Tom “Purple Balls” Brady?
The former New England Patriots quarterback revealed the genesis of that nickname Wednesday during a two-plus-hour interview with “The Howard Stern Show” on Sirius XM Radio.
It was a reference to one particularly nasty side effect of a sports hernia Brady suffered midway through the 2006 season.
“I thought when I got hit, something happened,” Brady explained. “It ended up being a hernia in the game, where the abdomen wall split open. I don’t know all the details. But other than that, (my) testicles — literally, one side was like an orange and then the other side was normal. I was like, ‘Something’s wrong here.'”
That sounds … unpleasant.
The injury didn’t cause Brady to miss any time — outside of his season-ending torn ACL in 2008 and his Deflategate suspension in 2016, he’s started every game since 2001 — but it provided endless fodder for jokes within the Patriots’ locker room.
“The guy who was my backup quarterback at the time, Matt Cassel, drew pictures of me with this one huge testicle on one side, and then he would leave them in my locker every day,” Brady told Stern. “‘Purple Balls,’ he’d call me because I got all bruised up. Man, that (expletive) hurt.
“That was a really tough injury. There were a few of those over the years.”
Brady also addressed a variety of more conventional topics during the marathon interview, including the Brady-vs.-Bill Belichick debate, his decision to leave the Patriots, his approach with underperforming New England receivers and his relationship with President Donald Trump.
