No pun intended, but Tom Brady had good reason to believe his season might be cut short.
The New England Patriots quarterback got quite the scare in the week leading up to the AFC Championship Game when he cut his right throwing hand during practice. The injury, which came a few days before an eventual win over the Jacksonville Jaguars, didn’t look good.
No, but really, it looked nasty. In the series finale of “Tom vs Time” on Monday, we got our first look at the gash.
If you’re squeamish, stop scrolling.
No, but really. If you don’t want to see it, look away.
OK, you’ve been warned. Here it is.
“When I hurt my thumb, I thought, ‘This is it. This is the way the season ends,’ ” Brady said in the episode. ” … I’m looking down at my thumb as it’s split open, and I’m thinking ‘I really don’t know what happened to my thumb, but I know it doesn’t feel good and I’m having a real hard time believing I’m going to go out and play well against the No. 1 ranked defense in four days.’ ”
In an interview with WEEI, Brady eventually revealed how close the injury came to costing him the season.
“It was pretty stressful. I was stressed out,” Brady said. “You drive home and you have all these stitches in this place. You’re driving home and I saw my wife and she said, ‘What happened?!’ and I said, ‘I know, it was just an accident in practice.’ She said, ‘What is going to happen?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. We’ll see how it goes.’ ”
The injury didn’t seem to bother him. Brady performed well against Jacksonville and was historic in the Super Bowl, but that wasn’t enough as he and the Patriots fell to the Philadelphia Eagles.
