The quarterback absorbed the anguish and pain he felt about his mother’s cancer and turned it into fuel for his return to the lineup.
“With my mom, it’s very emotional in my family all the time,” Brady revealed. “I grew up with three sisters, so, it’s just that I have had the best support from them for such a long period of time, and that has never changed. I just love them so much. I love my sisters, my parents, my wife, and my kids. When your family is good, life is good. I just gotta eliminate all the other BS. You know, I really don’t give a shit about many other things except my family, my teammates and coaches, and playing hard. That’s where my mind was at.”
While Tom was ordered to stay away from professional football, he could still attend college games. Number 12 was welcomed with open arms at the Big House in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in late September, where he served as honorary captain for the Wolverines in their showdown against Colorado. It was the first time that he had stepped onto the field at Michigan Stadium since 1999. Brady tossed the football with his son Jack, watched the team through warm-ups, and played catch with head coach Jim Harbaugh before approaching midfield for the ceremonial coin toss. Tom had been estranged from the Michigan program for years until Harbaugh worked hard to make amends on behalf of the university. Before the game, Brady thanked him by addressing his players.
“It was a chilling speech. It made the hair on the back of your neck stand up,” one player said, while another added, “It made me realize maybe the greatest quarterback of all time was saying that I represented him. That got me in the mind-set that I wanted to go out and play even better than he [Brady] ever did.”104
Michigan went on to beat the Colorado Buffaloes 45–28.
Lingering rumors about Brady’s troubled marriage were also put to rest at this time. He and wife Gisele took a romantic getaway to Positano, Italy, where they were photographed kissing on lounge chairs and even sunbathing nude. The photos sparked some laughter back in New England, but they were harmless compared to the collective panic Patriots fans experienced while watching a video of the quarterback jumping off a cliff into the water during a family vacation to Costa Rica after the 2014 Super Bowl.
Tom Brady looked happy and rested and no one doubted that he’d be ready to return to the Patriots huddle. Most important, he didn’t doubt himself.
“Getting back into the building and getting back to work, it was really like I never left,” Brady recalled. “I was part of all the OTAs [organized team activities] and training camp, and by the time I came back the guys were working hard. They were in a routine and I just didn’t want to screw it up. I just wanted to come in there and do my job the best way that I could. The practices were all the same that I had experienced and all the routines were very much the same. It was more about me getting into their rhythm. They hadn’t had me around or heard my voice in a while, but I just felt like I was fresh and ready to go.”
Part IV
Chapter Eighteen
The Return
October 9, 2016—FirstEnergy Stadium, Cleveland
Brady arrived at FirstEnergy Stadium wearing a sharp suit and was all business. His passing sessions with McManus, his ban from talking to his teammates, and his agonizing wait were finally over.
It was business as usual for his teammates, too, as they had been trained to overcome the absence of their undisputed leader.
“Coach [Belichick] kind of stayed to character—the whole next-man-up kind of mentality,” safety and team cocaptain Devin McCourty said. “With Tom not in the captain’s meetings, we just kind of moved on. We knew he’d be back. We didn’t really address it or think twice about it. It is what it is. We all know what he means to this team, so we knew when he got back he’d fall right in line. Because of his professionalism and leadership, we knew he’d come back blazing and ready to go.”
And with that, it was time for Brady to get back to doing what he did best: leading his team and lighting up opposing defenses.
While number 12 and the rest of the team were mum on the suspension, defensive lineman Jabaal Sheard sent a not-so-subtle message to the league as he arrived at the stadium: he wore a Brady jersey backward, so the “12” and “Brady” were visible to everyone who saw him coming.
Robert Kraft and son Jonathan were pleased to see the team rally around their suspended quarterback. They felt that each player had a responsibility not to let Tom down during his absence. While some sports reporters predicted that Brady would return to the lineup with his team in a big hole, the players refused to make it part of the ongoing story line. The Patriots went 3–1 under backup quarterbacks Jimmy Garoppolo and Jacoby Brissett.
“Jonathan and I watched the preparation and the practice,” Robert Kraft explained. “The preparation was all done within itself. It wasn’t to do anything fancy. It was just basics. The team went out and executed.”105
Within the confines of Gillette Stadium, everyone from the owners to the coaches to the players believed that Brady got screwed by the NFL, but they were no longer willing to discuss it publicly.
“Right now we’re focused on Cleveland,” Belichick said in his league-mandated weekly press conference. “Can’t do anything about what was or wasn’t in the last four weeks. We’re into Cleveland week, and that’s where all our focus is. Not worried about last week. Not worried about next week. Not worried about last year. Worried about this week against Cleveland. That’s it. Period. This week. Cleveland. We’re focused on Cleveland this week. Period. Cleveland.”
Pressed as to how it would be to see number 12 back under center, Belichick snapped, “[I] feel like we need to go out to Cleveland and play well in order to win. That’s what we’re going to try to do.
“We’ll do the same thing we do every week. There’s always players that fall into that category [of coming back after an absence], whatever the position is,” he added. “We’ll take it day by day.…We go out there and practice, we make the corrections, we come back in, go over some new stuff.…That’s what we do.”
Rob Gronkowski toed the line, too, almost.
“No matter who is at quarterback, you’ve always got to prepare the same,” he told the press corps before the Cleveland game. “The demeanor has been the same throughout the building. We’ve got to prepare every single week to the max. So, it’s just like any other week—”
He paused. And then added, “except Tom’s back at quarterback, baby!”
Other players joked about Brady’s absence and made light of his return.
“He looked good, man,” Matthew Slater told the Boston Globe. “Good hair. Good physique. Stylish, per usual.”106
Amendola described the quarterback as “tanned, happy, and pumped.”
“We’re excited to have our friend back,” he said. “He’s a great football player.…Obviously everyone is psyched, for sure.”
Walking from the team bus into the stadium, Brady was stoic. He focused directly ahead with an intimidating thousand-yard stare. One fan referenced his Michigan roots, saying, “Go, Blue.” Another said, “Go, Browns.” He didn’t flinch at either remark. He may not have let on that it was anything other than just another NFL game, but inside the fire burned.
“We all knew what Tom had gone through over the last two years, but it wasn’t one of those huge rallying cries like, ‘Do this for Tom!’” McCourty said. “But I do think each player thought Tom having to deal with all of that was crazy, so guys partly wanted it for him, but also for the rest of the 2016 team because of how tight we were as a group. We were all very close, enjoyed our time together.107
“Starting with the four-game suspension, a lot of people didn’t give us a chance to do well at the beginning part of the season,” he added. “For Tom, it was great to see us have his back while he was out, but when he was back in there it wasn’t just ‘Do this for Tom.’ It was ‘Let’s do this for this team because this team is truly special.’”
Robert Kraft echoed that statement. “Every negative experie
nce has some positives, if you have the right people. Deflategate created a sense of team and togetherness. They [the NFL] thought they were weakening us, but instead, they really made the team stronger.”
While Brady and the organization downplayed the “redemption” angle to almost comical levels, Tom’s inner circle wasn’t shy about letting the world know that TB12 was on a mission.
“I think Deflategate hurt Tommy a lot more than he’ll let anyone know,” Tom’s Michigan teammate and close friend Aaron Shea told ESPN. “We barely talked about the details other than a lot of f-bombs going back and forth. But now you’ve pissed off the GOAT [greatest of all time]. I grew up in Illinois, and if you got under Michael Jordan’s skin, he would score 50 or 60 on you. This is only going to make Tom better. It’s going to hurt the other 31 teams because Tom is healthy, he didn’t have to take any hits the first four games, and now he’s angry.”108
Those were the words Patriots fans wanted to hear. Those were the words being thrown around daily on the sports radio shows in Boston. They hate us ’cause they ain’t us. Redemption.
Shea took it even further.
“I want him to stick it to Roger Goodell so bad,” he said. “At the end of the year, I want him up there holding that Lombardi Trophy and taking it from Roger Goodell. Then I’d tell Tom, ‘That’s it, man, you couldn’t go out any better than that.’”
Brady is the godfather to Shea’s son, and the candid interview was as close as anyone in the media got to hearing Tom’s true feelings about the whole Deflategate fiasco and his suspension.
Asked if he thought number 12 was out for revenge, Shea answered, “One hundred percent. He’ll never tell anyone that, but we’re all human. You want to stick it to someone who stuck it to you. Deflategate was a witch hunt for Goodell and all the other owners who wanted to slow the Patriots down. And now everyone in the NFL knows Tom is back and fired up. If there’s one guy in the history of sports who didn’t need to cheat, it’s Tommy Brady.”
In Cleveland, the Patriots were supposed to be in enemy territory, but Brady’s return felt like a home game at Gillette Stadium as swarms of fans arrived from New England.
Patriots fans entered the stadium early to see Brady in warm-ups while reporters and photographers charted his every move.
Signs were hung in the end zones supporting Brady, much to the chagrin of the Browns. One sign read, THE RETURN OF THE GOAT, with a picture of Tom. #FREEBRADY was printed in bold letters on another.
The Krafts could not believe the thunderous chants for their star quarterback—chants that started long before kickoff and were repeated louder and louder throughout the game.
“It was really unbelievable,” Robert Kraft told the authors of this book. “The chanting of his name. We sat in Foxboro on those metal benches and went through those tough seasons. To go to a visiting stadium and like forty-five minutes before the game to hear the crowd yelling Brady’s name. It was really remarkable.”
About an hour before kickoff, Brady walked from the locker room through the tunnel and onto the field, flanked by Jimmy Garoppolo. He jogged the length of the field and stopped in the far end zone and pumped his fist wildly toward an army of Patriots fans.
“Let’s go!!!” he shouted. The crowd went crazy.
No one expected any rust to collect on Tom Brady, including the team’s owner.
“He’s a nice guy, but you won’t meet anyone who’s more competitive than he is,” Kraft said. “He does his work and goes home and watches film at home. I think Gisele has the potential to be an expert on film viewing. He was ready for that day.”
Ted Karras saw this firsthand. Like Brady, the rookie offensive lineman from the University of Illinois had been drafted in the sixth round and had fought hard to make the squad. Karras hailed from a long line of NFL talent. His grandfather, Ted Karras Sr., won an NFL championship as a member of the 1963 Chicago Bears, while his dad, Ted Karras Jr., played defensive tackle at Northwestern University and was a member of the 1987 Washington Redskins squad that won the Super Bowl in a season shortened by a players’ strike.
And his great-uncle was Alex Karras, the four-time Pro Bowler with the Detroit Lions who had also once been suspended by the league. Karras would have the last laugh on the field and on the screen in comedies like Porky’s and Victor/Victoria. In the acting world, he was perhaps best known for his starring role in the family sitcom Webster and his turn as Mongo, an outlaw who punched out a horse in the Mel Brooks classic Blazing Saddles.
With such an impressive NFL pedigree, it’s not surprising that Belichick took a flyer on the six-four, three-hundred-pound lineman.
Karras was a Belichick kind of guy. The young lineman not only made the team in 2016, but he played in all sixteen regular-season games and the playoffs, mostly on special teams. In Cleveland, he waited in the tunnel with the rest of the team, listening to the “Brady, Brady” chants, when the quarterback approached him.
“It was the first time I really saw Tom Brady in action,” Karras recalled. “He head-butted me before the game. I’m a role player and so I felt pretty good about that.”
The Patriots won the coin toss and deferred, as they almost always do. The New England defense forced the Browns into a quick three-and-out series and a punt.
Brady took the field in a calm and deliberate manner.
“I wasn’t really nervous,” he recalled. “It’s just about experience and playing 250-plus games. You’re excited and certainly anxious to get out there and start playing, but once you get out there, it’s just football. Getting the first few snaps out of the way is always good. We had a really great plan and we executed it very well.”109
Number 12 buttoned his chin strap and trotted out to the huddle at the Patriots’ 20-yard line, as his fans cheered wildly in the stands. Even some Browns fans clapped, recognizing the historical significance of this upcoming series.
Tom strode into the huddle and called his first play of the season. He got under center, took the snap—his first live play since the previous season ended in the AFC title game in Denver—and fired a perfect strike to Edelman, who rumbled to the 30 for a first down.
Finding Edelman first was fitting as it spoke to their mutual trust and close friendship. Like Brady, Edelman was a product of Northern California. He grew up in Redwood City, just thirteen miles away from Brady’s hometown of San Mateo. His dad ran a small business and dedicated most of his free time to coaching his kids on the football field. Like Brady, Julian had and maintains a strong relationship with his father, Frank. But he wasn’t coddled at home or on the gridiron. When Edelman was just twelve years old, his father imparted this advice about facing a tough opponent: “When you get them down, you break their fucking neck.” These were tough words for a preteen to hear, but they resonated with the boy, who played like a hulking linebacker despite his small frame. Edelman was a seventh-round draft pick for the Patriots in 2009 and was used originally as a kick returner despite having played quarterback in college. He was an afterthought in the receiver corps until Coach Belichick parted ways with Wes Welker, one of the team’s biggest stars, in 2013. Edelman filled Welker’s role in the slot and developed into one of the most beloved members of the Patriots and a close friend to Tom. Brady’s return in the Cleveland game had special meaning for Edelman.
“The moment was exciting,” Edelman told the authors of this book. “Your quarterback hasn’t been out there for four weeks and you now get to have him. It’s always gonna be exciting. He had a great game and that tells you he had a great week of practice. He was just being Tom out there.”110
The chains moved and Brady and his squad marched up to the line of scrimmage again.
He took his second snap, made a quick read, and threw another perfect pass over the middle to Gronkowski, who took it nineteen yards to the Patriots’ 49. Next, running back LeGarrette Blount took a handoff and rocketed through a gaping hole for thirteen yards. Next was a short pass for two yards to Martellus Bennett.
Brady was in the groove.
After a short incompletion to running back James White, Brady took a shotgun snap and hit Gronkowski over the middle again, this time for a thirty-four-yard completion that moved the Patriots to the Browns’ 2. Two plays later, Blount found the end zone. It was a classic Tom Brady drive, executed with surgical precision, going eighty yards in eight plays in just 3:13.
Number 12 torched the Browns all afternoon, racking up gaudy stats: twenty-eight for forty, for 406 yards and three touchdowns. A signature moment came in the third quarter when Brady called his own number on a third and four from the Patriots’ 31-yard line. He rambled for four hard-fought yards and took a hard smack from beefy defensive end Emmanuel Ogbah.
Brady popped up quickly and emphatically made the first-down signal with his arm, firing up Patriots fans again.
When the thrashing was over, New England had posted a 33–13 win, a score that would suggest the game was closer than it actually was. The league was on notice.
“I mean, it’s Tom Brady, so you don’t expect anything less,” Edelman told reporters in the locker room postgame.
“He was fired up, we were fired up to have him back out there, and we were just trying to make plays for him,” added Bennett, who caught three scores.111
The media had a field day with the gridiron beatdown and Brady’s near-perfect performance. Pundits used all sorts of superlatives for the game and seized on the redemption narrative. Some were already calling the season Brady’s scorched-earth tour. Others called it the revenge tour. But, per usual, for number 12, the game wasn’t a perfect effort.
“I think there was plenty of rust out there,” he said in his postgame press conference.
“[We] got the WD-40 out for him,” Bennett said.
“He didn’t look rusty to me,” new Patriots receiver Chris Hogan observed.
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