When you’re as good at your job as Tom Brady was during his two decades as an NFL quarterback, you’re bound to piss a lot of people off along the way. For him to win all those games and Super Bowls, other teams had to lose. It’s the nature of the sport. All you can really do is charge it to the game… or you can get back at your tormentor by heckling.
Advertisement
Even now, three years after Brady played his final game in the NFL, he’s still feeling it from rival fans. At the Indy 500 in Indianapolis last week (home of the Colts, who had an epic rival with Brady’s New England Patriots), he was booed by the attending Indy sports fans. Fair play.
The GOAT took the booing in stride, however, responding by saying, “It was great to get in one more successful drive in front of a bunch of Colts fans.” Nice. But Colts fans are just the tip of the iceberg. They weren’t even in Brady’s division.
It’s those AFC East fan bases he kept in the mud for 20 years that hate him the most. Brady went 87-22 against those three teams overall and 30-7 specifically against the New York Jets.
Recently, Brady reminisced about one of the funniest heckles he ever got, courtesy of a prepubescent Jets fan.
“I’ve heard it all. Actually, in my last season with the Patriots, we were playing at the Jets in the Meadowlands. And I’m standing in the tunnel before the game, and this kid’s yelling down at me, ‘You bleepedy-bleep bleep.’ (Laughs)”
Seeing how young the kid was, Brady went back at him.
“And I look up at this kid and I just said, ‘How old are you?’ He goes, ’11,’ I go, ‘Where are your parents!?’ (Laughs) And I’m like, you know, you teach ’em early and they’re into it too, so it’s fun.”
It’s one of the funniest interactions you’ll hear about between a superstar like Brady and a kid. The best part about it is that Brady knows not to take these things personally. He knows how much these sports teams mean to some people.
View this post on Instagram
Like he said, the kid may be 11, but they “teach ’em early.” It’s all in good fun, and that competitive spirit and passion from players and fans alike is what make sports so special. Obviously, fans can and have gone overboard, but this clearly wasn’t one of those instances.
Tom Brady may have had to take a bit of verbal abuse from rowdy rival fans, especially in the cauldron of New York, but we reckon he would say he got the better of those relationships in the end considering he went down as the greatest ever, while dominating his way to an NFL record seven Super Bowl titles.
If that’s the end product, you could probably take a few cuss words from a preteen.
