The Quiet Desperation of Tom Brady

A few years ago, I asked Tom Brady if he ever worried that too much of his life was consumed by the game of football. This was, in retrospect, kind of a duh question to put to someone who played, you know, the game of football for a living. Rather successfully, too, and for a long time.

Brady confirmed the question’s premise that, yes, football meant pretty much everything to him and he could not imagine doing anything else with himself. “I’m not a musician, not an artist,” he told me, among other noninterests and non-hobbies. “What am I gonna do, go scuba diving?”

I took the glibness of Brady’s answer as a sign that he wasn’t particularly worried about the that he had so proudly made, and that had been such a celebrated hallmark of his afterthought-to-legend story. But