Tom Brady retires

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What "hate"?

He was a great football player----one of the greatest of all time.

Was Brady the greatest football player of all time? Sure, why not. Was he the most accomplished American athlete of his generation? Yeah, probably. Was he a defining cultural figure during his reign, a man of his era the way Jordan was in the '90s, Ali in the '60s, the way Babe Ruth in the '20s? Yes.

Appropriate, then, that his era sucked. He won his first Super Bowl right after 9/11, clad in a red, white, and blue uniform, all while neocon demons sat in back rooms and plotted to wield the pain of all those deaths to perpetrate a series of hideous war crimes. He left as the country struggles to emerge from a hideous ongoing pandemic. In between all that, a litany of nightmares: economic meltdown, a disappointing president followed by a demagogue (that he befriended and supported), the complete and total fraying of anything resembling national unity.

The world that existed side by side with Tom Brady’s iron-fisted reign over American sports, his total domination over the country’s biggest league, was, like Tom Brady and his squads, an aggravating, tiring, regressive nightmare. Everyone is happy it’s over. Maybe, now that the avatar of an era of suffering has finally been exiled from American public life, the healing can begin under the more captivating, progressive aura of Patrick Mahomes or Josh Allen.

I can’t pretend there’s a cause and effect here—that when Tom Brady won that first Super Bowl, he set the template for the next two decades of American life, a maelstrom of disappointments. But what if I were to say that Brady was a totem of everything hateful about the era he played through? From 9/11 to the pandemic meltdown, terrible wars to demagogues and the approach of total civilizational collapse, there was Tom, square-jawing his way through it all, a big void dismantling your favorite team while the bigger void dismantled everything else.