The ageless NFL star is selling a dream with his slickly marketed wellness-cum-lifestyle brand TB12™, but the dubious science behind his products is bound to leave customers deflated
Football is America’s most democratic game, still, despite any incremental decline in participation, the most popular of all high school sports by far. It’s for country kids and it’s for city kids. It’s for black kids and it’s for white kids. You can be fat and play on the line. You can be skinny and play wide receiver. Or you can be an unremarkable athlete like Tom Brady and win multiple Super Bowls.
That appraisal might come off a wee bit harsh for a living legend regarded by many as the greatest of all quarterbacks, the position that’s been called the most demanding in team sports. But there was indeed a time – before the six NFL titles and nine Super Bowl appearances (records both), the Tag Heuer ads and glossy magazine covers, the tabloid-fodder romances with Hollywood starlets and Brazilian supermodels – when Brady was decidedly one of us: a lightly regarded prospect with a nascent dad bod selected in the later rounds of the 2000 draft as an understudy to an established star. Even after he burst from relative obscurity early in the 2001 season, coming off the bench for injured starter Drew Bledsoe to helm the perennially underachieving New England Patriots to an improbable maiden championship in the foggy wake of 9/11, he was no more than the fresh-faced, dimple-chinned California kid next door who came through to win the big one.
