiliating losses. He watched as Adam Vinatieri was called out to attempt a forty-eight-yard field goal.

  “Set to go. Snap. Ball down. Kick up. Kick is on the way,” Santos shouted into the microphone.

  Patriots fans in the stadium, watching on television, and listening on the radio held their collective breath as the ball sailed toward the goal post.

  “It’s good!” Santos screamed. “It’s good…and the game is over and the Patriots are Super Bowl champions. The Patriots are Super Bowl champions, the best team in the National Football League!”

  The confetti rained down in the Superdome as Patriots players ran onto the field. From Cranston, Rhode Island, to Camden, Maine, New England’s long-suffering fans leaped for joy, hugged, and even wept. Tom Brady, the accidental quarterback, was named the game’s most valuable player.

  As he reached the podium to hoist the Lombardi Trophy, the first in franchise history, Brady caught the eyes of his three sisters in the stands. He placed his hands to his head and mouthed the words Can you believe this?

  Months later, when the team handed out diamond-studded championship rings to the players and members of the coaching staff, Pam Rehbein received one in honor of her husband’s contributions to the season, primarily, championing the young quarterback out of the University of Michigan who would bring the first Lombardi Trophy to Foxboro.

  Rehbein’s widow spoke of the honor. “It’s his legacy to his children.”62

  Part III

  Chapter Ten

  Legendary Status

  In early 2015, Tom Brady and the Patriots found themselves headed back to the Super Bowl, and they were underdogs no more. They were no longer the Cinderella team that had delivered one of the greatest upsets in Super Bowl history against the mighty Rams. New England was now the gold standard by which all other teams were measured. Few could have predicted the team’s decade-long run of success that would earn them two more Vince Lombardi trophies in 2003 against the Carolina Panthers and 2004 versus the Philadelphia Eagles and a total of four more trips back to the Super Bowl. Fans could not imagine that their team would celebrate a perfect regular season in 2007. But it all had happened. It wasn’t a dream. The Patriots had built the greatest sports dynasty of the twenty-first century under the architectural guidance of Brady and Bill Belichick.

  For Tom, the comparisons to Drew Bledsoe were long gone now. Bledsoe, as good a professional quarterback as he was, would go down in history as a footnote to the Brady legend. The Patriots star wasn’t just Tom Brady anymore. He was TB12, a one-man corporation with multimillion-dollar contracts to endorse Uggs boots, Under Armour, and other high-end products. He was also building a new health and wellness business with his nutritionist, fitness trainer, and best friend, Alex Guerrero, who was placed in charge of Brady’s training after he suffered a torn ACL during the first game of the 2008 season and was kept out for a year.

  The yellow Jeep and the cramped Franklin condo were also distant memories. Brady now drove around in a Rolls-Royce Ghost and lived in two huge mansions on both coasts with his supermodel wife, Gisele, and their two young children, Benjamin and Vivian. He also shared custody of his firstborn son, John Edward (“Jack”), with actress Bridget Moynahan.

  Most important, the 2000 NFL draft-day afterthought was rightly considered to be among the greatest quarterbacks ever to play the game. For a decade, he compete
d against career rival Peyton Manning for recognition as the NFL’s top gun. Now entering his sixth Super Bowl against the Seattle Seahawks, he had pulled ahead of Manning in the eyes of most NFL observers, with just one quarterback blocking his way toward the rarefied title of greatest quarterback of all time—Joe Montana.

  Brady’s boyhood idol was teetering on the top of the sport’s Mount Olympus, poised to get knocked off by the Patriots quarterback if he could lead his team to victory over the Seahawks. A fourth Super Bowl win would tie Brady with Montana. Championship rings were the most important measuring stick with which to judge any NFL quarterback. Number 12 was on the cusp of matching number 16 in Super Bowl wins, but he dominated his idol in every other quarterback category.

  By 2015, Brady had thrown for more than four thousand yards in seven different seasons, while Montana had never eclipsed four thousand yards passing in a single season throughout his entire lofty career. Brady had thrown twenty-five touchdowns or more in ten different seasons, including a record-setting fifty in 2007, while Montana had done it just six times. Brady had even thrown fewer interceptions than his idol. He had won more regular-season and playoff games than Montana but had also lost the two Super Bowls to the New York Giants in heartbreaking fashion. The 49ers legend, on the other hand, was a perfect 4–0 in world championship games. With four rings, Joe Cool was alone on the mountaintop looking down at TB12. Another win would give Brady sports immortality and his fans plenty of ammunition in their barroom and golf course GOAT (greatest of all time) debates.

  “Brady’s made a mockery of the man many believed was the greatest quarterback in football,” said Kerry Byrne of Cold Hard Football Facts. “Statistically speaking, there is no comparison between the two. Montana peaked at age 33 when he was the most efficient quarterback in the game but he was not considered among the best at his position in the later years of his career. Tom Brady is still the best at what he does.”63

  The Brady–Montana story line heading into the Super Bowl against Seattle was drowned out quickly, however, by the controversy that was swirling around number 12 and allegations that he had performed with deflated footballs in the AFC title game against the Colts. The story was still fluid, changing by the minute. Newsday circulated a report that the issue had been first brought to the attention of the Colts staff by linebacker D’Qwell Jackson, who had intercepted a Brady pass in the second quarter of the game. Jackson reportedly gave the ball to a member of the Colts equipment staff who then alerted head coach Chuck Pagano that the ball appeared to be deflated. This story belies the fact that Pagano had already been notified about the Patriots’ ball situation by Ravens special teams coordinator Jerry Rosburg in a phone call the week before the game. Jackson would later claim that he had no suspicion that the football he intercepted had been tampered with.64

  Now both sides in this drama were working hard to get their stories straight.

  The night after the story first broke, DeMaurice Smith, executive director of the NFLPA, was enjoying dinner out with his wife, Karen, near their home in a suburban Maryland town. He glanced at the large television above the bar and his eyes were drawn to the ticker at the bottom of the screen, where the words deflated footballs and Tom Brady flashed before him.

  “Fuck,” he muttered.

  His mind began to race. In what number of directions can this possibly go?

  Karen gazed at her husband. She knew that look. It was the look of a fighter. She had seen it when the two were classmates at the University of Virginia Law School. She had seen it during the nine long years he had worked for United States Attorney General Eric Holder in the Justice Department. Karen understood the look because she was a fighter, too. She was a breast cancer survivor and the strongest person her husband had ever known.

  Dinner ended quickly. It was time for Smith to assemble his team and go to work.

  The story was spiraling out of control. It led news coverage on every network and now had its own name—Deflategate.

  The drumbeats were getting louder. As Tom Brady and the Patriots coaching staff tried to block out the media distractions and focus on preparations to face the Seahawks, DeMaurice Smith and his NFLPA legal team analyzed each step taken by Roger Goodell and the NFL up to this point in the case.

  Smith had already developed a close relationship with Brady over time.

  “Tom was one of the lead plaintiffs back in 2011 with Peyton [Manning] and Drew [Brees] to sue the league for locking the players out,” he explained.65

  That battle was over a new collective bargaining agreement (labor agreement between the owners and players). Team owners wanted a cutback in player salaries and health benefits, but the NFLPA fought hard against this plan. When the players could not come to a consensus with the owners, all thirty-two owners imposed a work stoppage and locked the players out of team facilities and halted league operations. The stalemate lasted from early March to late July that year.

  “He [Brady] was a union rep at the time and the statement by him and those other quarterbacks was not only a bold statement by them as union members, but it was nearly unprecedented to have what everyone would consider to be future Hall of Famers as lead plaintiffs fighting for the union,” Smith said.66

  Brady had agreed to designate himself as lead plaintiff, knowing full well that Patriots owner Robert Kraft was the principal owner in the process of locking out the players.

  “He went against his own boss,” Smith continued. “The decision by that quarterback in particular was a direct choice to express clearly which side they were on.”

  Brady stood tall for the union at a time when they needed him most, and now it was Smith’s turn to pay back the favor.

  Number 12 was now getting pinned down by the media. What he thought was a small issue over deflated footballs had grown into a national scandal. He figured the best way to control the media-fed wildfire was simply to address the allegations during an NFL required pre–Super Bowl news conference at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough. DeMaurice Smith adamantly opposed the strategy.

  “Stay cool, man. Don’t discuss it,” Smith warned Brady. “You can’t address it. We need to get a handle on this, man.”

  Tom did not listen. Instead he went rogue. He stepped up to the podium wearing a Patriots winter cap complete with pom-pom and told the crush of reporters, flatly, “I didn’t alter the ball in any way. I have a process that I go through before every game where I go in and I pick the footballs that I want to use for the game. Our equipment guys do a great job of breaking the balls in. They have a process that they go through. When I pick those balls out, at that point to me they’re perfect. I don’t want anyone touching the balls after that. I don’t want anyone rubbing them, putting any air in them, taking any air out. To me those balls are perfect and that’s what I expect when I show up on the field. That happened obviously on Sunday night. It was the same process that I always go through. I didn’t think anything of it.”

  From there, Pandora’s box was opened.

  “Are you comfortable that nobody on the Patriots side did anything wrong?” one reporter asked.

  “I have no knowledge of anything. I have no knowledge of any wrongdoing,” Brady replied, sounding like a politician on the wrong side of a story.

  “Are you comfortable that nobody did anything?” another writer pressed.

  “Yeah, I’m very comfortable saying that. I’m very comfortable saying that nobody did it, as far as I know. I don’t know everything. I also understand that I was in the locker room preparing for a game. I don’t know what happened over the course of the process with the footballs. I was preparing for my own job, doing what I needed to do.”

  For fifteen minutes, he was peppered with question after question. One particular query hit him square in the solar plexus.

  “This has raised a lot of questions around the country from people that view you, a three-time Super Bowl champion, as their idol,” the reporter stated. “The question they’re asking themselves is,
‘What’s up with our hero?’ So can you answer right now…is Tom Brady a cheater?”

  Brady smiled and let out a nervous laugh as he tried to maintain his composure. For the first time in his life, reporters were questioning his heart and his character. A stain on his credibility and work ethic would not only impact his legacy but also his relationships with all those he knew and loved.

  “I don’t believe so,” Brady responded. “I feel like I’ve always played within the rules and would never do anything to break the rules.”

  I don’t believe so. These are the four words that would haunt him. Instead of emphatically denying any wrongdoing, Brady offered a safe response—a “lawyered up” reply. The superstar quarterback was rattled, and many in the media pool questioned whether he was advised by legal counsel beforehand about what to say and how to say it. The odd response struck cynical reporters the same way that President Bill Clinton’s phrase “it depends upon what the meaning of the word is is” did during the Monica Lewinsky probe.

  Watching the news conference from his office at NFLPA headquarters, DeMaurice Smith grimaced. He certainly hadn’t advised Brady to use such language. Smith didn’t want Tom to talk at all. As a professional football player, Brady was used to answering questions about his performance on the field, but he was now out of his comfort zone.

  Earlier in the day, Bill Belichick had defended his own actions and perceived lack of knowledge of any wrongdoing.

  “I’m not a scientist, I’m not an expert in footballs, I’m not an expert in football measurements. I’m just telling you what I know,” Belichick said during a news conference. “I’m not saying I’m the Mona Lisa Vito of the football world as she was in the car expertise area.”

  The coach was making a reference to Marisa Tomei’s character in the Joe Pesci comedy My Cousin Vinny, a film he’d seen numerous times.