Tom Brady really doesn’t like to lose, and that apparently extends well beyond football.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback has built a successful NFL career behind a borderline absurd competitive nature, and Danny Amendola learned that first hand off the gridiron.
In his weekly column for the MMQB, Sports Illustrated’s Albert Breer shared a pretty funny story about Amendola beating Brady the first time the duo played ping pong against each other shortly after the wideout signed with the New England Patriots.
“Apparently, No. 12 saw himself to be a pretty good ping-pong player,” Breer wrote. “But Danny Amendola was fantastic. So after Amendola signed with the Patriots in 2013, the two talked trash with each other over it, and then wound up playing. Amendola wound up winning, and winning pretty handily. As the story goes, Amendola hammered home the last point, and barely could turn around before he heard this whistling go by his ear. Brady’s paddle had come in hot and just missed him. Amendola, I’d heard, looked up expecting to see Brady laughing. Instead, he was getting the death stare. And Amendola — who’d become a trusted target of Brady’s, and Super Bowl hero in his own right — learned a good lesson about Brady that day.”
Amendola and Brady grew to become good friends, but it sounds like they had to overcome that early hurdle.
