Day two of the 2000 NFL draft. The Brady family waited at home in San Mateo, California, for a call that didn’t come. Team after team picked other quarterbacks. Tom Brady walked out of the house with a baseball bat. His parents found him down the street, “alone and crying,” as the book puts it. The call finally came in the sixth round. He was the 199th pick.
That scene comes from Brady, a new biography by Lars Anderson. John U. Bacon reviews it in the Journal’s Fall Books section. Anderson has written 13 books and more than two dozen Sports Illustrated cover stories. Brady and his family wouldn’t talk to him, so he interviewed hundreds of other people and worked through the record. Bacon counts 100-some books about Brady and a Netflix (NFLX) roast that reportedly paid him $25 million. He calls this one the best portrait of the player yet, and fun, which he says is rare.
The book is built on slights. His three older sisters teased him as the worst athlete in the family, the biography says. Neighborhood kids called him chubby. He was the backup on a winless high school freshman team and never threw a pass. At the University of Michigan he started seventh on the depth chart. By his third year he was getting three snaps a practice and thought about leaving. A counselor named Greg Harden took him on. Harden’s rule was “control the controllables.” When Brady griped about his coaches and teammates, Harden agreed that they didn’t believe in him. Then he said the only belief that mattered was Brady’s own. The author calls that moment the foundation of everything Brady won, and the source of his hardest trials.
The bill for all of it
The Patriots were the only team that kept four quarterbacks that year, and he was the fourth. He climbed to backup on extra conditioning, film study and hours of throwing drills, the book says. He beat people on effort and study, and that left little room for anything else. By December 2006 he had three rings. Asked for his favorite, the book says, he always answered, “The next one.” A former teammate, Lee Smith, says in the book that he almost feels bad for him. Football decided what Brady ate and drank, how he trained, who he spent time with and who he went on vacation with. Brady’s warning to rivals is blunt. He is giving up his life for this, he says, and they had better be ready to do the same. The book covers the league’s $20 million deflategate inquiry and a hard divorce. The reviewer thinks losing daily time with his children hurt him most.
Our read
This is a career story with a behavioral lesson underneath. Harden’s rule is the whole of good planning. Brady couldn’t change the depth chart. He could change his preparation. You can’t control the market, the Fed or the next headline. You can control how much you save, what you pay in fees and taxes, and what you do in a bad month. Work that list and leave the rest alone.
Then the other half. Every yes to the work was a no to something else, and the reviewer names the cost. It was daily time with his kids. Most of us don’t have seven rings on the line. We do face the same trade. Decide what enough looks like before the job decides it for you. Write down the number, the year and the life on the other side, and check it once a year. You don’t wait for the first drop to find the umbrella, or for the retirement party to learn what the work cost.