Big Game

by Mark Leibovich

  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 like, ‘Fuck it, I want to go to Shake Shack.’ And I’m like ‘No problem, but that’s going to catch up with you at some point.’” (It was now clear that Brady and I in fact did not live the exact same life.) Brady said he has played with many teammates over the years who are content—thrilled—to have survived ten years before retiring. “They’ve played ten years eating pizza and drinking beer, that’s fine, people have proven you can do that,” Brady said. “But I’ve already played fifteen years, and I want to play longer. I don’t know how much, but I want to play over twenty, I know that.”

  Brady seemed a little shy at first but overall was pleasant and laughed easily. He did say a few things that stuck out to me: professional football players as a group, he observed, tend not to be the most normal and well-adjusted cohort in society. His teammates over the years have included “not that many assholes,” on the whole. He also told me a hilarious story about a fellow football player and close college friend, one that involved pizza, a fire in West Quad, and a photo of a bong in a damaged dorm room that ran in The Michigan Daily. Relatable!

  At one point I gently raised the topic of concussions. Did the growing evidence about their toll give Brady any pause? This is sometimes not the easiest subject to bring up with a football player, especially one you’ve just met. (“Nice to meet you, Mr. Coalminer, any thoughts about black lung?”) Brady kind of shrugged it off. But he also mentioned something about how Guerrero had a “system” and “technique” to help him deal with head trauma. I later learned that Brady had endorsed a dietary supplement that Guerrero had been selling, called NeuroSafe, that had dubiously promoted faster healing from concussions. “There is no other solution on the market that can do what NeuroSafe does,” said Brady in a quote attributed to him in 2011 for a NeuroSafe print ad. “It’s that extra level of protection that gives me comfort when I’m out on the field.” The Federal Trade Commission eventually began an investigation but in the interim took no enforcement action because NeuroSafe sales were discontinued.

  After about forty-five minutes, Brady’s phone rang. He picked up, and a loud and distinctively accented female voice echoed up from his phone.

  GISELE!

  Brady addressed her as “G.” “Where are you?” I heard her ask. G sounded annoyed. Brady adopted that clipped “I’m with someone, Hon, can’t really talk” voice familiar to spouses everywhere. Brady said he’d be finished shortly and would see her at home (“Love ya, Babe”). She appeared to end the call without saying good-bye.

  I told Brady I wanted to follow him during the season as he tried to defy the NFL actuarial tables. He was trying to “make history,” I suggested, or some such bullshit I threw out in an effort to communicate that I totally got his elevated purpose. Brady said he would try to carve out pockets of time to get together over the coming months. He allowed, however, that once the season began, he would be on “Belichick Time.” In other words, he would be absorbed into the scheduling equivalent of a black hole.

  A few minutes later, Brady’s then-five-year-old son, Benjamin, and then-two-year-old daughter, Vivian, were released into the room. They served as pediatric two-minute warnings. They both jumped on Brady, and Brady said something to “Benny” in Portuguese while little towheaded Vivian toddled over and looked sternly into my face. “Bye-bye,” she said. I took this as a sign it was time to leave.

  This was as close as I would get to my new best friend for a while. Brady kept putting me off, by way of Yee. Soon after we met in New York, the quarterback embarked with his family on a pre–training camp vacation in the Bahamas. The trip represented a rare separation between Brady and Guerrero, whose control over Brady’s day-to-day regimen was far more powerful than seemingly everything else except possibly “Belichick Time.” “Guerrero Time” was more like a New Age lockdown.

  The “body coach” label understates Guerrero’s reach into Brady’s life. Guerrero is his spiritual guide, counselor, pal, nutrition adviser, trainer, massage therapist, business partner, and quasi–family member. He is the godfather of Brady’s younger son, Ben. Guerrero works on Brady seven days a week, usually twice a day during the season. These sessions focus on Brady’s legs, thighs, and right arm, the one he throws with, which he calls “the moneymaker.”

  Guerrero also works with Brady’s personal chef to put together seasonal diets emphasizing certain foods in winter (lean meats and chicken), raw foods in summer, and a general food intake that is 80 percent alkaline and 20 percent acidic. This has something to do with balancing Brady’s metabolic
system for reasons I can’t even begin to understand, much less explain, or (if I’m being honest) care about. Guerrero also gives Brady special cognitive exercises that help “de-stimulate” his mind so he can fall asleep every night by nine p.m. while wearing the $99.99 biodynamic sleepwear made by Under Armour that Brady would endorse. “If my opponents aren’t wearing what I wear, I’m getting the edge on them even while I’m sleeping,” Brady wrote in a TB12 manifesto published a few years later. If Brady is the Beatles, Guerrero is his maharishi—although he’s also been compared with Yoko, suggesting a potential for disruption, or worse. “Everyone thinks I’m a kook and a charlatan,” Guerrero told me, referring to how some traditional trainers view him. He has been called by less flattering names (“scam artist,” “snake oil salesman”) as well as cited by the FTC for marketing that concussion-prevention drink. And there was another potion that he claimed could cure cancer and heart disease and arthritis, among other things. And the trail of false claims, lawsuits, and broken partnerships in what turned out to be quite a checkered past. A 2015 exposé in Boston magazine described sketchy TV infomercials in which a guy calling himself “Dr. Alejandro Guerrero” boasted of having run “clinical studies” in which he helped two hundred patients overcome terminal illnesses through a nutritional supplement called “Supreme Greens.”

  Guerrero, in various court documents, denied many of the allegations. Brady said he was aware of “most” of Guerrero’s troubles, which occurred before they ever met. He chalks it up to a learning experience for his best friend. “That’s part of growing up and understanding there are certain things that happen in life that you wish you didn’t do,” Brady said in a weekly interview he does during the season on one of Boston’s sports radio channels, WEEI.

  Brady and Guerrero’s TB12 center is housed in the shopping center behind the stadium. As with most New England businesses, it’s a few doors down from a Dunkin’ Donuts. It is difficult to describe what exactly TB12 is—not a gym, not a group practice of personal trainers, not a nutrition or massage-therapy center. Whenever I asked Brady and Guerrero to define TB12, they would speak of “reeducating muscles” and “prehab” (preventing injuries, rather than dealing with them after they happen). To the uninitiated, Guerrero’s “bodywork” resembles massage, but Brady told me he does not like the term “massage.” He believes that sells short the awesomeness of his body coach’s “technique.” “It’s like giving a chef some flour and eggs and saying, ‘Okay, we’ll make biscuits,’” Brady says. “Well, sure, everyone is going to make them different. But Alex is perfect at it.” Inevitably, Brady and Guerrero would come around to the word “lifestyle.” Inevitably, I would still be confused about whatever TB12 is. But Brady’s conviction appeared sincere, and the results he could point to from his own career made him a winning infomercial.

  Brady is always talking about the importance of “muscle pliability.” After Brady mentioned it for the seven thousandth time, I asked him to elaborate on what “pliability” meant. While traditional football training emphasizes muscle strength, he explained, Brady wants his muscles to achieve maximum sponginess and elasticity—or pliability.

  “So how do you keep your muscles soft?” Brady said. “Like when you’re a kid, when you squeeze their little butt, and they’re soft, and you grab their little cheeks, they don’t get hurt. When they fall, they don’t get hurt.” As a person ages, you lose that. “You lose your collagen. You lose your growth hormone. You lose testosterone, and all of a sudden your muscles become tight and tight muscles start pulling on tendons and ligaments, which create joint issues.”

  Every morning in the Bahamas, following his pliability workouts, Brady joined his family for a late breakfast that for him consisted mainly of a protein shake that was also high in electrolytes and included greens like kale and collards. “Sometimes we’ll go over to Tom and Gisele’s house for dinner,” Brady’s father, also named Tom, told me. “And then I’ll say afterward, ‘Where are we going for dinner?’”

  * * *

  —

  I met the elder Brady in California a few days after the family returned 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 remindi
ng 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.

  5.

  “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).