Time was, Brady carried a certain swagger that the winner of three Super Bowls in four seasons affords a quarterback, and with it, a celebrity status not usually seen from a 6th round draft pick - full of pomp and circumstance, the product of the University of Michigan started his professional career on the fast track.
Coach Bill Belichick surrounding the young fire-pisser with a fine supporting cast and providing him with a defense that was feared league-wide - Brady's career started in reverse, stepping into a leadership role on a team ready-made to win now...
...then attrition robbed him of weapon after weapon, yet he had grown in his role to the point that he could take any group of veteran cast-offs and has-beens and dominate the rest of the league, winning ten of twelve division titles, winning five of seven AFC Championship games and three of five Super Bowl appearances.
So it goes without saying that as football lives go, Brady has led a charmed one.
Blessed with the rugged handsomeness that attracted first a beautiful actress and then a Brazilian super model, Brady has graced the covers of countless magazines, yet he has stayed true to his calling and avoided the trappings of fame and fortune - his body a temple, he cares for it as only the most ardent of body-nazis can. Eating right and exercising vigorously, he has every intention of playing well into his 40's.
Fans of football and particularly the New England Patriots have watched Brady grow from a skinny prospect into a household name, setting the standard for quarterbacks in a league that thrives on them. There have been none better in the last thirteen years, perhaps none better in the history of the game, but the 2013 season will go a long way in determining that.
It's difficult to imagine that Brady has ever encountered the sort of challenge that he faces this season compared to previous editions, what with the horrific injuries, the bad business decisions and losing five of his top playmakers in the passing game from last season - having to rely on rookies, a china doll and now a condor with a surgically repaired wing...
That said, This is Tom Brady's finest hour.
No need to go scrambling for stat sheets, because there's no numbers that justify that statement - in fact, frankly speaking, his numbers are the worst of his 14 years in the National Football League and grade him out as no better than the 27th best quarterback thus far in the 2013 season.
Twenty six other quarterbacks rate out better than the veteran tactician, and only Minnesota quarterback Josh Freeman has a lower completion percentage than Brady. Only Peyton Manning and Matthew Stafford have thrown more passes, but twenty quarterbacks have completed more. His touchdown to interception ratio is the worst of his career and he's been sacked so many times that he's thinking about getting a bar code tattooed on his ass.
Yet his Patriots are 6-2 when they could just as easily be 2-6, and just as easily still be 8-0.
And that's the thing. They are having to scrap for everything they get, and the entire team seems to have taken on the mantra that "Whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger", and Brady is the point man. And while Bill Belichick has been particularly loathe of the media, Brady has stepped up his game in that respect, becoming even more outspoken and supportive of his teammates...
...teammates that have dropped his passes, that have run the wrong routes. Teammates that have missed blocking assignments that almost gets him decapitated - displaying a choppiness in his footwork that suggests high anxiety and a genuine disdain for the play calling, yet through all of this he is making the plays at winning time more often than not.
Brady can be rightly called the old gunslinger now; wise and grouchy, way past his prime and given to bouts of righteous indignation and with enough hardware keeping his joints where they belong that he looks almost like a cyborg at times - mechanical. ruthless and cold.
You see, the greatest of all time can not be so if they can not cause the players around them to be better - and that's what Brady is doing, sacrificing stats for wins at a time when his own window is closing ever so deliberately, if not quickly...
He's throwing to the rookies, and he keeps throwing to them regardless of the outcome, because he now knows that he can be a mentor to them, that his career has come nearly full circle, needing only to help raise the level of the play of those around him to once again taste football nirvana -and as for all of the fame and money, he doesn't need any more.
He has more of both than God, and his beautiful wife has even more than that - so much so that he restructured his contract to free up cap dollars to get him some new weapons - his motivation is purely football, and it's a beautiful thing to watch as it happens every Sunday on the field.
He wants another trophy. Badly. And he's going to do whatever he must to get one.
And maybe this is wrong. Maybe the fantasy football perverts are right and Brady's lost it - or maybe, just maybe Brady will be the last one left standing when the smoke clears in February. If he is, then he will know satisfaction like he has never known, because for once in his career, he laid it all out on the line, playing with reckless abandon and seizing the day...
...owning both his play and the team, not trying to do it all on his own, commanding his troops and delegating responsibility and in the process accepting even more than he could possibly imagine - and by the time the snow flies in Foxborough, his team will have gone though such hardship to get where they are that the pressure cooker of late season and the playoff won't even faze them.
Brady will have all of his weapons back healthy and the Patriots will make their annual ho-hum journey to the AFC Title game, but this time with an edge - this time with a team full of young fire-pissers with a veteran signal caller keeping them in check and hungry instead of the veteran team rallying around a young quarterback.
Yes, Brady's career has come full circle, and he's doing the best quarterbacking of that career, leading and setting the example - the stat sheet be damned...
Carpe Diem. Prepare to eat or be eaten.
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