Super Bowl XXXVIII: Brady makes strides under pressure

Judy Battista

Thursday, Jan. 29, 2004 | 11:10 a.m.

The blitz kept coming, and in the cool spring air of Ann Arbor, Mich., a whip-thin freshman quarterback kept going down. He had been in the offense only a few months, since he had forsaken a surefire starting role near home at California for the scrum of playing time at Michigan. At Michigan, they run full-speed scrimmages, and the quarterback would appreciate that much later.

But on that afternoon in 1996, the offensive line was struggling to pick up the blitz, and so, over and over, the quarterback was hit, only to pop up to his feet, like a jack-in-the-box in shoulder pads.

"He never flinched, he never let the contact that he was taking affect him," said Lloyd Carr, the Michigan coach then and now. "We came off the field that day, and I said, 'I know one thing about Brady, he's got great concentration and great toughness.' Every day he went out there, he wanted to beat you."

Eight years later, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, the battered freshman, does beat them, almost every day. On Sunday, at 26 years old, he will play for his second Super Bowl title in three seasons. If the Patriots defeat the Carolina Panthers, he will join Joe Montana, Terry Bradshaw, Troy Aikman, John Elway, Roger Staubach, Bob Griese, Jim Plunkett and Bart Starr as quarterbacks to win more than one Super Bowl.

It is heady company for a player who was not allowed to play football until he was a high school freshman because his parents worried that he would get hurt. He was so bad that year that even when the team went 0-9 and scored only one touchdown, the coaches would not let him play.

But in the two years since Brady led the Patriots to their first championship, he has emerged as one of the best of the new generation of quarterbacks. Brady is not nearly as fleet as Michael Vick (Brady's father, Tom Sr., jokes that his son used to be clocked with a sundial), and his arm is not as strong as Peyton Manning's. Brady does have a serene poise in big games that recalls Montana, and he has a gift for winning (he is 39-12 as a starter, 5-0 in the playoffs) that has positioned a largely workmanlike team as a most unlikely potential dynasty.

"He has real leadership qualities," New York Jets Coach Herman Edwards said. "You can tell that they feel like he's going to make a play."

Brady and the Patriots make up for the lack of a consistent running game by using short, high-percentage passes that Brady completes with unerring frequency out of multiple formations. This season, he completed 60 percent of his passes and rarely made a mistake; the interception he threw against Indianapolis in the American Football Conference championship game was his first of the season at home.

He does this without a star receiver by deftly spreading the ball around to a group of mostly serviceable receivers, which keeps defenses from focusing on any of them. It is a system designed for a brainy quarterback who can make quick, correct decisions.

"He doesn't try to force things," Edwards said. "When something isn't there, he feels, 'I'll live to fight another day.' "

Patriots Coach Bill Belichick called Brady "one of the most aware and poised players I've ever been around."

"Tom's strengths are his intelligence, his preparation, his ability to see and make decisions on the field, and his ability to deal with whatever the situation is -- whether it's crowd noise, whether it be the end of a game and we have to score, whether the other team has 10 guys at the line of scrimmage and they're blitzing," Belichick said.

For that, Brady credits those tense practices at Michigan where, he said, he learned to compete. Since becoming the Patriots' starter when Drew Bledsoe was hurt in the second game of the 2001 season, there has been a swagger and ease about Brady. When he spiked the ball to stop the clock to set up Adam Vinatieri's game-winning field goal as time expired in Super Bowl XXXVI, Brady caught the ball as it bounced and twirled it on his finger. The movie cameos and high-profile invitations (to last week's State of the Union address, for example) could not be far behind.

But at Michigan, Brady was less secure. Stuck deep on the depth chart, Brady once complained to Carr about his situation. He was Brian Griese's backup as a sophomore, but after completing 61.1 percent of his passes as the starter in his junior year, he was stung by Carr's decision to alternate him as a senior with Drew Henson. The experiment failed, and Brady finished the season as the starter. It was the first glimpse the public would get of Brady's teeth-baring tenacity, which is often obscured by his altar-boy looks and the laid-back California lilt of his voice.

"Our coach put a tremendous amount of pressure on us, to lead the team, to manage situations, to think like a coach," Brady said. "I used to get more nervous for practice than for games. It was a relief when Saturday came around. When you're 18, 19 years old, it can only help when you're 26."

But when Brady was 24 and stardom was thrust upon him, it did not help. His parents watched as Brady submerged himself in football, rarely peeking out to enjoy what was happening. After winning the AFC championship game Jan. 18, Brady admitted that he barely knew what was going on during the Patriots' Super Bowl run two years ago. The pressure of his role and the tug of the responsibilities weighed on him.

"When he took over, he went into a tunnel," Tom Brady Sr. said. "Almost to the extent that after they won the Super Bowl, he was thinking, 'Who do we play next?' Now, he's fresher, he's vibrant, he's excited about going to Houston. Two years ago, it was almost a task. Two years ago, it was all work and no play.

"I see him being a lot happier and more contented person than he was in the last couple of years. It's a pretty heavy mantle, when you're cast into a celebrity status, to be thrown into the spotlight and make sure every step you take is absolutely perfect."

His comfort level was obvious as the Patriots progressed through the season. Brady was not voted to the Pro Bowl, and he was third in the most valuable player voting, behind the two quarterbacks the Patriots defeated in the playoffs, Steve McNair and Manning. Still, he is the undisputed leader of the Patriots. The Boston gossip columns chronicle his personal life, and tight end Christian Fauria said, "Women want to be with him and men want to be him."

But the Brady whom the Patriots see reveals himself best in the heat of a game.

Brady has always had a competitive temperament. He threw a remote control at the television as an 8-year-old after losing a video game, and he punched a wall when he was 12 after losing a basketball game. Last summer, during one of the pickup basketball games that members of the Patriots play, Brady's team was losing to a group of firefighters. The playoffs and the Lombardi Trophy were far off, but Brady lashed into his teammates with a ferocity usually reserved for autumn Sundays. The face that launched a thousand New England crushes was gone. The one that would not succumb to the physical and emotional pounding at Michigan was back.

"The worst thing would be to lose -- they're going to be telling that story to their grandchildren," Brady said " 'We beat them and they won 13 or whatever in a row.' I couldn't stand that. You want to go out and put them in their place."

Just like the rest of the NFL.

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