Saturday, February 1, 2025

From Goat to Armchair Quarterback

 











New Yorker - "Tom Brady, Armchair Quarterback"

"This persona is apparent in the career of one of Brady’s chief on-field rivals, Peyton Manning. Manning is from good Southern football stock—his father, Archie, was a quarterback for the New Orleans Saints, his brother Eli was the scrappy, courageous leader of the New York Giants, and his nephew Arch will soon be drafted into the N.F.L.—but his excellence seemed well earned. His game was full of minute adjustments and quick decisions; he was famous for how encyclopedically he could master any playbook you threw at him. Nowadays, he owns a production company whose main product is “Manningcast,” an ESPN2 show that Peyton hosts with Eli. As they watch football games and chat, Peyton comes across as a great hang, an enlightened good old boy. He doesn’t seem driven by demons or a need to dominate anyone. It’s easy to understand why his teammates all seemed to like him so much.

Brady, though, has a fishier personality and a cooler eye. His closest likeness isn’t to other quarterbacks but to the basketball superstar Kobe Bryant, who, five years ago, died in a helicopter crash at a woefully early age. Like Bryant—who turned his gym-rat nature into a tall-tale mythos like that of Paul Bunyan—Brady likes to talk about his work ethic, about how desperately he needs to win and how far he’s willing to go to fill the void. Brady, in his own telling, holds on to small slights and inflates them just enough to fuel himself to victory. “I was always kind of motivated by people that say, ‘You can’t do it,’ ” he once told his fellow ex-player Michael Strahan on “Good Morning America.” All he needs is a snippet of smack talk, the hint of an insult, or even a cross look to make him mad enough to reach the end zone. If the classic quarterback, embodied by Manning, accomplished his exploits through the force of good will, Brady—a progenitor and a product of today’s so-called hustle culture—needs grist for irritation to reach his true heights."

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