10 years ago, the St. Louis Rams were the presumptive favorites to win the Super Bowl. That Rams rolled over opponents with 30- and 40-point performances. Getting the Lombardi Trophy back in 2001 after winning it two years before seemed all but inevitable.
10 Years Of Tom Brady, The Face Of A Decade
New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady burst onto the national scene ten years ago. This year, he’s looking to lead his team back to the greatness that was once assumed.
Instead, the Rams ran into the New England Patriots and Tom Brady, the team and the quarterback that would become the new inevitable. Brady's arrival on the playoff scene came 10 years ago this month and his story was one somewhat typical of NFL superstars.
He got his big break in the second game of the regular season, after Jets linebacker Mo Lewis rearranged Drew Bledsoe's organs. Through the next 14 games of the 2001 season, Brady twice led overtime drives that gave the Patriots an 11-5 record, their first AFC East crown since 1997 and an improbable championship that ushered in a decade identified by Tom Brady and the Patriots.
In his introduction to the national scene, Tom Brady beat Kurt Warner. In league full of Horatio Alger stories, Warner's was right out of central casting. He was every American schlub who dreamed of something better than putting canned peas on the shelves in the dimly lit nowhere parts of America. Tom Brady was different. Sure, he has his own bootstraps story, but that's not what made him the face of a decade.
Brady, then 24, was thrust into action in the second week of the NFL season, a week delayed after four hijacked airplanes collapsed the notion of our exceptionalism. Shocked and grappling with our national identity, Americans received their marching orders: spend like you are the exception.
But the truth was, we didn’t know what to do. We weren’t sure of ourselves anymore because our national identity was smoldering in lower Manhattan. The Zeitgeist wrapped around celebrity because it was suddenly an exalted and obtainable ideal. More importantly, it was a means for dealing with the unimaginable concept of our vulnerability.
Take away the stats, the Xs and Os and the scouting reports and boil pro football down to its essence; it’s entertainment with mass appeal. Like Hollywood movies, the NFL depends on its audience’s ability to identify with players, the characters in the story. Brady the brilliant quarterback and international celebrity was the archetype for the last decade.
Some NFL superstars get photographed back on campus, yukking it up with an old coach and a gaggle of boosters. Their publicists get them in front of cameras connecting to their everyman roots, something out of the same genre as clearing brush on the ranch.
Endorsement deals further the trend. “Hey, he plays backyard football in a crisp pair of $30 jeans, just like me.”
Brady’s different. He married an actress, and later graduated to a super model. He gets photographed at Fashion Week in Paris. He has dinner with Karl Lagerfield. His ads for razors remind you that it’s important to look good, while other razor pitchmen from the world of sports just offer you a comfortable way to satisfy a workplace requirement. He even laughed off, rightly so, pleated front pants for men.
It’s important to remember that Brady earned his status. He’s really good at what does, and the numbers reflect that. He joined the league’s elite quarterbacks in the exclusive 5,000-yard club this season. He’s led his team to four Super Bowls, winning three of them. He owns the record for the most touchdowns in a single season with 50 in 2007. Brady’s own struggles to get where he was, while far less dramatic than Warner’s, didn’t matter because he played during an epoch where people paid no attention to history in the pursuit of assumed greatness.
The same year he set the record four touchdowns, Brady and the Patriots rolled up a 16-0 record, headed toward an inevitable fourth campionship. But something happened.
New England was upended the same year we awoke from the dream life. The team of the decade was supplanted with chaos. Brady ripped up his knee in the first game of the 2008 season, spending the year on the sidelines with most wondering whether or not his golden days had ended too.
This year, Tom Brady had one of the best seasons of his career, but he didn’t garner the attention that he once did. Other players had great seasons too, but the deflation in national confidence gave us a preference once again for heroes with more warts. It’s less about the records now than it is about the jabs and knockdowns taken along the way. Statistics be damned.
The Patriots take the field on Saturday night still looking for their first playoff win since taking claiming the AFC Championship for the 2007 season. The odds make them the presumptive favorites to represent the AFC in the Super Bowl, largely because Tom Brady is playing as good as he ever did.
Even if Tom Brady does win his fourth championship ring, he’ll be just another ugly American, a guy who has taken his fair share of lumps to get back to that place. And he’ll go on being a celebrity, photographed in the tent at Bryant Park while we wait to identify the archetype for the next decade, if there is one.
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