Tom Brady and his family are renting Derek Jeter’s mansion in Florida. The Tampa Bay Bucs’ quarterback also took up some space Monday in a venture the Yankee Hall of Famer used to own.
Brady wrote a piece for The Players’ Tribune entitled “The Only Way is Through.” In it he says, “Changes and challenges are part of life. They’re part of athletes’ lives. They’re supposed to happen. They need to happen sometimes.”
That would address his move from the New England Patriots to the Bucs after six Super Bowls and 20 years in Foxboro.
Brady praised New England and its fans:
But more than any one physical place, it’s the relationships I made in New England that I’ll miss the most. Of course, it starts with the entire New England Patriots organization, and Robert Kraft and the entire Kraft family. It extends to countless other individuals who played such a valuable role in my 20 years as a Patriot. Teammates and coaches, past and present. Old friends, new friends, the neighbors we went trick-or-treating with every year. But mostly, I’ll miss the fans.
If there’s one thing anyone can say for sure, it’s that New Englanders understand what fandom is all about. New Englanders just really, really love their sports. That’s maybe because compared to New York, or Chicago, or Los Angeles, Boston feels less like a big city than it does a large small town. Even if you don’t know everybody in Boston, you feel like you know everybody. The fans feel like they’re part of our team, and my teammates and I felt the same way about them.
He concluded by writing:
Right now, though, I have things to prove to myself. The only way is through. If I don’t go for it, I’ll never know what I could have accomplished. Wanting to do something is different from actually doing it. If I stood at the bottom of a mountain, and told myself I could scale the highest peak, but then didn’t do anything about it, what’s the point of that? …
I want to show everybody what I got.