Tom Brady-Selfish, Egotistical, Self-Centered?

I honestly thought my opinion on this matter was an unarguable no-brainer — that Tom Brady, supposedly the Greatest (football player) Of All Time (GOAT in today’s vernacular), is selfish, egotistical, and self-centered to the point of allowing his needs to destroy his marriage and family.

However, as I was researching information for this article, I read a comment on a Tom Brady news article citing the exact opposite of my opinion. Who would have thought? It gave me a different perspective on the situation, but it DID NOT change my mind.

At the end of last year’s football season, he announced his retirement from the game of football at which he excelled far beyond anyone who had ever played. Hard-core football statisticians and experts can debate who is really the GOAT, but let’s give him his due. As the New England Patriot’s primary starting quarterback for 18 seasons, Brady led the Patriots to 17 division titles (including 11 consecutive from 2009 to 2019), 13 AFC Championship Games (including eight consecutive from 2011 to 2018), nine Super Bowl appearances, and six Super Bowl titles, all NFL records for a player and franchise. He then followed that up with a move to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a franchise that had only won ONE super bowl in its 45-year history as a team. In his first year with the Buccaneers, Brady delivered a Super Bowl win, an unprecedented accomplishment.

It was the perfect end to a spectacular career. No one could have gone out on a better starship. Well-deserved accolades started pouring in, as well as they should have, given the enormity of his accomplishments.

And then………………he changed his mind. He apparently could not bear to live without football. I won’t go into the psychological implications of the hypnotic, obsessive, addictive, competitive personalities that are the trademark of many successful professional athletes, but he is apparently their poster child and was unable to imagine a life without football.

At what price? His wife has made it clear that she is done sacrificing the needs of their family for his football career. And yet, here he is, taking to the field once again.

Is football so important to him that he is willing to sacrifice his family? A wife who has stood by his ambition for 13 years, shouldering the childcare and family get-togethers, birthdays, holidays? Yes, I know they are super wealthy and can afford help with the children that ordinary people cannot. That’s not the point. A wife and children want their father in their lives.

At the end of his life, will one of his trophies be holding his hand and whispering to him how much it loved him and will miss him? When age inevitably catches up with him, regardless of his strict diet and exercise regimen and his body rebels at the abuse it has taken on the football field, will it be his trophies or his wife and children who help him transfer from a chair to his wheelchair, wheel his walker to him? Hand him his cane?

You can argue that he is teaching his children the importance of setting goals, working towards them, and achieving them. For how long? To what extent? To the destruction of his family?

You can go out in a blaze of glory, Tom. Those lessons of goal setting, work ethic, and achievement have been well learned by your children. You have nothing else to prove except that now you can be present in their lives to guide them, cheer them on, BE WITH THEM. Demonstrate how much you love their mother by acquiescing to her wishes after she acquiesced to yours for 13 years.

I read an article that discussed how during the early years of his marriage, he gave his all to football during the season, and in the off-season, he spent his time ensconced in more football…..training, reading, practicing….. until Giselle put her foot down and showed him the error of his ways. She managed to get through to him that he needed to be present as a husband and father during the off-season. For a while, he “got it” and did what she asked — gave more of himself to the family during the off-season.

Let me interject a little story from my own life. My husband, who you know from my writings, I adored, was a workaholic. He came from the “old school” that a husband’s job was to provide for the family. It was not his job to stay up nights with a crying baby or work as a parenting “partner” as is common today. I worked hard to teach him otherwise, and to his credit, he tried, but work was his priority, and after 70-hour work weeks, there was little time to play with our son or help me with his care.

For years, I told him that a child’s time at home is short; it goes by in a flash; someday Joel would move away, and Sid would regret the times he was working instead of being with his son.

So it was in May of 1997, 2 months before Joel’s 23rd birthday, that he moved to San Francisco, 3000 miles from home. My husband sat at the kitchen table and sobbed. He could not bear the thought or adjust to the fact that his son would be so far from home, and he would barely get to see him.

I had no sympathy or empathy for my husband for the first time in our married life. I was angry. I reminded him that I had been warning him of this day for 20 years, and now it was his to deal with. Far too late, with the damage long done, he agreed that I had been right all along. He should have spent more time with his son and less on a career that had nothing to give him when he developed Alzheimer’s Disease.

I ask again, dear Tom, is a football career that has nothing left to prove worth losing your family?

The other side of this coin which I referred to in the beginning, is that a commenter said that Giselle knew Tom’s love of football when she married him, and she should just get used to the idea that he should do what he loves at the expense of her and their children. I strongly disagree. She has given him his chance to shine, and he shone brighter than all the stars in the universe. Isn’t that enough for him?

What do you think? Is Tom Brady a selfish, self-centered, egotist who cares more for his own needs than those of his family? I honestly want to hear your opinion, whether you agree with me or not. And if not, I would like to hear your reasons.

NOTE: I lived in New England for 58 years of my life. 36 of those years were in the Boston area. I lived through the worst of times — when the Patriots were the laughingstock of the football world. When they couldn’t win a game if the other team didn’t show up. My husband never gave up hope. And then it happened. Quarterback Drew Bledsoe was injured; a young backup quarterback named Tom Brady replaced him, and………….the rest is history. So I have watched it all from the beginning. I take nothing away from Brady’s accomplishments. But I still ask — When is enough enough? And at what price? Is it worth losing your family over a career that has nothing left to prove?

Resources:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tom-Brady

Google

Wikipedia

Boston Globe

Originally published in Medium publication - Illumination- Curated

©2022 Joan Gershman