12

by Casey Sherman

  In April 2016, the United States Second Court of Appeals ruled to reinstate Tom’s four-game suspension. The court stated that Roger Goodell “properly exercised his broad discretion under the collective bargaining agreement and that his procedural rulings were grounded in that agreement and did not deprive Brady of fundamental fairness.” Article 46 had taken down number 12.

  The sports world was stunned, and Patriots fans decried what they called the commissioner’s witch hunt. Behind the scenes, Brady and DeMaurice Smith tried to negotiate a settlement with the NFL that would overturn the suspension and thus allow Tom to play the first four games of the upcoming 2016 regular season. The quarterback even offered to pay a $1 million fine, but Roger Goodell wanted more. He demanded that Brady state publicly that former Patriots equipment guys Jastremski and McNally had purposely tampered with footballs, even without his knowledge. Tom said no.

  “There’s no way I’m gonna ruin these guys for something I believe they didn’t do,” he told Smith.

  For the first time since the start of the 2001 regular season, an able-bodied Tom Brady would not be taking his rightful place behind center for the New England Patriots. He’d missed the 2008 season with a torn ACL, and that had been among the most difficult and painful periods of his life.

  The four-game suspension meant that Brady would have to forfeit $235,000 in salary, and, more devastating to the quarterback, he would be locked out of Gillette Stadium and not allowed to have contact with any member of the Patriots organization beginning on September 3. Brady had led the most successful franchise in the modern era of professional football, and now it would be as if he were persona non grata in Foxborough.

  Close friends like Matt Chatham texted Brady to express their support and to see how he was holding up. Number 12 laughed off the concern and said he was fine. He wasn’t. Tom Brady was reaching a breaking point.

  He tried to appeal the decision, but the petition was denied by the United States Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Brady’s only other option at that point was to take the fight all the way to the United States Supreme Court. This would be nothing short of a Hail Mary pass and would mean more time in law offices and in court and less time on the field. At his age, it was not a risk Brady was willing to take.

  “I’m very grateful for the overwhelming support I’ve received from Mr. [Robert] Kraft, the Kraft family, and most of all, our fans,” he wrote on Facebook. “It has been a challenging 18 months and I have made the difficult decision to no longer proceed with the legal process. I’m going to work hard to be the best player I can be for the New England Patriots and I look forward to having the opportunity to return to the field this fall.”

  In his 2017 interview with the authors of this book, Tom Brady maintained the moral high ground with regard to his suspension and those who had conspired against him. “I’m a positive person. I just let those things play out,” he said before a short pause. “It was just a…I don’t want to say anything negative about anyone at this point and I’m not gonna [and never] will. [I thought,] I’m just gonna focus on what I need to do, which was just to get ready to play. Things didn’t work out the way that I wanted them to so I had to sit out the four games, but I tried to take advantage of [the suspension] and do things that I wouldn’t normally get a chance to do like spending time with my family, my wife, and my parents. That was the best thing about it… just having more opportunities with them.”98

  Despite Brady’s positive outlook, the punishment handed down by the league would have a lasting effect. Instead of discarding his suspension letter, he preserved it in a neat binder filled with anecdotes and memories of the 2016 regular season.99

  Chapter Seventeen

  Isolation

  It was the final game of the 2016 preseason, and Tom Brady was out on the field. Normally, number 12 would watch a meaningless contest such as this one from the sidelines—resting both his body and his mind for the arduous sixteen-game regular season ahead. But this exhibition game was anything but normal. Brady had been splitting time with his young backup, Jimmy Garoppolo, in preparation for the first four games of the regular season, which the starting QB would have to sit out.

  Brady played the entire first half of the preseason finale against the New York Giants, completing sixteen of twenty-six passes with a touchdown and an interception. For number 12, it was an uneven performance made even more curious because he was playing against the Giants’ scrubs and not their starters. His timing was off with Edelman and the Patriots’ newly acquired tight end, Martellus Bennett. Still, fans savored every moment, knowing it would be the last time they would see their beloved quarterback until early October.

  The Deflategate suspension went into effect at 4 p.m. on Saturday, September 3, 2016.

  At that moment, Brady became a ghost. He couldn’t go near Gillette Stadium or communicate in any way with staff or any of his buddies on the team. Still, his presence was felt in Foxborough. The day after the suspension began, the team hung two gigantic Brady banners on the Gillette Stadium lighthouse that were visible from both inside and outside the stadium.

  Tom would loom large over the field, but the Patriots were Garoppolo’s team for now.

  “Jimmy’s done a great job of working hard for the two and a half years that he’s been here and studying and improving every year in our system,” offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels said during a Sunday conference call with reporters. “He’s going to prepare hard this week and be ready to go in the game.”100

  From the outset, Bill Belichick tried pouring cold water on any potential quarterback controversy by declaring that the Patriots were Brady’s team and that he would return to the starting lineup on October 3 when the suspension was over.

  Still, fans couldn’t help but think back to 2001, when Brady had replaced Bledsoe due to injury. Most assumed then that Bledsoe would get his job back when he was healthy, but that never happened and the rest is history. Could Brady fall victim to a situation similar to the one that had launched his own Hall of Fame career?

  He had to stay focused and sharp.

  “I really tried to train as if I was just playing from week to week,” Brady recalled. “And I’m always working on my mechanics and on my pocket movement. By the time I got back to the practice field, I felt that I was kind of in sync. I was in my pads and helmet in [private practice sessions] and doing a lot of football drills, working on my mechanics with [former major league pitcher] Tom House, which was great, obviously working with Alex [Guerrero] a lot to keep my body just ready to go…so four weeks was about just as long as I could take.”

  It would take a small village to keep Brady in football condition. Tom House helped the aging quarterback rediscover the accuracy in his long throws, while Guerrero focused on improving Brady’s strength and flexibility.

  He also needed someone to throw to, preferably a highly competent athlete doing highly athletic things on the other end of the simulation. Brady wanted a professional-quality wide receiver to run through his practice simulations with him. But he also understood these kinds of people weren’t just to be found hanging out on any street corner in Massachusetts.

  Speculation on how Brady would stay on top of his work was widely batted around throughout the summer of 2016, with much of the discussion centering on former teammates, retired guys like Troy Brown, Deion Branch, and Wes Welker. One of them would have to bunk at Camp Brady for the month to help keep number 12 on top of his game. The idea of it sounded reasonable enough, but the realities were quite different. Although Brown was still in tremendous shape, he was now forty-five years old. Branch and Welker both had growing families and lived far away, so the logistics of a monthlong man-camp did not work. But fortunately, there was an alternative nearby.

  Ryan McManus was a team captain for Dartmouth College, and a two-time All–Ivy League player as both a wide receiver and kick returner. He was a smart, elusive, and productive player. With his five-eleven, 193-pound frame, he reminded Brad
y of the trio of New England slot receivers he’d had so much success with—Wes Welker, Julian Edelman, and Danny Amendola.

  Brady’s body guru Alex Guerrero reached out to McManus, and Team Brady had their man. For McManus, the September relationship just made sense.

  “I played football at Dartmouth [in New Hampshire], and then was lucky enough to be invited to rookie mini-camp with the Patriots,” he recalled. “They had twelve receivers on the roster prior to camp starting, and I had some things in my past, injury-wise, that I think maybe steered them away from not signing me. Either way, it was an awesome experience.

  “I got a call from Alex [Guerrero], and he basically asked when I wanted to work out with Tom, just like that! And in my head I’m thinking, ‘Wow, I’m dictating when Tom Brady is going to work out? That’s pretty funny.’ So I’m like, ‘Whatever time you need me there, I’ll be there.’ That happened as simple as that.”101

  McManus showed up the first day at the soccer field at the Dexter Southfield School in Brookline, close to Brady’s home, with a pair of gloves and cleats. He thought it was going to be a standard throwing session. But Brady and Guerrero showed up with a hockey bag full of stuff, including Tom’s helmet, shoulder pads, jersey, and resistance bands. Brady was trying his best to replicate what he was missing in Foxborough, and his approach had changed drastically since his early years in the NFL.

  “Those old throwing sessions…I was so young. You’re just doing stuff to do it. You don’t know if it’s gonna pay off in a game,” Brady said. “You don’t know if exactly what you’re doing is going to amount to anything. Now I just really want to get to the things I think are gonna be effective in the game and that I think will work. I just want to be more efficient with my time and my energy. It’s just all about doing things that are realistic, and from a quarterback standpoint, [it’s useful to work on] a lot of drops and pocket movements and running and throwing with accuracy and taking hits after the throws. I had people hitting me with bags, and [I was] just trying to stay sharp.

  “I’m still trying to work on routes and throwing regimens now,” he added. “It’s not like it’s ever a finished product. You’re just continuing to try to get better and more consistent, more accurate and better at timing and better at anticipation, but the problem with football is that [the team] changes from year to year with different players that come in, so it’s just [about] trying to get [them] up to speed.”

  As it turned out, it was McManus, the recent college graduate, who had to get up to speed with the gridiron great.

  “I instantly felt like I was the most underdressed person at the party,” McManus recalls.

  “Nobody mentioned anything at first, but during one of the breaks he [Brady] pulled me aside and explained that he likes to wear exactly what he wears in the game. At that point, going forward, I knew I had to bring a helmet and shoulder pads to fit in that way, which was funny. That was the first little tidbit he passed along. He called it a ‘TB nugget.’ Practice how you’re going to play.”

  On each occasion, Brady would do his warm-up—his stretching, and band resistance drills—with Guerrero, and then he and McManus would go into routes. Brady liked to work on each of a variety of routes, in no particular order. “With other quarterbacks I’ve worked with, it usually starts with the shorter stuff—the hitches, slants, and quick outs—and work your way up to the deeper routes. But with Tom, he wanted to treat it just like it was a game, mix it up between a short route and a long route, and then everything in between.”

  McManus would run the route, catch it, and then Brady would throw about seven more balls at the exact spot where the young receiver caught the first ball. Number 12 drilled in on his throws, consciously honing his techniques. Alex Guerrero would film every throw on an iPad, and then as McManus jogged back with the eight balls, Brady would be watching each throw in slow motion, going over it in meticulous detail, talking about the angle of his arm, or how close his chin was to his shoulder.

  “As we worked, he definitely gave me a lot of tips in terms of the kinds of routes he wanted run, at what depth, and things like that,” McManus said. “The first couple sessions, we were out on a soccer field, so it was kind of a best guess on depth and things like that because there weren’t any lines. He was pretty specific in terms of the angle of the breaks, the distances, and things of that nature. But he always did it in a very constructive way—it wasn’t like he was ragging on me. I was a kid trying to help him out, and help myself out and stay in shape. Through it all, he was super positive and super helpful. I really appreciated that.”

  During each passing drill, Brady shrugged off and avoided invisible defensive backs, playing the game both physically and mentally as best he could.

  “We would rep a specific route or concept, and then we’d talk on my way back, giving me a little bit of a breather, and I needed it [laughing]. Brady would say, ‘Such and such team, like the Jets, they like to do this a lot. This is the route we want for that.’ Or he’d recall a certain touchdown he threw to Gronk or Julian or somebody and he’d say this is the exact route he threw and why he threw it. We weren’t just running routes for the sake of running routes, we were working on specific things he uses in game.”

  One thing McManus paid close attention to were the digs and passes across the middle as well as Brady’s orders to come back to the ball from different depths. What the young receiver could not know at the time was that Brady would return to these passing concepts later in the season when it mattered most.

  “When we first started, I didn’t really know what to expect…like how hard is this guy actually gonna throw it, how early, things like that. By the end I was pretty comfortable. Because I had some exposure to the organization…and what expectations there were. Definitely things got easier and more comfortable as the weeks went on,” McManus recalls.

  The training sessions had to be done under a veil of secrecy as Tom wanted to work out far away from the television cameras and the public.

  “By the end, I think the last practice was the only one where we got caught. There was a lacrosse tournament that had just ended across the way. The field is right by the parking lot, so one kid came out and saw, and ten minutes later there are two hundred people—parents and kids—watching and cheering us on as we completed a pass on the air, which was certainly a new experience for me.…More than anything that stood out to me was Brady’s focus and mind-set. He’s a gamer and a competitor. How he talked about the game, how he approached something as simple as running routes…it became clear that his mentality was just a step above everybody else’s. I remember thinking when I left after working with him for just a few weeks…I would never bet against this guy.”

  The stress of getting locked out of Gillette Stadium and being sequestered from his teammates paled in comparison to the growing concern Tom felt at the time for his family. His mother, Galynn, had breast cancer. When she was diagnosed during the summer of 2016, the cancer was at Stage 2, which meant that it was still contained to her breast but was fast growing. Doctors told Galynn and Tom Sr. that the only way to survive was to be as aggressive as the cancer itself. This meant that Tom’s mother would have to put her body through five months of painful chemotherapy and radiation. Galynn also underwent two lumpectomies amid a number of surgeries.

  “Hearing about it for the first time that my wife of many years, I could lose her…” Brady Sr. told the NFL Network’s Andrea Kremer. “I’m not ready to lose her.”102

  Neither was their son. Number 12 had experienced loss before when Dick Rehbein died prior to his sophomore season and ascension to greatness. He’d also lost another mentor, College of San Mateo head coach Tom Martinez, who died on his sixty-sixth birthday in 2012. Martinez had tutored Brady on his throwing mechanics since high school. While quarterbacking the Patriots, Brady reached out to Martinez after every game to discuss and dissect each throw. On occasion, Brady would fly the coach to Boston and spend days with him looking for ways to
improve his game. The coach had been in failing health for years as he battled diabetes and cancer before suffering a fatal heart attack during dialysis treatment. The loss of Martinez dealt a crushing blow to the quarterback. Even four years after the coach’s passing, Brady was still profoundly impacted by his influence and heartbroken by his absence. So much so that on February 21, 2016, the anniversary of his death, number 12 remembered his coach in a Facebook post. “Tom [Martinez] made everyone around him a better person,” Brady wrote. “Thank you for being the ultimate example Tom. I’d be nowhere without your voice in my ear all these years.”103

  Still, no one had a greater influence over Brady than his parents, especially Galynn. As Tom Sr. observed, “He never says Hi Dad [on television]. It’s always Hi Mom.”

  Tom and his mother remained close throughout the ordeal although they were coasts apart.

  “We FaceTimed a lot,” Galynn said. “Losing my hair was tough for me. I’d have my bandana on and he [Tom] would say, ‘Oh, Mom, you look so beautiful, so beautiful.’”

  It was torture for Brady not to be in California with his mother and not to have both of his parents in the stands for regular-season games upon his return. But number 12 told his mother that she’d be ready and in better health for the Super Bowl. It was both a premonition and a promise. Tom Sr. and Galynn charted out her chemotherapy and saw that the treatments would end two weeks before the championship in Houston, Texas, and their son planned on playing in that game.