Tom Brady Retirement Announcement

You could know the end was near when Tom Brady took his son fishing on a Sunday night in the middle of the season. There was calm in the picture, and Brady, who was always unhappy, never sought peace during his triumphalist, overbearing, tablet-throwing 23 NFL seasons. In the straightforward, understated self-produced video he published announcing his retirement alone on a beach early on Wednesday morning, there was peace as well. Notably, the sun was rising above him rather than setting.

“Good morning, guys. I’ll get to the point right away: I’m retiring, for good,” he said.

It’s possible that Brady’s most revolutionary action is that he leaves the game looking more emotionally exhausted than physically. His legacy may be more significant than his all-time passing records and forklift-heavy trophy pallet. He is the only player to have won seven Super Bowls, and four of them occurred after he was 37, demonstrating that it is possible to slow down the aging process. A disastrous game that would have snatched the jersey off his back years ago if he hadn’t been so calculatedly self-protective has been defeated by his self-determined walk away into the sunrise. Was he ultimately brutal and self-centered in his pursuit to maximize his abilities, choices, value, and control?

Even after his haltingly reversed retirement last season, he still finished third in the league in throwing yards in 2022 and made the playoffs at the age of 45, proving that his body had plenty of athletic life left. He fell victim to all the invisible, non-physical weights that, in a man’s 40s, can begin to weigh heavily on his mind and tense shoulders: a gap in his marriage, parenting issues with three children, a cryptocurrency lawsuit, and too many business commitments.

He had to compete throughout his career using his trained awareness and fine arm accuracy rather than natural talent, which required more time-consuming training than other greats. If I don’t really work at it, I’m a very ordinary quarterback, he said to me years ago. Every bite he took had to be measured, and he judged every action according to whether it was a “input” or “output” to rivalry’s energy. He was undoubtedly more exhausted on game days than he was during the years of innate stiffness in all that training. He found it challenging to unwind and impossible to coast.

Before his final Super Bowl in February 2021, Brady reflected about retiring during a pregame news conference and said: “I think I’ll know when it’s time. … I believe I’ll realize it and realize that I did everything I could. … You worked very hard on it. I don’t believe I can ever play this game sloppily. I have to give it everything, you know. Therefore, I believe it’s probably time to leave the team when I put it all out there and feel like I can’t do it anymore or when I can’t commit to the team in the way that the team wants me to.

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