In a post-match interview, Brady blushed, his hair messy like a kid from the playground. He was informed that Madden insisted before the final drive of the game that the Patriots should play conservatively and decide on overtime.
“Maden was worried you were going to do something stupid,” one reporter said.
Brady, 24, looked injured at first. Then he thought about what he had just done.
Smiling, Brady said that Madden, the game’s most famous at the time, was wrong. Brady added: “I can say that, right?”
He could say almost anything he wanted in that moment and for the next twenty years. Brady’s stardom and football wizardry were deeply intertwined with the narrative of the cultural monolith that the NFL would transform over his career.
Brady retired on Tuesday, The last simple gesture in his legendary professional football life was so complex, productive, triumphant, and involved that he became one of America’s best-known—and sometimes humiliated—people.
Typically calm on the court and stylish off the court, he started more NFL games, won more championships, broke more records than nearly any of his peers, and was somehow embroiled in multiple scandals that ended with the “-gate” suffix. Mostly he let go of his hair on goosebumps. Brady will take his place in a separate wing of the North American pantheon of sports giants reserved for Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, Serena Williams, Babe Ruth, Wayne Gretzky and others.
Perhaps longer than anyone else, he was the face of the NFL at a time when the league had achieved elite status among sports played in the United States.