Tom Brady belongs in sports’ all-time pantheon, but he isn’t alone. He has company | Opinion
Here is what Tom Brady was doing Sunday night when the Super Bowl was won, really won:
He was watching, on the sideline. He was marveling, like the rest of us, as his defense spent the entire game hounding Patrick Mahomes without relent and forcing the worst game of his young professional career.
That was the difference and what defined the Tampa Bay Bucs’ 31-9 pounding of the Kansas City Chiefs. It was not Brady’s excellence, which we have spent 20 years assuming. It was the utter erasure of Mahomes as any factor in the game. It was seeing Wonder Boy hopeless and hapless for the first time.
I say this not to diminish what Brady has done by even an iota, but to remind that football is the ultimate team sport in a way that baseball and basketball are not.
It is worth noting as we read and hear the breathless anointing now of Brady as the greatest ever in the history of sports. As if Sunday night settled that, and removed any room for argument.
What Brady is is the most accomplished, decorated quarterback or player at any position in the history of the NFL. He just won his seventh Super Bowl. The most by any one franchise is six. Fathom that.
But Brady was the quarterback G.O.A.T. even before Sunday added yet more blingy of trophy room. His place in sports history hardly needed Sunday, and needs no hyperbole. The plain facts speak.
(Remember facts? Those are provable statements on which all of us could agree, back before the simple concept of truth somehow became the stuff of controversy).
Ten Super Bowls. Seven championships. Five Super Bowl MVPs.
Staggering, those facts. It’s Tom, then a canyonesque gulf, and then second place. Nobody else has come close in the 55-year era of the Super Bowl, and nobody will be close 55 years from now. No, not even the anointed prince put in his place Sunday by the old king.
Brady allowed Bill Belichick to be seen as a coaching god. They parted. One was a champion, again, while the other could only watch from afar.
The Miami Dolphins spent most of this century waiting for Brady to go away, or at least to start acting his age. Finally, he changed uniforms but at 43 remains great as ever -- the longevity, the defiance of age, as impressive as those seven rings or any other passing records he holds.
Still, though, the collective need now by the media to place Brady above all others, any sport, any time, is unnecessary, not to mention impossible, because it compares what cannot be compared.
Is Brady a greater athlete than Michael Jordan or LeBron James? Of course not. But is he greater because he helped win more championships? Maybe?
Wait, but Bill Russell won 11. Eleven!
Jim Thorpe and Jesse Owens defined what athleticism was, a long, long time ago. So did a woman named Babe Didrikson Zaharias.
How bigger would Jim Brown’s legend be today had he not played when we watched on black-and-white TVs and before ESPN “SportsCenter” was around to celebrate and magnify greatness tenfold?
We just lost Hank Aaron, the greatest home run hitter of all time who did it clean.
What might Negro League stars such as Satchel Paige or Josh Gibson have become had the majors let them in?
Wayne Gretzky — he was pretty good. Even without social media around.
Tiger Woods and Serena Williams have chased history, and are chasing it still, and doing it all by themselves, no teammates to help.
Michael Phelps and Simone Biles, also alone, only got one shot once every four years to take on the world, and did with unprecedented triumph. Just as Carl Lewis had done.
Before Lionel Messi there was Diego Maradona and before him, Pele’.
Muhammad Ali taught us that more than rings or dominance in a ring went into true, epic stature in sports. Personality matters, too. So does societal impact.
For that, Jackie Robinson’s name echoes profoundly for eternity.
Greatness is greatness, no matter the time, the place, the sport or the uniform worn. There is no use parsing it, because greatness, like beauty, cannot be quantified, and rests in the eye of the beholder.
History will see Brady as his sport’s best quarterback and most accomplished champion — of his time and all time.
He will be welcomed with honors into that ultimate, exclusive high pantheon of sports legends, where only the best of the best of any generation are invited.
But Brady will not be alone there. He will look around and be in awe of the company he keeps.
This story was originally published February 8, 2021 at 11:35 AM.
