Tom Brady Retires Without Any Doubts
What a fable about a Chinese farmer can teach us about the greatest QB of all-time.
When I woke up on Wednesday and saw the news that Tom Brady had retired, I thought about farmers. Specifically, I recalled a story Brady has told before—including once in a hotel room the day before Super Bowl LIII against the Los Angeles Rams, a game that the Patriots would go on to win. Tom had invited one of our other co-founders, Gotham Chopra, to catch up before the game. They chatted while Brady stretched, and then, out of nowhere, Brady started talking about a proverb he had first learned from the writer Alan Watts.
Brady described a farmer in China whose horse ran away. Soon, the farmer was surrounded by neighbors giving their sympathies. “That’s horrible that your horse ran away,” they told him, and the farmer only responded, “Maybe.”
The next day, Brady said, the horse came back—with ten other wild horses. The neighbors returned, too. “How lucky that you have 10 new horses!” they said. Again, the farmer said only, “Maybe.”
Another day went by. Now, the farmer’s son was working to break the wild horses when he was bucked off and broke a leg. Here came the neighbors: “What a terrible thing to happen to your boy!” The farmer replied, “Maybe.”
Brady said that when the farmer woke up the next morning, the army had come to town. There was a war, and all young men were being drafted into service. But when they visited the farmer’s house, they saw that his son had a broken leg and could not serve. “What a blessing!” they said.
Maybe.
Any measure of success is the product of a unique alchemy of luck and circumstance, and if anything in the potion was the slightest bit off, maybe Brady’s story wouldn’t have ended how it did. This was a difficult season—on the field and off—but even so, Brady led his team to last minute victories and a playoff berth. He retires this week with his head held high, without any lingering questions of what-if.
But there remains that affirmation of maybe, begging us to remember just how impossible it has been to predict the events of Brady’s 23-year career. You can encode so much of the Brady’s story onto the fable of the Chinese farmer, but perhaps most of all, it reminded me of the loss to the Giants in Super Bowl XLII, when the Patriots suffered their only defeat of the season.
After the game, as Tom walked to the team bus, rain poured down. Phoenix averages only nine inches of rain a year, but that night, it poured. “We’re sitting there on the bus in the pitch black,” remembered Brady in our series Man in the Arena. “Everyone is just sitting there dead quiet. Our hearts were broken.”
Brady said that in the weeks that followed, he couldn’t sleep, taking ownership for the loss. And then he started to imagine a different outcome.
“Had we won that game, I don’t know,” Brady told us, pausing. “I’m not a big hypothetical guy, but maybe the desire is a little bit different. If you’re looking at a silver lining, maybe the desire to reach that point, maybe I would’ve been fulfilled not to stop playing at that time, but I don’t know. Maybe I’d play another seven or eight years and I’m fulfilled.”
Maybe none of this would have happened at all.
Congrats, #12. What a ride it’s been.
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