I regret to have to inform you that the Officially Correct Pro-Labor Position is to root for Tom Brady in the Super Bowl.
You are forgiven for being reluctant. Brady has been politically toxic for quite awhile now. Even before his MAGA hat and friendship with Donald Trump got him in trouble, it felt reactionary to root for him. His persona—handsome, all-American white guy married to a literal supermodel and playing on the most dominant team in professional sports—calls to mind sports stars from previous eras, like Joe DiMaggio or Jack Dempsey. He evokes the same weird nostalgia for mid-twentieth century America that Trump exploited.
Plus, Brady’s aura was formed in 2001, in the haze of post-9/11 patriotism. He and the rest of that team were designed for the disingenuous nationalism of the era, killing individual introductions in the Super Bowl (as if that were some magnanimous act and not a way of ensuring lesser known players never got their moment in the spotlight) and literally named the Patriots (Robert Kraft now says “Today, we are all Patriots” every time he’s handed the Lombardi Trophy and has actually trademarked the phrase). And Brady was the humble face of the franchise: a low draft pick who put winning ahead of gaudy individual stats.
Of course, Brady very quickly went from likable underdog to unstoppable force—much like the American war machine. His robotic dominance became boring. It’s one thing to say you only care about winning football games—it’s another to REALLY only care about winning football games. At a time when other sports stars have spoken out on issues from racial justice and police brutality to marriage equality and equal pay, Brady avoids all of it. Even his support of Trump seemed to stem from the fact that they were golfing buddies—once he got flak for it, he stopped talking about it. His only real commitment seems to be to nutrition, as part of a so-far-successful attempt to defy the aging process—so he can keep winning football games forever.
For nearly two decades now, rooting for Tom Brady has felt like rooting for the status quo.
But not anymore. This year, rooting for Brady is rooting for labor. Because Brady is no longer on the Patriots, this season has been a referendum on the Belichick/Brady question: Who is more responsible for the Patriots dynasty, the quarterback or the coach? That Brady went to a 7-9 team that hadn’t made the playoffs in 12 years and immediately took them to a Super Bowl, while Belichick missed the playoffs completely, proves it pretty clearly: It was Brady.
Of course, Serious Football Fans will tell you that this is nonsense. They will tell you that it’s only one season, that the Bucs benefitted from an easy schedule, and that trying to parse individual responsibility for a team’s success is pointless anyway. Do not listen to these people.
The Belichick/Brady question is not silly—it is crucial. It is about management versus labor. And whenever that happens, it is important to take labor’s side. There is always an attempt to credit management for the successes of labor. In sports, this is especially extreme: We are constantly hearing about the tactical brilliance of coaches, managers, and coordinators. Especially in football, players can be seen as mere cogs in a coach’s system.
And yet here it is, as clear as day, how important one player out of 53 can be. The Patriots were a 12-4 team last year, and even though they lost Brady, they replaced him with a former MVP in Cam Newton. Still, they were bad: they lost five of their first seven games, including two home losses to bad teams. They finished 7-9 and missed the playoffs—two things that never happened with Brady as quarterback. Clearly, Belichick is nothing more than a decent football coach who happened to land the best quarterback ever for two decades. He has coached seven seasons without Brady as his quarterback, and in six of them his team finished below .500. The evidence is clear now, but a Super Bowl win next week will prove it definitively: The boss needs you; you don’t need him.
Some links for the weekend:
-Dave Zirin on the press’ treatment of Kyrie Irving.
-Tom Ley on the labor struggles in Major League Soccer.
-Stephen Wood on the plans to pay college athletes.
-Lindsey Adler on the Yankees letting down Masahiro Tanaka.