Recalling How Long-Shot Tom Brady Learned to Believe as a Wolverine
Now considered the GOAT in football, Brady has retired, and personal recollections of covering him before all the greatness ensued provides perspective on his unprecedented accomplishments
Photo Courtesy of University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library
By Steve Kornacki
ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Tom Brady retired today with an Instagram post, having begun his NFL career four years before Facebook was founded. He was playing for the New England Patriots before the 9/11 tragedies, before some players he was competing against this year were even born.
Longevity combined with unprecedented achievements was quite a formula for success, wasn’t it?
Brady won seven Super Bowls and threw for 84,520 yards and 624 touchdowns in 22 seasons. He’s No. 1 in each of those categories. The guy threw for 48 miles! The distance from Ann Arbor to Detroit is 42 miles. So, imagine throwing your way all the way down Interstate-94 between those cities, and then crossing the Ambassador Bridge for another half dozen miles into Ontario.
Brady blows your mind with all he did.
Twenty-seven years have passed since his football coach at Junipero Serra High in San Mateo, Calif., handed me the phone to talk with Tom, who told me he was going to the University of Michigan. Little did I know just how much he would accomplish.
And, a few years ago, during Wolverine coach Jim Harbaugh’s “Signing of the Stars” extravaganza at Hill Auditorium, Brady came back. I was writing for the University of Michigan Athletic Department’s MGoBlue.com, and got five to 10 minutes with Tom. He volunteered that he remembered me and cracked that comforting and assuring smile of his. Whether he was just being nice, who knows? But it sure made me feel good.
That exchange is an example of why Brady is such a great leader. He greeted every rookie entering the locker room this way: “Hello, I’m Tom Brady.” As if they didn’t know. But he approached anyone he spent time with like they were the most important person in his life for that moment.
When he committed to the Wolverines, I was writing for the Detroit Free Press. Tom told me he loved the Michigan tradition, coaching staff and recent development of NFL quarterbacks Elvis Grbac and Todd Collins. I asked about him signing with a baseball team because he was a great catcher, too. But he said he wanted to play football in Ann Arbor, and stayed true to that even after the Montreal Expos drafted him.
As a freshman in 1995, playing for Hall of Fame Coach Lloyd Carr, Brady’s name was fifth on the depth chart behind Scott Dreisbach, Brian Griese, Jason Carr and Scott Loeffler.
Brady played behind future NFL starters Dreisbach and Griese – who led the Wolverines to the 1997 national championship. Then he had to beat out blue-chip recruit Drew Henson of nearby Brighton – who was acclaimed as the greatest quarterback the state had produced since Michigan All-America Rick Leach.
Loeffler, now the head coach at Bowling Green, had about as much talent as anyone but he got hurt. Carr, the son of the head coach, now has a quarterback son of his own, C.J. Carr, a sophomore at Saline High who just might be the greatest quarterback prospect in the state since Henson.
So, Brady has played so long that the circle of life enters into our story.
And yet, none of this seemed possible back in 1997 and 1998, his junior and senior seasons. Tom built up some serious doubt in playing behind so many at his position.
Greg Harden, a long-time athletic department counselor, told me this about Brady when he knocked on his office door at Weidenbach Hall: “He was borderline depressed and as skinny as a rail. He was a tad bit distraught, and we began to talk about how important it was for him to believe in himself even though nobody else was.”
Brady was recovering from acute appendicitis, had lost 20 pounds, and had dropped out of serious contention for the job. However, Tom began believing over several years of counseling and developing a friendship with Harden.
Harden recalled how Brady would look to the sideline and coaches any time he made a mistake in a game, expecting to get pulled or scolded. But eventually, he gained confidence in himself and was voted captain by his teammates as a fifth-year senior in 1999.
Brady threw for 369 yards and four touchdowns with zero interceptions to lead Michigan to a 35-34 overtime win over Alabama in his final game for the maize and blue, one Harden termed the “signature game” of his college career.
Harden said, “When he finishes here, he is clear about who he is, where he is going, and what it will take for him to get there.”
Remember that they didn’t sell those No. 10 Brady jerseys when he played in Ann Arbor. Those began selling like hotcakes years later, when he became a pro phenomenon.
Brady was a three-time NFL MVP and a five-time Super Bowl MVP, and he returned to address the Wolverines in the full-team meeting room in 2013 to tell them being elected captain at Michigan was the greatest honor he had ever received.
His greatest pro moment – unless you favor winning it all with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at age 43 – came Feb. 6, 2017. Brady’s Patriots were down, 28-3, to the Atlanta Falcons. They won, 34-28, in overtime for the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history. Brady threw for 246 of his 466 yards in the fourth quarter, and in OT led an eight-play, 75-yard march capped by a two-yard touchdown run by James White.
And he became the GOAT off of that game, playing five full years while holding that title.
That belief he gained at Michigan only strengthened along the way.
Brady decided to call it a career in that lengthy Instagram post:
“This is difficult for me to write, but here it goes: I am not going to make that competitive commitment anymore. I have loved my NFL career, and now it is time to focus my time and energy on other things that require my attention.
“I’ve done a lot of reflecting the past week and have asked myself difficult questions. And I am so proud of what we have achieved. My teammates, coaches, fellow competitors, and fans deserve 100% of me, but right now, it’s best I leave the field of play to the next generation of dedicated and committed athletes.”
So, he’s going to be able to focus on his wife, Gisele Bundchen, and three young children. He’s stepped aside and passed the torch.
And I have this deep hope that someday Tom returns to coach his Wolverines. That seems like a reach for someone so lofty, and one former All-America player I discussed it with said he couldn’t see it happening.
But, then, Thomas Edward Patrick Brady, wasn’t supposed to even become a starter at his alma mater. That was a long-shot. Seems laughable now, doesn’t it?
If there was one thing he established in over a quarter-century of excelling in football, it was that you can never count him out.
For more on Brady at Michigan, read the chapter “Tom Brady: Learning to Believe in Himself,” in “Miracle Moments in Michigan Wolverines Football History” by Derek Kornacki and Steve Kornacki, Skyhorse Publishing, NYC, 2018.
E-mail me at sgkornacki@yahoo.com if you’re interested in acquiring an author-signed copy.
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