FOtball is the most democratic game in America, despite the gradual decline in participation, by far the most popular sport of all high schools. It is for the children of the countryside and for the children of the city. It is for black children and for white children. You can be fat and play on the line. You can be skinny and play a wide receiver. Or you can be a mundane athlete like Tom Brady and win several Super Bowls.
This assessment might seem a bit harsh for a living legend considered by many to be the tallest quarterback, the position that has been called the most demanding in team sports. But there was a time – before the six NFL titles and nine Super Bowl appearances (records both), Tag Heuer’s commercials and glossy magazine covers, tabloid novels with Hollywood starlets and Brazilian models – where Brady was definitely one of us: a slightly considered perspective with an emerging father and father selected in the last rounds of the 2000 project as a lining for an established star. Even after breaking out of relative obscurity at the start of the 2001 season, leaving the bench of injured starter Drew Bledsoe to lead the underperforming New England Patriots to an improbable young girl’s championship in the misty wake September 11, he was no more than a young Californian with a cool face and a throat who came to win the big one.
Due to decades of hard work, meticulous preparation, a disturbing nerve / temper, hair-triggered release and good fortune, Brady is still among the best players in the NFL as he plays launches his second act with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after 20 seasons in New England. If there is a 2020 season, he will be 43 years old at the start. No matter what common ground he coexisted with mortals like us, he was sold in mid-August after his third Super Bowl title in four years or his 2007 campaign. And like his career absurd and panoramic has spread well after the age when quarters are put to pasture, the answer to the million dollar question – What’s the secret? – appreciated only in value.
Brady’s trajectory from any man to Superman embodies the lure of upward mobility to the essence of the American dream, which for the particular generation who happened to watch him surgically separate the secondary with numbing efficiency – the first of l he modern history of the United States that will eventually become poorer than its parents – has increasingly been presented as bogus merchandise, as hollow and inaccessible as a fairy tale. But over the past few years, Brady has bottled, packaged and sold this fantasy with a well-being and lifestyle brand called TB12 ™. The company, which has physical sports therapy centers in downtown Boston and adjacent to the Patriots Stadium in the bucolic suburb of Foxborough, peddles everything, nutritional supplements, home training equipment and nutritional products, all centered around New York. The best-selling volume of the time The TB12 method: how to obtain a lifetime of maximum sustainable performance. The packaging is as smooth and polished as the pitchman on the cover, but the dubious science behind much of the product line is sure to deflate the most demanding customers.
In the book, Brady attributes his fantastic longevity and durability to the pseudoscientific concept of “muscle flexibility,” a vaguely defined concept coined by his “body coach” who became trading partner Alex Guerrero, a controversial self-taught exercise guru who investigated twice by the Federal Trade Commission – first in 2005 for falsely posing as a doctor and claiming to be able to cure cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease with a food supplement called Supreme Greens, then seven years later for a sports drink called NeuroSafe (infamous approved by Brady), which he said could prevent concussions. That muscle flexibility as a concept is categorically rejected by exercise scientists is irrelevant; as Brady’s writing writes: “Feeling better – that’s the key “
The very restrictive diet required of members is described in more detail in the TB12 ™ nutrition manual, abandoned since, which sold at retail for $ 200 and quickly sold: a “living document” including “a library of 89 seasonal-inspired recipes you can use to support your TB12-aligned nutrition plan. ” In addition to the well-documented sweet foods and other processed carbohydrates, Brady avoids “nightshade” fruits and vegetables, including peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, and eggplant – New York magazine reported that he had never eaten strawberry of his life – and leans heavily towards “alkaline” foods like nuts and legumes which he says prevent bone fractures (incorrectly, empirically) and fight “inflammation” (whatever it is).
Most of these products, like Brady’s Vitalfit ™ Tart Cherry recovery capsules ($ 45), are expensive if harmless supplements that might otherwise be found on ambitious lifestyle platforms like Goop. Others like the more recent addition of TB12 ™ PROTECT, an “immunity blend” that promises to “activate your immune system and fight stress-induced immune suppression” and has been criticized for responding to the afraid of people getting Covid-19, wouldn’t do it don’t feel right with Force Plus DNA, Ultimate Bone Broth Formula and less bewildered snake oil peddled by the great poobah d ‘Infowars Alex Jones.
Brady’s evolution in the Nietzschean superman, the ubermensch who touches the affected who believes that the rules do not apply to him, came to divide public opinion but failed to significantly undermine his celebrity and its commercial appeal. For those who are able to set aside or compartmentalize the rule-breaking and circumvention model that has resurfaced throughout his career, including a quarter-season suspension for being “at least generally at current “of ordinary cheating in 2015, it’s hard to complain to him about the spoils of his success and the right to leverage his brand for further financial gain, even in the hawking of baseless health claims. Caveat emptor, right? It’s an industry at least as old as Be Like Mike. Buy the sneakers. Eat the cereal. Not only can you look at me, you can be me. But at a time when anti-science sentiment has been alarmingly generalized (see: the flourishing anti-vax, anti-GMO and climate crisis movements), it’s also hard to ignore where Brady’s racket fits in the wider trend of influencers selling products in the “wellness” and “lifestyle” categories because they don’t meet the highest criteria of science.
And yet: isn’t this just another iteration of the American dream? These United States carry a long and often fun tradition of rapscallions, hucksters and charlatans who made their bones by exchanging on glamor, charisma and the promise of miracles: from Professor Harold Hill to PT Barnum to John R Brinkley to Elizabeth Holmes to Brady Good friend Donald Trump. If there has ever been a grand unifying theory to this improbable experience, this is it: you can’t get away from it. Brady’s garbage science is on the whole no more pernicious than the televangelists or carnival barkers who have separated generations of brands from their money. The American dream is already quite difficult to achieve for the first time. Let the San Mateo golden boy handle it twice.
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