After teasing it during Tom Brady’s Patriots Hall of Fame induction last year, Robert Kraft finally pulled the curtain on his long-promised statue outside Gillette Stadium yesterday, and it was every bit the tribute fans had hoped for.
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Standing 12 feet tall as a nod to Brady’s iconic jersey number, atop a granite base quarried from Vermont, the bronze figure now welcomes visitors outside the team’s Hall of Fame. With the base included, the full installation reaches 17 feet, symbolizing the 17 AFC East titles Tom Brady helped secure over his two decades in New England.
The statue was primarily conceived and sculpted by Jeff Buccacio and his wife, Nina. A lifelong Patriots fan, Jeff approached the project with one clear priority: avoid the well-worn quarterback pose like Joe Montana’s and Peyton Manning’s at the 49ers’ and Colts’ stadiums, respectively. He wanted it to be different.
“We looked at some of the other football statues that exist out there in the world and wanted to make sure that this was different from those,” he said. “Obviously, with the quarterback, the tradition would be a passing motion, and we didn’t want to do that.”
Instead, Jeff and Nina, along with their creative head, combed through years of Tom Brady imagery, narrowing it down to 10 “signature poses.” Nina recalled, “Once we got that short list, we presented those to Robert and Jonathan [Kraft]. We all gravitated towards this sort of… very victorious pose.”
From there, Buccacio refined the stance to convey something timeless. “The way it was expressed to me, they wanted him to feel sort of stoic… You [are] just after victory, sort of exhausted but still standing tall and proud,” he explained. “We wanted it to be emotion, but we also wanted it to be able to stand as a piece of artwork by itself.”
Even the statue’s hexagonal base adds another layer of symbolism, with each side representing one of Brady’s six Super Bowl victories in New England. Together, the figure and base form a piece both rooted in history and elevated beyond the typical sports memorial.
Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who called the monument “larger than life, just like Tommy is,” is hoping that it will forever remind fans “what Tom Brady did and how he made us all feel.”
Coming back to Jeff Buccacio, his challenge wasn’t just capturing Brady’s likeness but distilling a 20-year career into a single moment. “There was no one play that we could really single out… that could really embody his life’s work,” he said. So the final result, a victorious, grounded, and unmistakably Tom Brady pose, ensures this statue will stand apart from his peers.
