Tom Brady has been a star for literally as long as Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes can remember
The most respectful and also a little insulting thing that one professional athlete can say about another is some version of I grew up watching him.
The line is used all the time, almost always earnestly, and is typically meant to convey reverence. The unspoken intent is to say this older, more accomplished fella has been doing this successfully since the speaker could only dream about it.
That’s the unspoken intent, anyway. The unspoken message: He old.
All that said, in the grand and often absurd history of American sports, we have never had an I grew up watching him moment like Super Bowl LV: Tom Brady, legend, won his first Super Bowl when Patrick Mahomes, legend-in-the-making, was in kindergarten.
“September 17, 1995, the day I was born,” Mahomes said when asked when he first became aware of Brady.
It’s a good line, and you can see it all here, right? Unending respect, but also at least a little bit of OK, boomer.
Psychologists differ, but generally believe adults’ earliest memories to be from ages 2 to 8, which means that Brady — 18 years older than Mahomes — has been winning Super Bowls for quite literally as long as Mahomes can remember.
In fact, if Mahomes could remember Brady on the day he was born, he would remember Brady as a redshirt freshman at Michigan, going over film of the team’s win at Boston College. Instead, Mahomes is a grown man preparing for the Super Bowl, and when he’s asked about Brady he can’t help but start with that phrase.
“I grew up watching him play and he’s still here playing, and he’s still at the top of the game,” Mahomes said. “So for me, I need to watch him and watch the things that he does on and off the field in order to figure out the best way to make me the best player possible.”
When Mahomes was born, Brady was already at one of college football’s top programs. When Brady made his first start, Mahomes may or may not have been in diapers. Brady’s professional career is older than Mahomes’ younger brother. Brady’s first two MVP awards are older than Mahomes’ little sister.
This is one of the relatively few ways Mahomes is not unique. It’s estimated that 42 percent of the world’s population is 25 or younger, meaning nearly half of the world cannot remember a time when Brady was not winning Super Bowls.
Mahomes, for whatever it’s worth, almost certainly watched Brady’s first championship — Super Bowl XXXVI, when the Patriots won as 14-point underdogs on a last minute drive that ended with the winning field goal — but he was also 6 years old, so it’s not like he was analyzing blitz schemes.
But what we have is a remarkable truth, one we may never again have in another Super Bowl: Brady’s career has been in the background of Mahomes’ entire life, one boy growing into a superstar as a man went from starter to star to legend.
In the movie, it would be like a double montage: Adam Vinatieri’s kick and Brady’s hands-on-cheeks-OMG face after the first Super Bowl, then Mahomes shagging fly balls as a 5-year-old before the 2000 World Series.
*the drumbeat grows louder as the music quickens*
Brady winning his first MVP with that revolutionary 2007 team that went 18-1, then Mahomes attending his first quarterback camp in the sixth grade.
*cymbals crash, trumpets blare*
Brady wins his fourth ring (and first in a decade) with the 2014 Patriots on Malcolm Butler’s goal-line interception, then Mahomes plays his freshman year at Texas Tech and finally becomes a full-time football player the next spring.
Mahomes grew from a small boy to the NFL’s best player, all while Brady was a star. Here’s something: Mahomes is too young to remember the career of former Cowboys star Troy Aikman, who called a few Chiefs games this season, but he did cheer for Cowboys throughout the career of Tony Romo, who will call this Super Bowl.
In between, a million stories exist of how Mahomes caught up. He is naturally blessed, that’s been obvious from the beginning. Randi, Patrick’s mom, has said she knew her son would be a professional athlete from the age of 7.
It’s sometimes said that you can see Patrick’s loyalty in his using the same trainer he’s had since he was a kid, and that’s true, but that trainer has many other professional athletes as clients. So we could put it another way: Patrick, as a kid, began training like a professional athlete.
This is not one of those stories of parents pushing too hard. There was something different about Patrick from the beginning. Mike Hampton was a teammate of Patrick’s father on the 2000 Mets, who played in the World Series the month after Patrick turned 5. Randi remembers Hampton asking how she always got Patrick to want to play catch. Randi asked Hampton if he knew how she could get him to stop.
A friend tells this story from when Mahomes was in the third or fourth grade. He’d only recently moved to town, but quickly found a group of friends who obsessed on sports like he did. They’re still best friends, actually. But one day, Mahomes ripped his leg open on a barbed wire fence.
The cut was bad enough that he couldn’t play in a basketball game the next day, and his buddies swear he was a little upset his team won anyway. Maybe this is the beginning of this wild competitive streak, the one where he finds insults in being ranked the fourth-best player in the league and to the All-Pro team.
When that basketball game happened — Mahomes unable to play — Brady had recently won his third Super Bowl at age 27. Think about that. It’s not just that Brady has been a star for as long as Mahomes can remember — Brady has had a legitimate case as one of the best to ever play.
The shadow is so large that before Brady played in that third Super Bowl, the Tyler Morning Telegraph quoted 9-year-old Patrick Mahomes predicting the Eagles to beat the Patriots 35-28.
“Eagles are a better team,” Patrick said, which means we have documented proof of him believing in then-Eagles coach Andy Reid long before that was part of his job.
Brady was a part of Mahomes’ life, even as just someone to watch on TV, before the young boy even realized it. Every step of Mahomes’ path from diapers to potential dynasty has come with Brady already an established star in America’s biggest sport.
Here’s an idea of how quickly Mahomes escalated: Randi always had a four-year plan for her oldest child, a plan that was blown to bits when Patrick needed just three years to from a high school baseball prospect to such a tantalizing football prospect that teams with Hall of Fame quarterbacks tried trading up for him.
When the Chiefs made the most daring personnel decision in franchise history, Mahomes had been a full-time football player for just two years.
Mahomes’ story is such that merely saying things that are true can make you sound like you’re on hallucinogens. He is the single most valuable asset in the NFL, and football was his third-best sport two years into high school.
By the age of 8, he’d call pitches while watching big-league games, and Randi swore he was correct more times than not. By 10 or so, he could tell you what was good or bad about a golf swing on TV.
People of a certain age sometimes like to dismiss people of Patrick’s age by calling them “the participation trophy generation.” It’s a flawed concept on a lot of levels, but doesn’t fit Patrick anyway — Randi described him as obsessed with competition, and the process, and then constantly losing the trophies he’d win.
The men who reach or even approach Mahomes’ level usually had childhoods that revolved around learning how to quarterback. An ecosystem has developed over the years, with one camp leading to another, year-round competitions that coaches have to call “the circuit.” Kids get professionalized highlight packages before their first varsity game.
Mahomes had none of that. He nearly quit football twice as a kid, actually, though nobody thought much of it at the time because they figured he was a baseball player anyway.
But it’s wild to think about — the NFL’s brightest star wanted to quit when his Pop Warner coach put him at linebacker instead of quarterback, and again before his junior season when colleges were recruiting him as a safety.
Most of what Mahomes loved about football was specific to playing quarterback, so if college coaches were telling him he’d have to play another position then maybe he should save his body and concentrate on baseball.
He actually told his mom he was quitting the Whitehouse High team. This wasn’t thinking about it. This was a decision made. Part of Randi was relieved. Football scared her. But she knew her son, and told him to think about whether he’d be happy watching from the stands as his friends played.
Patrick relented, thinking he’d give football one more season, when he was in one of the most awkward quarterback competitions imaginable — with one of his best friends, Ryan Cheatham.
The coaches were split — Cheatham was more reliable, Mahomes more spectacular — but at halftime of a rainy early season game they chose spectacular. That’s when one more season started to feel more like a future.
“To see the light in his face, to win a big game like that, that’s when I saw it,” said Adam Cook, then Whitehouse’s offensive coordinator. “After that, I always knew in the back of my mind this boy loves football. It was like, ‘I hear what y’all are saying about baseball, but this boy loves football.’”
That was the beginning, and one more truth about Mahomes that makes you sound crazy if you say it out loud: a movie could be made on his life so far, and his football career is still very much closer to the beginning than the end.
No matter how the rest of it goes, we’re set to watch one of the most important moments of his life and career — a Super Bowl matchup against a man who started winning Super Bowls before Mahomes could ever dream of one.