Not a whole lot of football to be discussed after a bye week, but Tom Brady did his weekly interview on the Dennis and Callahan show on WEEI this morning and discussed a potpourri of topics.
First, a little bit of football.
"It will be fun to get back to football," Brady said. "It feels weird, you know. It's hard to stop your mind from thinking about the game. It's impossible to do that when all these other teams are playing. So, you just kind of get a little bit of rest while you can, and we're back to work today. It will be fun to get started on Buffalo."
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Brady explained that he's always thinking of ways to make himself a better quarterback, whether there's a game later that week or not. As he described his obsession with his own self-improvement, he cited a documentary he saw recently.
"I saw a great documentary this weekend on the airplane, it was called . . . I don't even know how to pronounce his name . . . it was this Japanese sushi chef that I would encourage you guys to see it," said Brady, who couldn't quite remember the title "Jiro Dreams of Sushi."
"But he's 85 years old and the only thing he ever wanted to do was make sushi . . . It was just his life-long commitment to being really great at what he loves to do. And he's 85 and still doing it. It's just amazing the commitment that it takes to do that.
"You think, 'Man, it's just simple, throwing a football or making a piece of sushi, how hard can that be?' " Brady added. "When it's something that you just love to do, you think about it. You wake up in the night and think about mechanics. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about what I can do better -- my foot stride and where my arm is and what I'm doing with the front side of the body.
"For some people it may be crazy to think that," Brady said. "But for me, that's just what I've always loved to do . . . I always seek my improvement from improving my mechanics so that every throw I make is absolutely perfect. It's exactly where I wanted to throw the ball and exactly the amount of velocity I wanted to put on the ball. Those are the types of things that I think about in my off time. That's what I was meant to do."
Here a few of the other topics Brady hit on in his interview:
What would he do if his pregnant wife were to go into labor on a game day?
"That's such a hypothetical," he said. "That's such an un-Belichick question. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. There's nothing more important than that, but there's also nothing more important than my job, and I've got a lot of people that are counting on me. Hopefully, that's not the case.
"Whenever it happens, it's meant to happen. She's prepared. She's got to do all the work, not me."
On Peyton Manning's successful return to football
Thats what great players do," he said. "Theres a consistent level of high performance and its no mystery. He works his butt off and Ive seen it first hand ... He loves the game and he loves to prepare, he pushes his teammates and he gets the best out of them.
On the state of his social life
"When you meet people, you don't want to be a jerk," said Brady, who will be at Aerosmith's free concert today on Commonwealth Avenue. "I remember those experiences when I was a young person. I got to meet 49ers star Dwight Clark and I got to meet Jeffrey Leonard, the Giant baseball player, and Chili Davis. I remember each of those experiences very well. When you're on the other end of that -- for me, I'm trying to go through just a day, and I feel like I've always felt. But sometimes you just want to make sure you have enough energy to deal with being a nice person. Because you don't always want to be a nice person. Sometimes you just want to be yourself. If I want to be myself, then I just stay in or do something private.
"I don't go out much anymore. I rarely do things. And I think that's probably the only thing -- you get a little bit accustomed to being a little bit of a loner. Because during the football season I need my energy for my teammates and for the game. Some people can go out and do things and be in public a lot and really get a lot of energy from that. For me, it's a bit draining. So, I just tend to be more of a loner. I just don't do much. I wish I could. I wish I could be out there. In some ways you get a bit anti-social and you get in the habit of being anti-social. It's hard to be social again, too. Because you're not used to going out and doing a lot of things."
"There was a time where I enjoyed the things that Gronk enjoys, too -- going out and being a free spirit and traveling around and enjoying a little bit of the limelight," Brady said. "For me, that wears off. Now this is a career and it's a life, and I have a family. There's a lot of commitments that are required of you that I really enjoy, but also, those are the priorities. There's more responsibility now just waking up in the morning than there was when I was 23 or 24. When that's the case for me, then you've got to begin to prioritize: What are the things that are important for me today? Especially during the football season, my job, there's nothing more important than that. As a leader and as a captain of the team I have to bring the energy and emotion to the field every day in practice. And I can't do that and be out at 9 o'clock at night or go to bed at 11 o'clock at night and think that's what I can be. My commitment a lot of the time is to my teammates and my football season.
"As you're a veteran player, you realize every year you're one step closer to the end. So, this is the year, this is the year you've got to think about. Because you don't know if there's ever going to be a next year."
What would he do if he was not a quarterback?
"I don't know," he said. "I was thinking about that this weekend, to tell you the truth. I don't know. I've never been forced to think about those things. Whatever I would have been, I would have brought the same characteristics to that profession, I know that. I was blessed with a work ethic. And that's something that is God-given, to me. I'm glad. It's really easy for me to go out to the gym for a few hours. It's really easy for me to go out to practice. I don't ever despise those things. That's something that I really enjoy doing.
"I'm lucky that I've never had to work a day in my life, to tell you the truth . . . I got the profession that I wanted to be, and there's not even a close second."
Who is he voting for on Tuesday?
"I'd rather not say," he said. "But I love this country. This is the greatest country in the world. When we're in places like London, and I talk to some of my teammates like Germany native Sebastian Vollmer, and I'm married to a woman from Brazil -- this is a great country.
"I hope we make the right decision. I don't know if there is a right decision. I always think that it starts with us. It's hard to expect one person to change the lives of 300 million. The change starts within all of us. I think that's more the message that I always try to talk to whoever I'm talking to about politics, that we're the ones that make the changes. Don't always look on the outside. At least, that's what I learned from football."