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Here’s the story that @people ran this morning revealing the cover of my next book on @TomBrady: “Brady: An American Story and the Price of Greatness,” out across the world on September 29. people.com/lars-anderson-…
@LarsAnderson71
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Knowing an author always gives you a different perspective. Full disclosure, I’ve known @LarsAnderson71 for more than two decades, and while we’ve never been friends, we’ve always been cordial, familiar and respectful enough to speak and congratulate one another on this or that story, work that, in my case, no one remembers. Lars was one of those guys you couldn’t wait to read—the person you opened Sports Illustrated hoping to find. Once I got to know him, he was exactly what I thought he would be: cerebral, idiosyncratic, observant, and in passionate love with the high art of language.View quoted post on X
All those traits come through in his latest book BRADY: AN AMERICAN STORY AND THE PRICE OF GREATNESS. With elegant prose and a sense of pacing that comes from decades of experience in the craft, Lars stirs hundreds of interviews and events into a complex stew of obsession, doubt, drive, determination, and the casual selfishness so often found—perhaps required—in great achievers. Every page shows Brady as a nuclear reactor of competitiveness: hot, indefatigable, consistent, but always on the edge of a Chernobyl-level eruption, especially in his personal life.
Lars steered clear of some of the foibles, and for good reason. I have trusted sources who have been with Brady while he indulged his high-testosterone appetites in clubs you only know if you have money to burn. But that’s not his core. The guy was not Mike Tyson partying with Bobby Brown all night before a title fight. From the first day of training camp until the last play of his record ten Super Bowls, Brady was a singularly focused, almost manic, man on a mission. In the end, that led to the implosion of his family.
All relationships are complicated—we are sentient beings with souls and no more than a century of life on earth—so it’s impossible to know everything about another man’s motivations, or his heartache, or his blind spots. But Lars comes as close as an outsider can with his book.
BRADY is both a blueprint for greatness, and a warning label for its cost. Read it not as a biography—although it’s a good one—but as an all-too-familiar tragedy. Tom spent forty-five years chasing glory only to realize, as all athletes eventually do, that those trophies cannot love you back. That’s the lesson Lars delivers in these pages. It is certainly worth your time.
The @Patriots had the perfect formula for success at Gillette Stadium.View quoted post on X
Brady returns this Sunday on FOX.
@TomBrady @NFLonFOX
Gisele Bündchen out-earned Tom Brady for years, then scaled back her own career so he could keep playing.View quoted post on X
becoming.is/gisele-bundche…