SATURDAY MORNING, Tom Brady and Bill Belichick alone, one last skull session before match day. It was about ten years ago, during the drought of the New England championship, that lasted a decade, when the Patriots tried to regain the lost magic, when first He began to think that maybe Brady was going up there. Belichick was watching the Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez’s film and focused on one particular play. Sanchez was going to the right, chased by the defenders, off balance and trying to survive, and had a receiver open in the low field: 65 yards deep and a diagonal of about ten, on the contrary. It was a pitch that only a few quarterbacks in history could attempt, much less complete, a fact that seemed lost by the greatest coach in the history of modern football.
“Just throw it,” Belichick said. “You won’t have more open than that.”
Brady was incredulous. I couldn’t throw it 85 yards! he thought.
“Let it go,” Belichick added.
Let it go? Brady thought, laughing to himself. The ball would go 15 yards if he threw it.
Years after Brady told me this story, I am left. It’s not just because it’s rich to imagine a lifelong defensive coach who doesn’t understand (or refuses to worry) about the degree of difficulty in an almost impossible throw. That’s what Brady told me after describing the moment: “When I see a work, I see it within my own limitations.”
BRADY’S WORDS WERE then it is hard to buy and now they are harder to buy. Throughout most of his two-decade career, his fans and detractors have felt that, for Tom Brady, anything is possible. After the Tampa Bay Buccaneers eliminated the Green Bay Packers to go to the Super Bowl, Bruce Arians put it better: “The belief he gave this organization that it could be done, it only needed one man.”