The Chinese Fable That Inspires Tom Brady
How a Chinese farmer, wild horses, and an English philosopher led Brady to his sixth Super Bowl.
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' 2018 victory over the Los Angeles Rams.
Let’s start today’s newsletter in a hotel room. Tom Brady’s hotel room to be exact. It’s the day before Super Bowl LIII in Atlanta. He’s doing his Tom Brady thing, getting massaged. And then he starts telling a story. He learned it from the philosopher Alan Watts. It’s a fable.
Brady describes a farmer in China whose horse ran away. Soon, the farmer is surrounded by neighbors giving their sympathies. “That’s horrible that your horse ran away,” they tell him, and the farmer only responds, “Maybe.”
The next day, the horse comes back—with ten other wild horses. The neighbors come back, too. “How lucky that you have 10 new horses!” they say. Again, the farmer says only, “Maybe.”
Another day goes by. Now, the farmer’s son is working to break the wild horses when he’s bucked off and breaks a leg. Here come the neighbors: “What a terrible thing to happen to your boy!” The farmer replies, “Maybe.”
When the farmer wakes up the next morning, the army has come to town. There’s a war, and all young men are being drafted into service. But when they visit the farmer’s house, they see that his son has a broken leg and cannot serve. The neighbors tell the farmer what a lucky break his son has had, but one more time the farmer only says, “Maybe.”
Brady told the story to director Gotham Chopra in that hotel room hours before taking on the Los Angeles Rams in the Super Bowl. Chopra was so struck by the scene of a Hall of Fame quarterback recalling philosophy (“I was like - holy shit, are you serious?” he remembered on Twitter this week) that he had Brady retell the fable of the Chinese farmer to begin the latest episode of Man in the Arena, our new series out now on ESPN+.
“We don’t have the perspective of what’s going to happen in the future, and when we don’t have the perspective, we don’t understand whether the things that happen in our life are good or bad,” explains Brady, which covers the 2018 season, a period during which the quarterback’s relationship with the Patriots was beginning to become untenable. By the end of the episode, the blue tones that have tinted the entire series turn red. Brady has left New England.
A younger Brady might not have handled the breakup quite so well. But what’s revealed in the story of the Chinese farmer is just how important Brady’s ability to keep things in perspective has been in maintaining his career over two decades. “It’s really a shift in the mind,” he says. “You go from being a victim to being empowered by the fact that you went through something difficult, and you learned something.”
That’s such a powerful idea, and over the past nine episodes, it’s staggering to be reminded just how often Brady has translated defeat into victory. Discussing the sluggish beginning of the 2018 season, Brady says, “If you’re 2-2 and haven’t learned anything, then frankly, you have a problem.”
Everyone says that losses are the worst thing that can happen to a football team. During that regular season, they thought New England was finished. Former wide receiver Nate Burleson on Good Morning Football said at the time, “The Patriots are not going to make the Super Bowl this year.”
And how did Brady respond to that? He shrugged his shoulders, and he said, “Maybe.”
Then he went out and won one more Super Bowl.
Man in the Arena is taking a pause before the tenth episode—chronicling Brady’s first year in Tampa Bay—will be released this Spring. That means that starting next week, this newsletter will be back to its regular scheduled programming of sharing the most inspiring stories from across sports. See you then!
– Joe Levin
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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. Episode nine is an unexpected one, but it just might be my favorite one yet, asking the question: How has Brady impacted the other football, a.k.a. soccer? Featuring Brendan Hunt (who plays Ted Lasso's Coach Beard), the Men In Blazer's Roger Bennett, and Tottenham Hotspur star Harry Kane, Gotham goes searching for answers.
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If you’re ever in Kansas City, you must go. But even if you’re not, there’s an amazing new way to support the museum. In honor of the 100th anniversary of the Negro Leagues, the U.S. Mint will release a handful of coins, made of silver and gold, that feature some of the most important figures in baseball history—including Jackie Robinson and Rube Foster, who created the Negro Leagues a century ago. Check out the coins here—proceeds support the museum.
Mike Ehrmann / Getty Images
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– Tom Brady