Tom Brady, 44, Reveals Why He Still Has No Set Plans To Retire After 22 Years In The NFL
Mario Sorrenti for WSJ. Magazine
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There’s no quit in Tom Brady. Though he’s well into his forties, the seven-time Super Bowl champ reveals why he’s not ready to hang up his jersey just yet.
“I don’t want to be out there and suck,” Tom Brady says in the new feature in WSJ. Magazine’s Men’s Fall Fashion issue. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback has been dogged by retirement speculation for years. While his contemporaries – like Peyton Manning, Eli Manning, and Drew Brees – have walked off the football field, Tom still has some gas in the tank, and he knows that when he doesn’t, he’ll bow out. “You think I want to go out there and look like I’m 44 years old?” he adds. “I want to look like I’m in my prime.”
“I don’t think anything will match my football career,” he tells WSJ. Magazine. “I think it’s too hard to replicate that level of energy and output and adrenaline. That’s kind of why I want to go until the end, because I want to make sure I don’t look back and go, ‘Man, I could still do it.’” As to when? Tom doesn’t know. “I don’t know where that’s going to be. I really don’t.” Tom recently signed an extension with the Bucs, ensuring he’ll have a spot through the 2022 season. “Beyond that, I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe it’s another year after that; maybe it’s two. I’ll have to see where I’m at with my family. That’s probably the overriding factor—what I’m missing out on.”
Tom does have some intention to retire. When he does, he’ll focus on his portfolio of businesses, ranging from the TB12 fitness brand to fashion and filmmaking. “I feel like I’m living two lives,” he says. “My football life and then my post-football life.” Tom said switching between the two — football and off-field interests — is a bit tiring, but these entrepreneurial endeavors are expanding the concept of who Tom Brady is. “Tom has accomplished so much in his career, and the world knows him for his love and devotion to the game of football,” his wife, Gisele Bündchen, tells WSJ. Magazine. “Now it’s great having others also get to know him a bit more, as I do.”
Though the seven-time Super Bowl champion may come off as superhuman, he’s really not. Tom acknowledged that while not everyone lives as he does, everyday people are “looking for wins professionally. They’re looking for wins personally,” he says. “They’re looking at how to parent in a challenging life, how to have a healthy marriage based on professional responsibilities… I relate to everybody that way. To think that I don’t is ridiculous. The reality is that I’m very human.”