Episodes
Friday Jul 31, 2015
That Tom Brady
Friday Jul 31, 2015
Friday Jul 31, 2015
by Jim Shearer
How about that Tom Brady?
I don’t have to go over the incident again, do I? My mother-in-law—who only likes Sunday football because it means TJ Maxx will be less crowded—even knows about “Deflategate.”
A few months after the infamous deflation of footballs, the NFL suspended Brady for four games. Many pundits thought the penalty would be reduced after he appealed, but it was upheld—even after 10 hours of testimony. Yes, 10 freakin’ hours!
Following the Deflategate game in January, Brady told the press that he wasn't aware of any wrongdoing. I believed him.
But then something strange happened:
(above: Tom Brady answering questions about under-inflated footballs.)
During the two weeks leading up the Super Bowl his answers became more and more ambiguous, and after an interview with Bob Costas on the pre-game show—one in which he wouldn’t give a straight reply—I didn’t believe him anymore.
After winning the Super Bowl Tom Brady publicly went silent…until this week, when he posted his rebuttal on Facebook.
As kids, we’re conditioned to SPAZ OUT(!!!) when someone blames us for something we didn’t do. If your childhood neighbor, Chad, didn’t rip the head off of your sister’s Cabbage Patch Kid, he wouldn’t take six months to tell you that he didn’t do it, would he?
I remember feeling the same way when Roger Clemens was accused of taking steroids. I thought, “No way, man! Now it’s just a witch-hunt. That’s good ol’ fashion Texas-bred strength behind his fastball.” After he finally opened his mouth, I felt like a chump.
I can almost rationalize why Tom Brady would skirt the issue before the Super Bowl. Maybe he was paranoid that something so stupid could cost him from playing in the year’s biggest sporting event?
But imagine if he would have cutely played coy immediately following Deflategate or simply laughed it off by saying, “Hey, it's a little trick of the trade. A bunch of us do it. My bad, but hey…how did I do with those inflated footballs during the second half of the game!?”
Once he cracked that middle-American Michigan grin, we would have forgiven him, because, c’mon, who hasn’t bent the rules at their own job, surfing the internet on a conference call or making a trip to the copy machine to print out garage sale flyers?
On top of that, the National Football League has a rich legacy of unspoken competitive advantages, whether its a stadium sound-person enhancing crowd noise, owners water-logging fields, linemen taping up their forearms like professional wrestling villains, wide receivers dipping their hands in tar-like goo, or the countless players who have tried to gouge out someone’s eye at the bottom of a scrum for a fumbled football.
As children, not only are we taught to quickly (and loudly) plead our innocence when we’re accused otherwise, but we’re conditioned to believe that sports builds the foundation of good character. Well, we used to believe that. The bar has been lowered so much in the last 20 years, not even an earthworm could limbo underneath it.
Sadly, these days we expect our athletes to lie and cheat, but we just wish one would actually admit it (and not years later when they’re trying to get into the Hall of Fame).
The irony of it all is that after the dust settles on Deflategate I won’t think any less of Tom Brady as a football player, just of him as a man.
Comments (0)
To leave or reply to comments, please download free Podbean or
No Comments
To leave or reply to comments,
please download free Podbean App.