He’s Leader of the Pats

The golf cart rolled quietly through the darkness under Gillette Stadium. Quarterback Tom Brady was riding shotgun. Around the corner, about 100 New England Patriot fans were standing in a roped-off area, unfazed by the drizzle, unaware of which player had been chosen to sign autographs that day.

The shrieks came when Brady turned the corner. The 100 sounded like 1,000. Brady, wearing a five-day beard and a wool cap, smiled sheepishly before climbing out of the cart and walking over to the crowd.

“It really embarrasses me,” he said later of getting the rock-star treatment. “I don’t think I enjoy that. It’s not my personality. I just like to be one of the guys. On the field it’s a different story; you expect the quarterback to lead. But when you’re off the field, I don’t think of myself differently than I did when I was a 12-year-old kid.”

If that sounds too humble to be true, it probably is. There are definite advantages to being a star quarterback who has led his team to victories in two of the last three Super Bowls. Two years ago, he took a coast-to-coast trip aboard Hugh Hefner’s jet, was a judge for the Miss Universe pageant and was chosen one of People magazine’s “Most Beautiful People.” This off-season, he hobnobbed with President Bush and had a private audience at the Vatican with the Pope. His dating life is breathlessly covered in the Boston gossip pages, and this summer the buzz had “Tom Terrific” on the verge of marrying actress girlfriend Bridget Moynahan.

(“No sir, no sir,” Brady insisted last week. “No plans to get married.”)

In many ways, though, the quarterback with the looks of a leading man has the ego of a Hollywood extra.

Clearly, that has helped him keep his edge in a league that nearly passed him by -- letting him go almost six full rounds before the Patriots selected him with the 199th pick in the 2000 draft.

It took him 29 months to go from a virtually anonymous rookie just hoping to make the roster to two-time Super Bowl most valuable player. His .739 winning percentage is best among active quarterbacks with at least 25 starts, and, with a pair of championship rings, he’s halfway to the total earned by his boyhood idol, Joe Montana.

But Brady understands how quickly it can unravel. The quarterback with the second-best winning percentage is Kurt Warner, who is 0-8 as a starter since his last victory: the NFC championship game in 2001. Warner, the former St. Louis quarterback twice selected MVP of the league, is trying to revive his career as a New York Giant.

“I think you really realize how quickly things change,” said Brady, 27.

“Not using Kurt as an example, but if I don’t keep my preparation up, if I don’t keep in shape, and I don’t keep disciplined in terms of learning the offense and understanding what we’re trying to do, then it can go the other way.”

At the moment, Brady’s immediate goal is simple: keeping his parking space. The team’s top workout warriors in each position group are given prime parking spots at the stadium. Brady has kept his since his first season when he was backing up Drew Bledsoe. Unusually thin as a rookie out of Michigan, Brady has put on about five pounds a year and now is listed at 6 feet 4, 225 pounds, as solid as the Montreal Expos probably envisioned him becoming when they selected him as a catcher in the 18th round of the 1995 Major League Baseball draft.

Before visiting the White House with teammates this off-season, Brady got up at 5 a.m. to lift weights, even though players were credited with a free workout day for making the trip. He’s determined not to jostle his schedule, no matter what the occasion.

“There really are no shortcuts for me,” Brady said. “That was a Monday morning, and our schedule is to lift Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and I’d rather get up and lift than not lift. It’s worth it for me to stay as strong and as big as I can stay.”

More than ever this season, he will have the authority to make decisions at the line of scrimmage. He won’t be directing traffic the way Indianapolis quarterback Peyton Manning does -- sometimes checking in and out of three different plays before getting the snap -- but he is free to make a change he thinks will work better. Brady said he has so much respect for the play-calling ability of offensive coordinator Charlie Weis that he can’t imagine changing plays more than two or three times a game. Regardless, he feels comfortable doing it.

And his teammates are perfectly comfortable too. After all, Brady has completed a franchise-best 61.9% of passes in his career. He set a Super Bowl record in February with 32 completions in the Patriots’ 32-29 victory over Carolina.

“Talk about calm under pressure,” tight end Christian Fauria said. “That was another level. I had never been to the Super Bowl, and he was just completely under control. He was just ice.”

Fauria, in his third season playing with Brady, said the quarterback has a natural charisma that draws people to him.

“I don’t want to offend anybody, but he’s got like a JFK presence around him,” Fauria said. “People want to be around him. He’s nice to everybody no matter what their race, no matter what their income level. He’d be a great politician.”

That’s a teammate talking, of course, and Brady has learned to weed through the hyperbole. He understands on an intellectual level that he’s probably as big on the Boston sports landscape as Larry Bird and Bobby Orr were, yet he figures it does him no good to dwell on that. Nor is he interested in pursuing a career in acting, as some people have suggested he should.

“It’s not my style. It’s not my thing,” he said. “I find it kind of difficult. Even the stuff when you’re doing a commercial. That stuff is more difficult for me than running out in front of 100,000 people playing football.

“You’re in a totally different environment. All these people are professional, they’ve been wanting to do this their whole life. And I’m a football player out there trying to read a couple of lines just realizing that I have no clue what I’m doing. I have no clue what they’re looking for. And everyone is afraid to tell me something, you know, ‘Try it this way,’ because they don’t want to hurt my feelings or whatever. They’re afraid that I’m going to shoot back at them.”

Brady won’t rule out acting or politics when his football career is over, but he hopes to play at least another 10 years. That’s too far in the future for a guy focused on his next practice, his next workout, his next play.

And on keeping that parking space.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Well-Armed Patriot

Tom Brady’s passing statistics during his four seasons with New England:

*--* Year G GS Att Comp Pct Yards Lg TD Int Rate 2000 1 0 3 1 33.3 6 6 0 0 42.4 2001 15 14 413 264 63.9 2,843 91 18 12 86.5 2002 16 16 601 373 62.1 3,764 49 28 14 85.7 2003 16 16 527 317 60.2 3,620 82 23 12 85.9 TOTAL 48 46 1,544 955 61.9 10,233 91 69 38 85.9

*--*