Brady's life now ensnarled by celebrity craziness

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The first shot across the bow was in Tuesday's New York Post, with the front-page picture of Patriots quarterback Tom Brady in a hooded sweatshirt and carrying flowers, his right foot in a white protective boot, walking through Greenwich Village, while a subhead screamed, "Girlie Man Limps Home."This Super Bowl had officially begun, with Brady in the middle of the media crosshairs.Is he really hurt?Will he play?Is he going to be 100 percent?What's going on?All complete with the paparazzi that followed Brady around as if he were some male version of Britney Spears, just more grist for the celebrity mill, celebrity for its own sake. Why not? Brady has become the biggest sports star in America, the glamour quarterback on the glamour team, the glittering centerpiece in the national spectacle that's become the biggest day in American sport. You don't believe it? Name a bigger sports star.Tiger Woods? You can have that one.But Tiger already seems a little like yesterday's news, complete with a wife and child, the symbol of domesticity, living in some gated community in Florida. Not for Tiger to have the paparazzi chasing him through the streets of New York chasing him and his glamour-puss gal-pal, a life in the tabloids. Not for Tiger to be on the front page of the New York Post with a headline that says, "Girlie Man Limps Home."Like Tiger, though, Brady has transcended sports, as great a quarterback as he is. He is a genuine celebrity, with the looks and the style and the model girlfriend and all the accoutrements of what it now takes to be truly famous in America. Everyone else in the Super Bowl is a football player.It no longer is just about the fact that he broke the all-time record for most touchdown passes thrown in a regular season, no longer is it just about the fact he's knocking on the door to be know as the greatest quarterback ever, as amazing as that may sound. It's not even about the fact he's the star of a team that's one game away from staking their claim as the best in NFL history.All that's sports-page stuff.Brady left all that in the dust a long time ago.What we are seeing now is a cultural phenomenon, a perfect storm of factors, complete with the aw-shucks charm of the boy next door, like he sprung from the pages of adolescent fiction. For if you had brought this script into a Hollywood studio, some Perrier-drinking mogul would have laughed you out of the office. You want anyone to believe that some skinny kid who was a sixth-round draft choice, some no-name kid who only gets on the field because someone clocked the starting quarterback, becomes the best player in the NFL, GQ calls him one of the all-time 50 icons of cool, and he dates a super model, too?Yeah, right?Come back when you have a story anyone over 12 might actually believe.But that's what we're dealing with here, one of those stranger-than-fiction stories that give hope to every sixth-round pick, a story as American as mom's apple pie cooling in the window. The kid who dreamed about being an NFL star and one day became one.And the fact Brady has a son out of wedlock, a highly publicized event, the only apparent blight on his storybook life?In today's celebrity culture this is irrelevant. And celebrity is the key word here. For this isn't about the guy who lives down the street, even if he happens to play in the NFL. This is no longer about football. This is about celebrity, America's new Holy Grail, this cottage industry complete with its tabloid news shows, and tabloid papers, and paparazzi that run after people in the street. This is about something that comes along rarely in sports, like some sort of cultural solar eclipse.Joe Namath once had it, in a different era of course, back when he was interviewed by a group middle-aged sportswriters all smoking cigars, not chased by paparazzi as if he were Mick Jagger.Michael Jordan definitely had it.Roger Clemens never had it.Magic Johnson had it for a while.Larry Bird never did.A-Rod wants to have it.Kobe Bryant thought he was going to have it.Brady has it, even if it seems to come as easy to him as eluding rushers trying to get in his face. And the fact that his celebrity kind of snuck up on us made it all the better.What were the odds when he got drafted that one day the paparazzi would be chasing him through the streets of New York as if he were Tom Cruise with a better arm?There were no odds.So here is the star of this Super Bowl, complete with all the rumors that now swirl all around him.Is he hurt?Will he play?If he does, will he be 100 percent?What's up with Brady?On and on it goes.Not that anyone is going to tell the truth, you can be sure of that. George Bush tells us more about the war in Iraq than Bill Belichick tells us about injuries. And Brady? Even when he talks he says nothing, using cliches to protect himself, trying to ignore questions the way he tries to ignore the paparazzi. He's become as evasive with the media as he is with pass rushes, now you see him, now you don't, the David Beckham of the NFL.As if the more we see him the less we know. As if he's become the perfect celebrity.(Contact Bill Reynolds at breynold@projo.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)