From Ed Reed to Aaron Donald, Tom Brady spent two decades outsmarting some of the NFL’s most feared defenders—racking up 7 Super Bowls and 5 Super Bowl MVPs in the process. The fact that he pulled this off well into his 40s only reinforces why he’s the undisputed GOAT.
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But for all his composure under pressure, you have to wonder — what actually gets under Brady’s skin? What’s the one thing that pushes him over the edge? Fortunately, we finally have an answer.
In this week’s edition of his newsletter, 199, the seven-time champ gave fans a glimpse of a side we rarely see: the hot-headed, controller-smashing, golf-club-swinging competitor who simply can’t stand to lose — even during an 8-bit boss battle.
“I was playing Nintendo, and I lost right at the point in a game where I was sure I was going to win,” TB12 recalled. “I smashed the controller against the living room coffee table until it cracked in half, and then I threw it at the TV.”
As it turns out, this meltdown wasn’t a one-off. “I probably broke 5 controllers in this same fashion,” admitted the GOAT.
The former Bucs star’s family wasn’t too thrilled about his outbursts—especially his three older sisters. They’d often hit him with that brutally honest line: “What is wrong with you?!”
While one might expect a nice guy like Tom to mellow out with age, it turns out his fiery side never really cooled down. It just got redirected. These days, instead of launching game controllers, he’s launching wedges into the ocean.
Recently, while playing a round of golf on vacation in the Bahamas, Brady revealed trying to “play conservative off the tee” on hole 13 at Bakers Bay. However, his meek attempt led him nowhere near the target, leading him to smash the daylights out of his club on the turf.
“I ended up shanking the ball about 100 yards left out of bounds,” he wrote. “I slammed my club three times into the turf with full force while shouting a stream of profanities into the air loud enough for God to hear.”
And then, the ultimate kicker: “I threw my 60-degree into the ocean from the bunker behind the 7th green at Pebble Beach.”
That said, the GOAT revealed he isn’t ashamed of any of his outbursts for a simple reason: if he didn’t hate losing, he would’ve never won. According to Brady, it wasn’t just his discipline, IQ, or arm strength that made the difference in his career.
It was that relentless inner engine — that insatiable hunger to excel — that helped him win 7 Super Bowls and pull off impossible comebacks, like the 28-3 Super Bowl 51 game.
“For the longest time I thought our success… was simply the result of having gotten better in all the important dimensions of football… But the thing that has always made the biggest difference, I realized, was the thing that never changed: my competitiveness.”
Sure, the GOAT smashed a few controllers and threw a few golf equipment to the sea, but if this fire wasn’t lit inside him, we wouldn’t have seen the greatest NFL career of all time. Because as Brady said, “talent is never all it takes”.
