JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Tom Brady was far from flawless.
Except when it mattered most.
A tough week ended sweetly for the NFL's latest matinee idol
when the New England Patriots finally wriggled free of the
Philadelphia Eagles, 24-21, to claim their third Super Bowl in the
last four years. His numbers weren't eye-popping -- they never are --
but they were good enough, as usual.
The victory Sunday night made Brady 9-0 in the postseason, a
record that puts him level with former Green Bay great Bart Starr.
It might not be much longer before we stop comparing Brady to Joe
Montana and start comparing Montana to him.
Montana is one of only two quarterbacks with more Super Bowl
wins, but it took him nine years to collect his four. The other
four-time winner, former Steelers great Terry Bradshaw, gathered
his in just six years.
That might explain why, just before handing over the Lombardi
Trophy to Brady on the field, Bradshaw leaned in and said, "This
is not that easy, you do know that?"
"Oh, believe me," Brady smiled back. "I do know that."
Everybody talks all the time about what Brady has -- good looks,
money, an icy-cool demeanor, the best team the league has seen in
some time -- and yet he spent more than a few hours the past few
days thinking about what he had lost.
His grandmother, Margaret Brady, died Wednesday night in the San
Francisco area at age 94. His thoughts much of the next morning
went not to football, but to visits to her backyard swimming pool
when he was young, to the Super Bowl parties she hosted in a
nursing home the last few years, always calling him afterward.
"I'm sure she'll be looking down on us Sunday," Brady said.
"That's one more person up there who will be cheering for us."
Later that evening, though, the grandson was focusing on the job
at hand and looking at film.
"It had to be tough," offensive coordinator Charlie Weis said.
"The rest of the family is all back home and he's got so much on
his plate already. But after a while, he called me up to his room
and wanted to start breaking stuff down.
"He does that so much," said Weis, who is leaving the Patriots
to take over the head coaching job at Notre Dame, "that he can
really be a pain in the butt sometimes."
All the work, though, paid few dividends in the opening 15
minutes. Brady would recall afterward, mistakenly, that the
Patriots failed to get so much as a single first down in the
quarter. But that was understandable. The all-angles blitzes
devised by Eagles defensive coordinator Jim Johnson took away his
passing lanes, and the New England running game was still stuck in
gear.
To make matters worse, the first real drive Brady cobbled
together to start the second quarter ended when he coughed up the
ball up at the Eagles 10. First, Brady bounced the ball off his own
running back's hip pulling back from center, then he spent the next
few seconds clumsily rolling along the ground looking for the
handle. No sooner had a few Eagle defenders joined him than tackle
Darwin Walker emerged from the pile holding up the ball.
It's never easy to get a read on guys who have been kissed by
fortune as often as Brady has. Despite a stellar career at
Michigan, he was a sixth-round draft pick, 199th overall, and his
opportunity came along only after the Patriots' front-line
quarterback -- and $100 million investment, Drew Bledsoe -- went down
with an injury. From that day forward, everything about Brady's
career seemed permanently charmed.
There was the infamous "Tuck Rule" playoff game against the
Raiders and the late drives he led in the Patriots' first two Super
Bowl wins that put matching MVP trophies on his mantle. There were
dates with starlets, wins piling up in impressive numbers and,
through it all, an almost-supernatural cool in the way he handled
fame and fortune.
But all of a sudden, Brady was trailing 7-0 in a game he was
supposed to win. The Patriots had gone the entire postseason to
that point without a single turnover, only to have their leader
turn over a big gift at a very inopportune moment. Instead of
panicking, Brady simply reminded himself that's what teammates are
for.
"In four seasons," he said, "I've never had a receiver
complain about not getting the ball. I've never had a running back
complain about not getting enough carries, an offensive line that
busts their backs every day."
And then came his turn to pay them back.
The New England defense forced a punt on Philly's next series
and gave Brady the ball at his own 37. He spread the ball around to
three different receivers, then handed off to Corey Dillon to get
to the Eagles 4. When he dropped back on the seventh play of the
drive, Brady's two primary receivers were blanketed and the
defenders were collapsing the pocket on every side of him.
But Brady stood there, surveying the possibilities. Then, at the
last possible second, he swung around to his right, where he hadn't
so much as turned his helmet even once, and fired a laser to David
Givens standing at the far edge of the end zone.
"That was about his third read," Patriots coach Bill Belichick
marveled afterward -- and this from a coach who rarely marvels about
anything. "That was an outstanding play, because he had to read
his progression all the way out. That was a great read and throw."
It wasn't the last one Brady made Sunday night, but it was the
one that restored the confidence of a quarterback, a coach and a
team that more was on the way.
"They look to me for a lot, and I look to them for a lot,"
Brady said. "We really stepped up when we needed to."
As usual.
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Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated
Press. Write to him at jlitke@ap.org