Tom Brady is a six-time Super Bowl champion who’s widely considered the greatest quarterback in NFL history.
Yet the fire still burns ahead of his age-43 season.
Brady shed additional light on his decision to sign with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as a free agent after 20 seasons with the New England Patriots in a piece published Monday on The Players’ Tribune. He expressed enthusiasm for the new challenge that lies ahead while answering one of the burning questions surrounding his move.
Here’s what Brady wrote:
People ask sometimes what motivates me. The answer is simple. I love my sport. I love doing what I do. I want to keep doing it until I don’t want to do it anymore. Playing football isn’t something you can do alone in a backyard either. Football is a team sport, and getting a chance to collaborate with my teammates is a big reason I was drawn to the game in the first place.
I was blessed to grow up in an amazing family, with loving, supportive parents and siblings. I left San Mateo and flew 3,000 miles to the other side of the country, eventually raising a family of my own outside Boston. Now I’m moving on to another chapter, another experience.
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Brady seems well-aware that life will be different in Tampa Bay. He’ll have new coaches, new teammates, a new system to learn and new facilities to navigate. But he’s hardly scared off by that reality. In many ways, those changes were at the heart of his decision to leave New England after two decades.
“Still, I’m excited. Most of all, I’m motivated,” Brady wrote. “I want to deliver for my new team, my new coaches and my new teammates. I don’t want to let anyone down. I’m going to give it everything I’ve got.”
Brady clearly is out to show his apparent regression in 2019 was a matter of circumstance, more than anything else, and the rest of the NFL might want to take notice before it’s too late.
