(NEW YORK) — Tom Brady sat down with Michael Strahan in a new exclusive interview for Good Morning America to reflect on winning his seventh career Super Bowl, and the motivation behind his longevity and momentum.
When Brady announced he was leaving New England after 20 years, six NFL titles and four Super Bowl MVP awards to sign with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the quarterback faced criticism and doubt.
“I was always kind of motivated by people that say ‘you can’t do it.’ You know, ‘you’re not good enough, you’re not fast enough, not big enough, you’re not good enough arm,’” Brady told GMA. “I’ve had a body of work over a period of time, so you know, you just say, hey [and] quickly you forget.”
He continued, “I think that’s a great part about football. It’s not really about what you did last year, it’s kind of what you’re going to do this year, so for me, it was what I was going to do for the Bucs last year. I still feel that way.”
Earning his first title in his first season with a new team would have been impressive enough, but even more so because it all came together during a pandemic.
“I think that’s a big part of what I understood last year, it’s things are gonna be different. I try to work within what’s currently happening but still try to do the best I could do,” Brady said. “All of it was really — really amazing, obviously with the way the season ended — so it was a great year.”
For the 43-year-old quarterback, the idea of starting from scratch in Florida after two decades in New England was “in a lot of ways really invigorating.”
“You know when you’re at the Patriots, everyone would always come to me and introduce themselves to me because I was kind of the mainstay,” he said. “But I was the new guy for the first time, you know, and that was a really different experience.”
Another big difference for Brady has been his new head coach, Bruce Arians, who is a totally different type of coach than Bill Belichick, he said.
“He’s a great motivator — he’s got a great feel for the team — a great pulse for what’s going on in a locker room, great intuition, great evaluation of talent,” Brady said. “When you’re in one place for 20 years, you think that’s the only way, and I think when you go to a different place you realize, ‘wow — there’s another way that people do things.'”
One month after his Super Bowl win over Kansas City, Brady broke another record off the field when his rookie card sold for $2.25 million, edging out the previous record of Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, whose card sold in early February for $861,000.
“It’s surreal and it makes me want to go check all my cards that I have stored again; there’s got to be one [more] in there somewhere,” Brady said. “I kept all these cards for all these years.”
When he was first coming up in the league trying to make some money, he said, “my agent, Steve, was like [‘I’ve] got a trading card deal for you. Sign 1000 cards and they’re going to pay you like 20 cents a card.’ And I was like, ’20 cents a card, five, whatever — I’m gonna be rich. This is unbelievable!’
“And 21 years later, you see these cards that are worth that kind of money. I definitely should have kept some of them — but whatever I think it all worked out pretty good,” he said.
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