“Tom Brady Knocked the Kid Into Never-Never Land”: The Time Tom Brady Taught a Frat Boy a Lesson and Earned Comparisons to Larry Bird, Charles Oakley, and Wayne Gretzky

It doesn’t matter if it’s the Super Bowl or an intramural Basketball game at U-M in the 90s: don’t piss off Tom Brady. When a frat brother was foolish enough to do so, he learnt his lesson.

In the 1999 NCAA season, Tom Brady found himself in the middle of a sour QB battle. Although he was Michigan’s starter in the ’98 season, head coach Lloyd Carr wanted to give another QB, Drew Henson, a shot.

The situation dragged on for weeks, and Brady did not appreciate the decision of his coach, to say the least. Obviously, Brady would eventually win the starting job, but not before the ill-effects of the dual-QB were felt.

So when a trash-talker brought up Drew Henson during an intramural basketball game, it’s no surprise that Brady wanted to teach him a lesson.

How Tom Brady Earned Comparisons to Larry Bird and Charles Oakley

Jay Flannelly, commonly known as “The Beav”, was Brady’s close friend during their time in Ann-Arbor, and he had the following interesting anecdote to share:

“We played intramural basketball together, and there was one day the frat boys were giving Tom a hard time about Drew Henson. Tom was taking it. I kept going over to him, asking, ‘You OK?'”

“So the game is almost over, about a minute left, and we were up by about 30 points. He comes over to me and asks how many fouls he has. You’re allowed four and Tom had two at the time. So he says to me, ‘Beav, next time we’re inbounding the ball, I’m going to throw it to you and just run up the court and don’t look behind you. Just sprint.'”

“So Tommy inbounds the ball to me, I run up the court and I hear this awful noise behind me. Tom set a screen, like Charles Oakley, that took out one of the guys who had been on him all game about Drew Henson.”

“It literally knocked the kid into never-never land. I always talked to him after that about how he was the quarterback enforcer; it would have been like Wayne Gretzky beating up a goon, or when Larry Bird went up to Bill Laimbeer.”

Also read: “What Is Tom Brady Even Thinking? Hope Is Not A Strategy”: How A Hedge Fund Guy Foolishly Thought Brady Could Never Climb The Ranks In The NFL And Become A Starting Quarterback