Brady's foot provides much-needed QB intrigue
Posted: Tuesday, January 22, 2008 5:30 PM
Football is a lot more fun when quarterbacks are bachelor celebrities. It’s a truth most football fans weren’t even aware of, there not having been one worthy of that designation since Broadway Joe Namath was sampling blondes and winning the Super Bowl nearly 40 years ago.
The sad truth is that quarterbacks as a breed are a pretty dull lot. As exciting as they may be on the field, they tend to marry young and stay at home during their off hours, watching film, studying game plans and getting their rest. As a rule, quarterbacks are probably the dullest athletes in all of sports, a group that makes fly fishermen seem wild and crazy.
Lucky for us, Tom Brady isn’t one of that ilk. If he had been, there’d have been no story and video this morning of him hobbling to his supermodel girlfriend’s house with a bouquet of flowers in hand and a walking cast on his foot.
Nor would there have been a backpage headline in The New York Post calling the Patriots’ quarterback a “girlie man” and asking, “Who’s afraid of Tom Brady now?’ The Post even superimposed a red circle over Brady’s right foot in the photograph, just in case the paper’s readers couldn’t tell which foot they were supposed to look at.
And without the angst of seeing Brady limping in a video on TMZ.com, how could we have experienced the relief of learning later in the day that he’d been out clubbing with Giselle “The Brady” Bundchen sans cast and sans limp?
Brady is no Namath. Nobody is, and no quarterback probably ever will be again. In Namath’s day, football players could spend Saturday sipping martinis and still win on Sunday. Players didn’t life weights then, and game plans weren’t nearly as sophisticated as they are today. If you could stagger out there and fling it deep and on target, you could win. But try living like Namath today, and you’ll be out of the league before training camp’s over.
But at least he had a bit of a social life. And, while you have to feel good for Eli Manning shaking his critics and getting into the big game, you can only wonder how much fun this week would have been had the Cowboys made it and we could have had dueling back pages, with Brady on one and Tony Romo and Jessica Simpson on the other. Of course, in that case, The Post wouldn’t have taken nearly as much interest in it, so the celebrity sniffers are actually better off this way.
I have no idea why we care who Brady is dating or what he’s doing on his days off. I suppose some of it is jealousy. Mostly, as Joel Sherman of The Post once observed, it’s probably because too many of us find other people’s lives more interesting than our own.
There’s probably a bit of Puritanism in there, too, the fear, as H.L. Mencken noted, that somebody, somewhere might be having fun. And if they are, we’ll do what we can to put an end to it.
Clearly, there’s nothing seriously wrong with Brady’s foot. Nor is there anything wrong with his social life. And we know that come Feb. 3, no one on the field will be more prepared or more focused than he.
So in the meantime, enjoy the show. Because come Feb. 4, it’s back to Britney Spears for the rest of us.
