A wrongfully accused man is harshly sentenced for a crime he didn’t commit based entirely on shoddy circumstantial evidence. Despite his innocence, he refuses to relinquish the high road for the very sake of his soul.
Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.
Our hero refuses to let the anger in, he offers hope to those who surround him in the prison, he finds power and conviction in his desperate situation. His final appeal for exoneration is destroyed when his warden literally kills his only shot at getting out.
Apologies to the Hoodie, but the best movie to describe Deflategate isn’t “My Cousin Vinny”, it’s “Shawshank Redemption”. And Tom Brady is Andy Dufresne.
Peter King, Chris Mortensen and Mike Kensil were the prosecutors, haplessly convicting an innocent man through the court of public opinion. The NFL League Office (Troy Vincent, Jeff Pash) were “the Girls”, the group of inmates who torture and rape Andy mercilessly (leaking misinformation in an attempt to obliterate Brady’s reputation). ESPN and the NFL’s stooges played the Guards who permit the Girls to do their thing (refusing to correct the record because of a financial relationship with the league). When evidence came to light that exonerated Brady (basic science), Warden Goodell spiked any chance of Brady finding freedom by killing the only person who could help him (a ginned-up Wells Report, lies about false testimony, destroying cellphone, an abuse of article 46, etc). In the movie the Warden Norton orders an actual assassination, but Goodell had to settle for a character assassination in one of the silliest conspiracies ever.
This is a conspiracy, that’s what this is, one big damn conspiracy and everyone’s in on it.
And after all of Goodell’s tantrums, the tunnel was revealed.
On February 5th, 2017, Tom Brady crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side.
The River of Shit, a 4 game suspension (appealed, upheld, appealed, overturned, appealed, upheld), the league’s warden actively tarnishing his name, an entire nation rooting against him for some truly bizarre reasons (his political allegiances, which still remain opaque, was a thing), then we find out his mom has been sick for the better of two years and his family quietly suffered through that while Goodell was trying to destroy his good name.
But kudos to Roger protecting the Shield.
Like Andy, Brady had to sacrifice his personal animosity and help Roger Goodell, the same way Andy laundered the money for the Warden. This NFL season would have SUCKED if the Patriots were an average team. Instead, they were an all-time great team in a sea of mediocrity, the only true challenger being their Super Bowl opponent. Like the Warden, Roger Goodell needed Tom Brady to keep his profit margins high: ratings were down, the play was extremely poor and at least 90% of the coaches were inept. And like Andy Dufresne, Brady knew he had to do his part in order to achieve his revenge. Swallowing his pride to polish his shoes nightly, carrying this NFL season on his back. No hatred. No anger. Just tirelessly constructing a plan to get out of the prison that Goodell put him in. Brady used his captor’s malevolent nature as positive motivation to will his success.
I didn’t shoot my wife and I didn’t shoot her lover. Whatever mistakes I’ve made, I’ve paid for them and then some.
Science is science, facts are facts, but whatever the national media want to say about Brady, he’s a cheater or somehow not deserving, he served his sentence. He did the time for his (unproven and likely uncommitted) crimes.
And he emerged on the other side of a Raquel Welch poster.
Of course there was also the game, as horrible a first half as I can remember, a pick-6, LG fumbles, just getting the three points felt like a slog. Another hundred yards of sewage. And then Duran Harmon, a stand-in for Morgan Freeman’s Red character echoed his confidence “we got this”. Suddenly the Patriots team was met with a simple choice:
Get busy living or get busy dying.
Brady and the rest of the team got busy living. Marty’s flutter catch (the most underrated play of the game), Edelman’s catch (which took the eraser to the Helmet Catch), High’s strip sack, James White getting the extra yard (MANY TIMES), Brady dialing up a historic performance, Flowers forcing the Falcons out of Field Goal range, there were so many moments in that second half.
Instead of dwelling on whatever wrongs he’s taken on, he did what he’s always done. Stayed positive, stayed confident and executed his plan to perfection. The team’s relentlessness and perseverance when the Falcons started to look glassy eyed. Brady willed the team to keep churning their legs through the Nile River of shit that they were up against. Each movement, painful. Each breath, vomit-inducing. And each yard relentlessly achieved. And when finally the slog was over, Brady ripped off his Jersey (which some asshat Pats fan stole), dropped to his knees and took his first gasping breath of relief, of freedom, of victory.
As Super Bowl MVP, I half-hoped Brady would scream into the camera: “I’m going to Zihuatanejo.”
Update: I’m completely aware that I never identified a Red that remained alongside Tom Brady. Belichick is the obvious choice, but the truth is there are just too many Reds in Brady’s life: The Kraft family, his own family and friends, Jules, High and the Defense, White, Amendola, Bennett and Mitchell making monster grabs and Patriots fans, writ large. That’s why Red is all of us, the many people who stood by Brady through this whole thing. Red was always a metaphor anyway.
2nd Update: I wrote most of this piece two weeks ago, but decided not to publish out of fear of jinxing the game and by midway through the third quarter of the Super Bowl, I thought my writing it was jinx enough. That was until I saw the Brady 5 rings commercial. Tom Brady has taught us one thing, you can’t jinx goatness. No more seat moving, no more superstitions, Brady is that great. Only Goats can rid the world of superstition.
3rd Update: Thank you for a wonderful season. Thank you to Mike Dussault, the Hoodie Master General and Pats Propaganda creator, for giving me a platform to celebrate the goat dynasty. Apologies to Red Auerbach and Bill Russell. Apologies to Michael Jordan. Apologies to those great UCLA teams. In a sport that financially prevents dynasties, this is the greatest of all time.
4th Update: Thank you, Bill Belichick. I know you’ll Keyser Soze us one day, but I’m glad it’s not this day. Happy to be wrong.
