Tom Brady to World: Getoffamylawn

The GOAT is losing it

Most great athletes are great at everything but knowing when to leave. Their grace eludes them when they need it most. Their competitiveness is a 2-way street. A few, most recently Roger Federer, know when to take the off ramp. The rest have to bend a few fenders.

Which is where we are now with Tom Brady. His greatness assured, his legacy cemented, all Brady had left to do was say goodbye. After a GOAT career, a graceful exit would be his final achievement.

OGs will recall a few who got it right. Sandy Koufax comes to mind. He retired at 30, after his finest season: 27-9/1.73/317 strikeouts in 323 innings. Jim Brown ran for 1500 yards in 14 games in 1965 and scored 17 TDs. Then retired at age 29.

Koufax and Brown knew Peter Pan was a fairy tale.

“You’re so much (ducking) better than that!’’ the 45-year-old Brady raged at his offensive linemen, late in the 2nd quarter Sunday in Pittsburgh, where his team, the Tampa Bay Bucs, was losing to the lacking Steelers. It wasn’t exactly a 70-year-old retiree chasing kids off his lawn. But it did add to the recent impressions that in midlife, Brady looks like an entitled child.

Brady’s most recent unraveling is fascinating on multiple fronts, not the least of which is this: He cares about his public image as much as any athlete on center stage now. To a big extent, he has been able to bend it to his liking. Then he started smashing laptops and reaming out teammates. Who, it should be noted, actually were at practice in the middle of the week and did not blow off a Saturday walk-through to attend a wedding. Or miss two weeks of training camp for unspecified reasons.

Nor did Brady suggest that he could apply the same description to his own, skittish play. Brady never liked contact. Now, he’s avoiding it by getting rid of the ball like it’s radioactive.

(FWIW, Bill Belichick did not attend the nuptials of Patriots owner Robert Kraft. His team won big Sunday, with an erstwhile 3rd-string kid QB.)

You could suggest that if any player had a right to embarrass his teammates publicly, it would be Brady. You might even say they deserved the embarrassment. You could also say the public tantrum belied Brady’s ultra-cool persona and heretofore unchallenged grace under pressure.

Does GOAT-ness come with its own rules? Maybe. Probably. But in this case, Brady’s exceptionalism mostly served to show his crotchety age. He’s still the guy with as many rings as Saturn (seven) but now, he’s also the guy that lost his cool as he aged.

In pro sports, calling your own shot is almost as important as knowing when to call it, then having the ability to follow through. Tom Brady is looking for his follow-through.

Now, then. . .

THIS INTERESTS ONLY ME, BUT IT IS MY BLOG. . . Ball-washers are vanishing at golf courses. Who knew? Golf magazine:

Ball washers cost money (upward of $250 each) and require upkeep. They get weathered, battered. Birds tag them with their droppings. “You’ve got to paint them once or twice a year,” a course superintendent explained. Some deep-pocketed courses go so far as to have their ball washers sandblasted at body shops.

And that’s just the aesthetics. Parts on ball washers wear out and jam up. The soapy water (or just water; not all courses use soap) inside the machines starts to stink, Guilfoil says. (Don’t even get him started on those built-in ball washers on golf carts; those get next-level gross). The bad smell can be killed with vinegar or Pine-Sol. “But then it smells like vinegar or Pine-Sol, and golfers won’t get near it.”

Courses with big budgets can afford the busywork of cleaning and repairing. But at a property with lean staffing? Please.

The solution? When ball washers break or wear out, courses aren’t replacing them. Personally, I will never wash a golf ball that I’m hitting well. I’m not about to clean the mojo off it. You?

(I will never retrieve a ball from a water hazard, either. I don’t need somebody else’s bad karma.)

In the future, we’ll all be doubling up on golf towels and, I dunno, spit.

AFTER THE DODGERS BLEW A 2-0 5th-inning lead and the division series to San Diego the other day, I said to self, “Self, I bet Dave Roberts pulled Tyler Anderson after 5.’’ That’s exactly what Roberts did. Anderson, 15-5 in the regular season, had worked five shutout innings, allowed two hits and thrown all of 86 pitches. His team led, 2-0. A couple LA relievers promptly blew the game and the season for the Dodgers.

Roberts explained his hook with analytics. The ol’ two-times-through-the-lineup tap dance.

Such bull.

Numbers are messing too much with the game. They’re taking away some skippers’ best quality: Intuition. Gut. Thinking honed by decades in the game. Dave Roberts has been around a very long time, as player, coach, manager. I dunno if his gut told him Anderson was done, but I’m thinking not. Numbers told him.

Why would a manager allow numbers to replace his hard-earned intuition? Roberts is too good at his job to lack that basic confidence in himself. He’s not alone. Analytics departments have way too much sway in MLB now.

I’M NOT JUST ANOTHER PRETTY FACE, YO. . . I have a bad habit of starting books and not finishing them. Since I quasi-retired in July, I’ve started and not finished several, most recently Robert Penn Warren’s classic, All The King’s Men. That said, I’m about done with historian David McCullough’s The Pioneers, the story of the settlement of the so-called Northwest Territory, which included Ohio.

Next on the list is a late-career Hemingway novel, Islands in the Stream, followed by The Mosquito Bowl, Buzz Bissinger’s non-fiction telling of a WWII football game between Marines fighting in the Pacific.

Any others I should consider?

AND OH YEAH. . . My daughter Jillian Daugherty Mavriplis, aka Jillian The Magnificent, turned 33 yesterday. She was born the day of the SF earthquake. I was in San Fran, covering the World Series, when my wife called to tell me she was in labor. Jillian was a week early. I caught a red-eye back, but missed the birth by several hours. I also missed the earthquake. Life does have its tradeoffs.

Happy Day to my little girl, who has spent 33 years inspiring me and everyone she meets.

TUNE O’ THE DAY. . . Maybe my all-time hit-or-miss group. When they were good, they were very good. When they weren’t, they were unlistenable. This is a good one.