Tom Brady On Where Resilience Comes From
2017 was one of the most challenging seasons of Brady’s career. To make it through, he put faith in his process.
Welcome! We're continuing to examine every new episode of Man in the Arena to better understand what each of Tom Brady's Super Bowl seasons can teach us about the nature of competition—and of life. This week, we're talking about the Patriots' 2017 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles. We have one more episode to break down before the series takes a break. Stay tuned for more!
There’s an aspect of Tom Brady’s story that seems storybook, a little too perfect. He’s the good looking guy who came off the bench and won a Super Bowl in his first season, only to tear off a decades-long run of dominance that still hasn’t ended. “I often hear people say, ‘Tom’s a cyborg,’ or, ‘He’s not built like everybody else,” says Alex Guerrero, Brady’s longtime personal trainer. But in the newest episode of our series Man in the Arena, now streaming on ESPN+, that perfect veneer is slightly soiled. An “eerie feeling” fell over the Patriots in 2017, according to beloved tight end Rob Gronkowski. “Everyday it felt like there was some type of dark cloud over what we were trying to accomplish for one reason or another,” describes Brady.
There was a slow start, then the Jimmy Garoppolo trade. Reporters wrote of palace intrigue in Foxboro. Guerrero got his sideline passes revoked, and then was repeatedly called a “snake oil salesman” on national TV. Gronkowski was suspended for a dirty late hit. Brady sliced his hand open in the middle of the playoffs. “More and more, I think the joy was being taken away,” Brady remembered, “Because it wasn’t about football anymore.”
And yet, the Patriots still made it to Super Bowl LII, finishing a Hail Mary short against the Philadelphia Eagles. The season was something of a masterclass in staying present, tuning out the noise to focus on the task at hand. As Guerrero said, “The one thing I learned from Tom over the years is he has an unbelievable way at not looking in the rearview mirror.”
But even if he wasn’t looking to the past, Brady wasn’t forgetting it, either. In many ways, 2017 was a culmination of decades of Brady’s navigating the NFL. Here, we see Brady having to lean on all the lessons he had gathered over the years and actually apply them. While rumors swirled that he no longer wanted to be in New England, Brady burrowed himself in his routine. When he was without his tight end, he kept watching film to find new flaws in the defense. When he sliced his hand, he trusted his team to get him healthy enough to play. “His ability to play with joy on any given Sunday is really based on his ability to find joy in the week leading up to the game,” says Guerrero. In other words, Brady relished the work. When everything felt like it was collapsing around him, he trusted that what had worked before would work again.
That’s where resilience comes from—not just from gritting your teeth and powering through but from seeing what worked before, tweaking your approach accordingly, and trusting your process and those around you.
Adversity? Brady had been there before. “I’ll go prove them wrong again,” Brady said. “They didn’t learn their lesson last year, obviously. Or they didn’t learn their lesson the year before that, or they didn’t learn their lesson the year before that.”
They might not have learned their lessons, but Brady sure did.
Now Streaming: Man in the Arena Podcast
In addition to the docuseries, we’re also producing a Man in the Arena podcast, in which Gotham Chopra explores two decades of Brady’s career through the eyes of the fans and haters, those inside and outside of the arena. Each episode grapples with the ways in which Brady has altered our understanding of sports. In episode eight, Gotham peels back the corner on Brady’s social media accounts, to show how someone who started his career before social media came to be so masterful on it. Is it really possible to share an authentic version of yourself online?
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“Football has been that meditative place for me in my life. It’s been that place where I could control what the outcome was.”
– Tom Brady