THERE NEVER WILL BE ANOTHER TOM BRADY — SO, LET HIM BREATHE

Hellbent on proving the world wrong for almost a quarter-century, the G.O.A.T. deserves some time to let retirement sink in, as we determine his place in the all-time sports pantheon

     When a man is obsessed enough to count down time before the next Super Bowl on his neon gym clock — when he’s driven enough to drink 25 glasses of water a day provided it’s infused with electrolytes, to smash a tablet and tell an opposing coach to “go f— yourself,’’ to eat avocados the way the rest of us eat croissants, to cheat on his diet only with chocolate made of agave and cabbage juice, to crave an eighth championship when he already has seven — then, of course, he can’t just up and retire one day.

     Tom Brady, competitive psycho, is going to need some time to process what he just did. He alerted his personal team to leak the R-word — after 22 seasons and the most accomplished career known to American team sports — but he immediately began having convulsions and breaking into hives. That probably isn’t true, actually, but it should surprise no one that the player with the longest accomplishment catalog in NFL history has trouble spitting out two short words:

     No more.

     He will, in due time. Respectful of time passages and the progression of a quarterback position he mastered like no other, Brady will sit back like the rest of us and watch a conference championship round that he dominated for two decades. He’ll watch a creative magician, 26-year-old Patrick Mahomes, try to reach another Super Bowl in Kansas City and continue his impossible quest to match Brady’s title treasure. He’ll watch a dude almost half his age, 25-year-old Joe Burrow, attempt to slice up a defense as he did: with a nimble mind and accurate arm. He’ll then watch the NFC game and just cringe, if not hurl, knowing he and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers would have been there if they’d been healthy. As Bucs coach Bruce Arians said, “He has a burning desire in him to compete at 44 like most 24-year-olds.”

     But life beckons. Brady’s wife and kids need him, which should have been clear when the NBC cameras showed them waving to the audience from a private suite last Sunday, and Al Michaels mentioned how Gisele would have major sway over her husband’s future. As she has told him — and the world has told him — what more is there to accomplish, anyway, Tommy? His seven championships are more than any franchise has won, including Bill Belichick and the Patriots, who heard the news Saturday as New England was buried under snow and praying to keep the power on. He wanted more than to pass Joe Montana’s four Super Bowl titles; he also wanted to pass Michael Jordan’s six NBA titles, and he did so last February. He has the most touchdown passes, passing yards, regular-season wins and playoff wins in NFL history. He was Super Bowl MVP five times, NFL MVP three times and made the Pro Bowl 15 times.

     Now, he can go be Father of The Year.

     “I said this a few years ago, it's what relationships are all about,’’ Brady said the other night on the podcast. “It's not always what I want. It's what we want as a family. And I'm going to spend a lot of time with them and figure out in the future what's next.

     “The biggest difference now that I’m older is I have kids now too, you know, and I care about them a lot as well. They’ve been my biggest supporters. My wife is my biggest supporter. It pains her to see me get hit out there. And she deserves what she needs from me as a husband and my kids deserve what they need from me as a dad. And I’m going to spend some time with them and give them what they need because they’ve really been giving me what I need the last six months to do what I love to do.’’

     The fact there’s little left to say about Tom Brady means there’s little reason to play a 23rd season at age 45. He’s the greatest quarterback ever. He routinely tops every list of the NFL’s greatest players, including the ferocious defenders who tried but never could devour him. He already has proved in his fifth decade on Earth that he can defy the laws of time, age and health. This season, he led the league in touchdowns, passing yardage, completions and attempts. He has thrown for 84,520 yards and 624 TDs. At some point, even a sportsman who has conquered all must grasp a live-work balance.

     So don’t let Brady’s post-leak hiccup — his agent and father say he has yet to retire, the Bucs say he has yet to inform them — interfere with our natural collective thought process. He won’t play another game, just as a contemporary, Ben Roethlisberger, won’t play another game, and just as Aaron Rodgers will retire soon enough and Drew Brees retired last year. Will he try TV? That’s not his style. Will he advance his TB12 wellness brand, dive into crypto, build his business empire? Damn right, he will. Damn right, he should.

     In almost a quarter-century in the public eye, since his strange days as a Michigan overachiever with a flabby NFL Combine body, Brady has let us down only once. He broke the rules, participated in a conspiracy to deflate footballs, lied about it, then conveniently had his assistant destroy his cellphone when the NFL wanted it. Deflategate doomed him to a four-game suspension in 2015, but it didn’t bury him. He won three more Super Bowls.

     All that’s left to determine is his place in the sporting pantheon. He’s on the proverbial Mount Rushmore. Jordan is there. Michael Phelps is there. Muhammad Ali is there. Should there be two chiseled mountains? For Babe Ruth, Wayne Gretzky, Jim Brown, Tiger Woods? Three? Four?

     Don’t bother asking Brady.

     “My enjoyment comes from not a recognition of kind of what I’ve accomplished as a player in the league,” Brady said on the podcast. “My enjoyment comes from the competition. More so than anything, even (Sunday), I was thinking about competing. I was thinking about, this whole year, about competing. I wasn’t thinking about anything other than that. So when the time comes to think about post-career and second career, I’ll think about those things.

     “It’s just when you’re 44, I guess you get asked about that a lot. And a lot of people thought I was done playing football in 2015. A lot of people in 2016 said, ‘You're done.’ A lot of people in 2018 and when I left the Patriots, they said, ‘You're done.’ ”

     I was one of them. Foolish me.

     In my head, it was only yesterday when we were at the Big House, in Ann Arbor, where Brady was alternating quarters with a hotshot named Drew Henson. The head coach, Lloyd Carr, couldn’t make up his mind on a starter. Was Brady already washed up as a college senior? The answer is an all-time lesson in perseverance and middle-finger defiance, from a plunge to 199th in the 2000 draft to his ascent to a hallowed place.

     “I would say I’m proud and satisfied of everything we accomplished this year,” Brady said on his podcast. “So I know when I give it my all, that’s something to be proud of. And I’ve literally given everything I had this year, last year, the year before that, the year before that. Like, I don’t leave anything half-ass, you know? I leave it with everything that I have.’’

     In case he isn’t entirely certain about retirement, let’s leave him with this burst of finality. We have measured our lives in Brady time — from 9/11 to the global pandemic, from Steve Jobs to Elon Musk — and he extended the length of his athletic prime and championship eminence beyond that of any male or female who ever lived.

     There never will be another Tom Brady.

     So, let him breathe.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.