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NBC on Yahoo SportsTom Brady misses White House Visit; was at the stadium that day
The news that Patriots quarterback Tom Brady didn’t attend last week’s visit by the defending Super Bowl champions to the White House initially didn’t register on the national radar scale. Brady reportedly had a prior family commitment, and no one seriously questioned that.
But now comes word, from Mike Reiss of ESPNBoston.com, that Brady spent part of last Thursday at Gillette Stadium, while his teammates were in D.C. Although it’s possible that Brady’s family commitment kept him from traveling to Washington but not from making an appearance at work, this specific wrinkle makes the situation a bit more interesting.
The specific chain of events, with Brady not going to the White House and word now leaking that he was at least able to go to NFL’s reigning equivalent, invites speculation regarding whether Brady simply chose not to show up. Which invites speculation that Brady chose not to show up because of a comment from White House press secretary Josh Earnest after Brady’s earnest-but-ineffective press conference in the immediate wake of the emergence of the #DeflateGate scandal.
“For years it’s been clear that there is no risk that I was going to take Tom Brady’s job as quarterback of the New England Patriots,” Earnest said after Brady’s widely-panned performance. “But I can tell you, as of today, it’s pretty clear that there’s no risk of him taking my job either.”
The Boston Herald previously suggested that the jab may have influenced Brady’s decision not to attend the event. This new information from Reiss, which surely didn’t come to him accidentally after last Thursday’s joke from President Barack Obama regarding the football-inflation imbroglio, supports the conclusion that Brady was demonstrating his displeasure.
The crack from the Commander-in-Chief drew a thumb’s down from coach Bill Belichick. In turn, it may have prompted Brady to give himself a thumb’s up for choosing not to be there to hear it personally.
We also aren’t prepared to rule out that, in the photo of Obama holding a helmet autographed by the team, he’s not thinking to himself, “Is that ‘thank you’ under Tom Brady’s signature?”
