WAS THIS A ROAST FOR TOM BRADY — OR A LIFE ATTACK AND CONFESSIONAL?
He’ll be OK, about to start his $375-million gig at Fox Sports, but as the ridicule went on, barbs from Hart and Belichick — and a Deflategate admission? — recalled the in-house tension in New England
Would we have a Rub-and-Tug Tom Brady? Another body slam akin to Will Smith’s Slap Jokes? When comedian Jeff Ross alluded to the half-hour massage of Bob Kraft, which cost $59 at Orchids of Asia Day Spa, Brady suddenly wasn’t in the mood to be roasted Sunday night.
“Tom became a Patriot, moved up to New England, and on the first day of training camp, that scrawny rookie famously walked into the owner Robert Kraft’s office and said ‘I’m the best decision your organization has ever made,’ ” Ross said. “Would you like a massage?”
We waited for a punch when Brady approached Ross. “Don’t say that s— again,” he said, which naturally was captured by Netflix’s microphone. Ross understood.
But did Kevin Hart? As the lead host for three hours of “The Greatest Roast of All Time” — a Brady-binged event at the Forum near Los Angeles — he focused on his ex-wife, Gisele Bundchen. “Gisele gave you an ultimatum. She said you retire or we're done. When you got a chance to go 8-9 and all it will cost you is your wife and your kids, you've got to do what the f— you've got to do. You gotta do it,” said Hart, who then blamed Brady’s marital woes on his decision to divorce coach Bill Belichick.
“You f—ked him good,” Hart said. “You did, Tom, you f–-ked your coach. But let me tell you something, that’s what you got to do to maintain your happiness. Sometimes you gotta f-–k your coach. You know who else f–-ked their coach? Gisele, she f–-ked that karate man.”
That would be a reference to Bundchen’s jiu-jitsu instructor, Joaquim Valente, her new man of the past year. “How did you not see this coming?” Hart said. “Eight f–-king karate classes a day and she’s still a white belt!”
Or, as comedian Nikki Glaser said: “You have seven rings — well, eight now that Gisele gave hers back.” She was getting started, blitzing Brady for breaking up with a pregnant Bridget Moynahan, as did others. To which, Moynahan responded with a tweet: “So true.”
At that point, you wondered if a streamed TV roast of Brady was an attack on his life. Fortunately, he appeared to take the abuse well, as he has withstood forms of adversity throughout his career as the 199th draft pick. “You have to be able to laugh at yourself, and I love what he is doing in this forum,” Hart said. “I love that he is embracing the things that some people think he runs away from. It is a celebration of greatness, and we are doing it in a fun way.”
Yet the non-stop barbs were stunning in their guttural flow, reflecting the tension that accompanied 20 years of Brady and Belichick as they won six Super Bowls. I’m not sure they all gathered afterward for a long night of drinks. But hell, this was the end anyway, with Brady off to Fox Sports, Belichick unable to find an NFL coaching gig and Kraft starting anew with Drake Maye at quarterback. For Brady, was this also a confessional about Deflategate? He always has denied wrongdoing that he deliberately deflated balls in 2014. Ten years later, was he revealing a secret?
“Where's Roger Goodell? Remember Deflategate?” said Brady, knowing the league commissioner wasn’t in the audience. “The NFL spent $20 million and found that it was more probable than not that I was generally aware and someone may have deflated my footballs. You could have just given me the $20 million and I would have just told you that I f—king did it. You know what I’m saying, boys? You know what I’m saying?”
That you’re guilty? Or was this merely a roast? And who was more responsible for the six-pack of championships? Belichick said it was him: “For all of you out there who think about who's responsible for the Patriots' success during the time Tom and I were together — was it Tom or me? — in reality, the truth of the matter was it was both of us because of me.” Brady proceeded to note that he’ll make $375 million at Fox while Belichick no longer is a coach.
“I’ve been out of the game for a minute, so I'm curious, how many Super Bowl rings have you won since I left?” said Brady, who one another in Tampa Bay. “Maybe it's not just the guy on the sideline. When I go to the Indy 500, I don't ask the winning driver, ‘Hey, who gassed up your car?’ ’’
Without a hoodie, dressed in a suit with the same champagne everyone else was drinking, Belichick retorted. He noticed Brady’s soccer team in Birmingham City is struggling in England. “They suck,” he said. “Not so easy running a team, is it Tom?”
And what about Alex Guerrero, the trainer whose methods appealed to Brady’s new lifestyle and led to a difficult relationship with Belichick? “In a way that was true, but not really. It was hard to butt heads with Tom because he was so far up Alex Guerrero’s ass,” he said, thrilled to be “at the roast of Tom Brady” opposed to “the 10-part Bill Belichick roast during the Apple TV documentary.” At one point, he looked at Rob Gronkowski and said of his new career, “Gronk, I’ve been watching on Fox and I’m begging you, please stop doing your job. Do another job. Do somebody else’s job.”
Said Gronkowski: “You’re both hard asses that hate fun. You both live and breathe football. Neither of you are married anymore. You’re both even divorced from football — and both of you take full credit for the dynasty.”
On and on it went, as Kim Kardashian handled raucous boos while ripping Hart: “A lot of people make fun of your height.” We had Will Ferrell, saying of Belichick vs. Brady: “Remember that period when people thought it was you, well, it wasn’t. It was Tom.” We had receiver Julian Edelman, referring to Brady as “Leonardo DiCaprio’s ex-girlfriend’s ex-husband” and Guerrero as “the snake oil salesman who turned Tom into a big f—ing weirdo.” Then we had Peyton Manning: “Honestly, it is great to be here with a bunch of people sitting around talking smack about Tom Brady. Or as we call that in the Manning family: Thanksgiving. My (golf) handicap is a 6.4. Tom's handicap is blowing leads to my brother Eli in the Super Bowl.”
To which Brady responded: “Peyton, sometimes you live in Denver, sometimes you live in Louisiana, but you'll always live in my shadow.”
Finally, as the show appropriately ended, Kraft put aside his rub-and-tug event and made two comments. One was to the Kremlin, where his Super Bowl XXXIX ring lurks. “Vladimir Putin, if you're watching, give me my f—king ring back.”
He looked at the crowd and made light of the night. “I want to say this is the greatest coach in the history of the game,” he said of Belichick. “And having Tom Brady and him was the greatest honor the good lord gave me, so cheers!”
Before the roast, Brady said, “It's like a football game. You run with a game plan, and then you get to see kind of how the strategy goes, and then you adjust on the fly. This is what a locker room has been like for me for all these years. So it's not like I'm used to people not making fun of me.”
This wasn’t mere fun. This was an assault on his brain and bones. But he picked himself off the turf, threw three touchdown passes and, of course, won again.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question 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.