SATURDAY MORNING, Tom Brady and Bill Belichick alone, one last skull session before game day. This happened about 10 years ago, during the decade-long championship drought in New England, when the Patriots were trying to regain lost magic, when we the first he began to think that maybe Brady was up there. Belichick was watching Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez’s movie and started on a certain song. Sanchez was heading to the right, chased by defenders, unbalanced and trying to survive, and had an open receiver down the field – 65 meters deep and 10 or so diagonally, on the opposite hashmark. It was a throw that only a few defenders in history could try, much less complete – a fact that seemed lost to the greatest coach in the history of modern football.
“Throw it away,” Belichick said. – You’ll only be open.
Brady was distrustful. I couldn’t throw him 85 meters! he believed.
“Just let him go,” Belichick added.
Let it go? Brady thought, laughing to himself. The ball would go 15 meters if I threw it.
Years after Brady told me this story, she stays with me. Not only because it is rich to imagine a lifelong defensive coach who fails to understand – or refuses to care – the degree of difficulty in an almost impossible throw. Because of what Brady told me after describing the moment: “When I see a play, I see it within my limits.”
BRADY’S WORDS WERE hard to buy then and they are harder to buy now. For most of his two-decade career, both his fans and detractors felt that anything was possible for Tom Brady. After the Tampa Bay Buccaneers beat the Green Bay Packers to go to the Super Bowl, Bruce Arians said it best: “The belief he gave this organization that it can be done – it only took one man”.