Congratulations, Tom Brady!
GQ just officially named you its “Man of the Year.”
#Patriots quarterback Tom Brady is @GQMagazine's Man of the Year https://t.co/meHev4qjOt pic.twitter.com/mjl7gR6vJx
— The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) November 18, 2015
Despite Brady’s rocky 2015, GQ’s Chuck Klosterman wrote that Brady is “MOY”-material for a multitude of reasons, but none more important than the following: “He is, by definition, a winner.”
Read the GQ excerpt:
In the present, we overvalue the rules of sport and insist that anyone caught breaking ,those parameters must be stopped, sanctioned, and banned. But as the decades slip away, such responses tend to invert. Who won and who lost got hurt and nobody took drugs and nothing was fixed by gamblers, a little deception almost becomes charming. A deficiency of character adds character, somehow. It proves that the cheater cared.
The Patriots are the Raiders of now, despite the fact that the Raiders still exist. They push the limits of everything, and that’s how they dominate. Sometimes that limit-pushing is lawful and brilliant: When Belichick placed seven “eligible” receivers on the field against the Ravens in last season’s divisional playoff, it was a stroke of strategic genius. Sometimes that limit-pushing is (perhaps) significantly less than totally legal. But it’s all philosophically essential to what makes them who they are. They don’t need to cheat in order to win, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. I mean, how do rich people stay rich? By avoiding all the taxes specifically designed for rich people. How does a football franchise sustain a dynasty within an NFL system designed to instill parity? By attacking the boundaries of every rule in that system, at every level of the organization. And in both cases, the perception of those actions does not matter to the individuals involved. Perception is other people’s problem. Brady does not hide from this: “I don’t really care how the Patriots are perceived. I really don’t.”
There is nothing more attractive than a person who does not care if other people find him attractive.
These are all just games. Within the grand scheme of existence, they have no intrinsic value. A game can matter only as much as the involved players believe it to matter. This is why no one watches the Pro Bowl. It’s also what makes Brady di≠erent from normal people, and from other quarterbacks: He will do whatever it takes to win, regardless of what that win represents. He is, by definition, a winner. Which is what everyone has always said about him. We always knew this. He is precisely the man society demands him to be. It’s just that society doesn’t like to think about what that means in practice.
In 2014, actor Ansel Elgort graced GQ’s MOY cover. (RELATED: Tom Brady Wants To Make America Great Again)