Belichick Has Entered the Chat to Remind Baker Mayfield How Much Fun He and Tom Brady Had Winning All the Time

Jerry Thornton10/01/2024 3:20 PM

Tom Pennington. Getty Images.

This was enjoyable enough:

Because Tom Brady has proven time and time again that when it comes to public beefs with anyone, especially someone questioning his legacy, he is King of the Ring. And this was no exception. He got Baker Mayfield into his signature closing move and got him to tap out in under a minute.

But sometimes even the holder of the most championship belts in history can benefit from having a Tag Team partner. And the best there has ever been came right off the top rope to deliver the People's Elbow to anyone who would dare suggest the Dynasty he and Brady built together was not a good time:

"Well, I do thing Tom and I were a good match there. Look, Tom could have fun and he could pull pranks and make fun of people and be made fun of and all that. But, when it was time for business, he was all business. Whether that was in the meeting room or walkthrough on the field, there was nothing more important to him than everything being done right. Not just his job but the players around him. The proper timing, the proper alignments, and so forth. And anybody who played with Tom would support that. Julian, Rob, Troy Brown, you name it. And that's kind of the way I was.
"And people say well, we didn't have fun. Let me tell you something. Winning six Super Bowl championships was fun. Going to nine Super Bowls was fun. Winning those AFC championship games, that was fun. The fun was really the winning. And I certainly understand where Tom was coming from.
"Honestly, I think there's a lot more stress when you're not winning. Winning is hard. It's very hard to win in the National Football League. You've got to put a lot into it. And there's a very fine line between winning and not winning."

Giphy Images.

The Brady-Belichick dynamic has never been expressed so beautifully. Not even by me, who spent the whole 20 years they were working together trying.

This is the true benefit of having both these GOATs away from the game and sitting behind microphones. They can finally give us looks into what was going on behind their Iron Curtain because they're no longer putting in 16 hour days figuring out ways to run play action or gameplan for Ed Reed. And this is as revealing as anything they've told us.

Remember all the speculation over all the years as to whether these two got along? Whether Brady could even stand playing for Belichick? I'll say again, I spent more time talking about the interpersonal relationship between these two grown men than I have my own marriage. (Happy 31st anniversary to my devoted Irish Rose.) And just as I suspected all along, they weren't interested in having "fun" in the way regular slobs like you, me, or Baker Mayfield think of it. They weren't throwing Friday pizza parties and going out after work for beers. In the offseason they weren't texting each other memes or getting together for rounds of golf.

What they did was share the common enjoyment that can only come from harvesting souls together. The world is a lot more fun when you're looking at it from the throne you've placed at the top of a pyramid of skulls. But you don't get to enjoy that vantage point without putting in a lot of time and effort. Blood, toil, sweat and tears. Which is an entirely different kind of fun. One that's not for everyone. Just for achievers.

Like Brady and Belichick. And the others he singled out, like Edelman, Gronk and Brown. And I'll add Ty Law, Richard Seymour, Deion Branch, Rodney Harrison, Tedy Bruschi, Vince Wilfork, Logan Mankins, Devin McCourty. Dozens of guys who were obsessively fixated on winning. That delayed gratification that is sometimes referred to as Type 2 enjoyment; that thing where the pleasure doesn't come in performing the task, but in the satisfaction of a job well done when you've accomplished your goal.

That's what all the critics and haters never understood. They'd be sitting home in January watching the Patriots in yet another AFCCG, comforting themselves with the notion that all those Pats players are miserable, but at least the teams whose seasons were over had a fun year. "After all, it's called 'playing' football!" But it was always the Aesop fable The Ant and the Grasshopper. The ones who applied themselves, put in the effort, and waited to enjoy themselves when the work was done were the ones who end up truly happy and successful.

It's ridiculous that this even needs to be said. But it does. After all those hit pieces in ESPN and anti-Patriots propaganda like Apple TV's The Dynasty, people need to be reminded those were great times. Difficult for those involved. But all their effort paid off. They accomplished impossible things. And will be remembered forever as the best team in the history of their sport, while all the ones on the outside looking in who said they weren't having fun have long been forgotten.