Tom Brady: The Leather Years

The post-retirement track record for your hyper-competitive, multiple-champion GOAT-class athletes is not necessarily one you'd want for yourself. So often they seem stranded, often surrounded but generally quite alone, peering down from atop a mile-high butte of money and notoriety at a world that is much too far away to recognize; the people moving through and within it, to the extent they are visible at all, have a busy and eminently squashable ant-like aspect. We can probably assume that we look roughly as strange and unreal to them as they do to us. There is something alien about this type of person that goes beyond their superhuman and highly public accomplishments, and that is true even before wealth and fame shove them further and further into abstraction. That otherness is sort of spiritually hypertrophic, in the way that tennis players tend to have one really strong arm and one comparatively normal one, but mostly just a reflection of how lopsided this sort of lifetime spent in relentless pursuit tends to leave one's being. As any/every sports biography or feature profile can tell you, this is just What It Takes. Everything combustible enough to serve that all-consuming pursuit gets consumed; it becomes fuel, and things that might be necessary later in life are chucked into the furnace in the moment to keep the engine stoked and burning. The more distance that time puts between these champions and their old glories, the more that deficit tends to come into relief. There's a type of feature story about this, too, and it's common enough to be a sort of genre unto itself. Sometimes the dramatic action is someone who has burned what these people burn wondering where everything went; think of Michael Jordan telling Wright Thompson, in 2013, "I drove myself so much that I'm still living with some of those drives. I'm living with that. I don't know how to get rid of it. I don't know if I could." Sometimes, usually but not always in instances that require writing around an uncooperative subject, that incapacity for insight is the story. Think of Tiger Woods clearing rooms in a Navy SEAL "Kill House" training facility and wrecking his body in an attempt to better understand his domineering and rapacious military father, also in a Wright Thompson story. Steve Kerr, a much more enlightened and insightful being than Jordan or Woods, presents a different version of this protagonist in a much more recent Wright Thompson story, one who is trying to figure out what his existence might be like without the old rhythm of competition and camaraderie, and with nothing but his own very full life to fill it.