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Tom Brady, wearing Oakley Meta glasses, onstage at Fanatics Fest NYC 2025.
When legendary Patriots quarterback Tom Brady played for equally legendary New England head coach Bill Belichick, he found that Belichick’s style was to instill “fear” in his players.
Brady felt it too, and in his 20 years with the Patriots, all spent with Belichick as coach, the “fear” could be seen in his measured, very controlled manner of public speaking whether he was at the podium after a game, or in other media interviews.
“Brady tended to come across as cautious, someone who was very careful about what he said,” wrote one Boston-area journalist.
But that all seemed to change when the future Hall of Famer departed New England after the 2019 season and headed for the warmer, more relaxed climes of Tampa, Florida, where he spent the final three seasons of his career playing for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
“I think I’m finding my voice again, you know?” Brady told a Wall Street Journal interviewer in 2021, a few months after his first season in Tampa Bay culminated in the quarterback’s record seventh Super Bowl victory.
Brady Takes New ‘Voice’ to Bizarre Extreme
Since then Brady has continued, as Boston Globe reporter Shannon Larson wrote, “further shedding some of that rigid persona long associated with his former team and coach.”
That trend has only continued since Brady retired and embarked on a multi-faceted new career, or multiple careers, as businessman, broadcaster, advertising pitchman, and media personality.
But how far is Brady going to go with this newfound, relaxed attitude? On Friday, appearing at Fanatics Fest New York 2025, Brady went to a new extreme, adopting the persona of a pro wrestling “heel” for a wild entrance on being introduced at the Jacob Javits Convention Center.
Not only did Brady give a WWE-style over-the-top performance as a bad guy, he did something that even in his new, freer persona he rarely if ever is seen to do in public — show blatant disrespect to other football players.
Brady’s New Target Claps Back Online
In this case, it was New York Jets two-time first-team All-Pro cornerback Ahmad “Sauce” Gardner. Nevermind that Gardner’s young career started the same year Brady wrapped his up, and the two never faced each other on the football field.
As he paraded into the arena, someone handed Brady a green Gardner Jets football jersey, and the 47-year-old proceeded to throw it to the floor, stomp on it — then bend over and spit on the Gardner shirt.
Gardner was not there, but after seeing the incident on social media, Gardner made a post of his own, responding to Brady with a GIF of rapper 50 Cent asking the question that was surely on Gardener’s mind, “What you saying (expletive deleted) me for?”
Gardner’s uncensored post can be seen at this link.
The bizarre, but silly, jersey-spitting incident wasn’t even the first tviral social media moment Brady created at the Fanatics Fest event on Friday. Earlier, Brady got together with another iconic former Patriots star — who also headed to Tampa Bay, following Brady there — retired tight end Rob Gronkowski.
In a private corridor at the Javits Center, they attempted to recreate the notorious Lombardi Trophy toss that the pair pulled off during a celebration of the Buccaneers’ 2020 Super Bowl victory.
Except this time, Gronkowski fumbled the trophy and broke it in two.
Jonathan Vankin JONATHAN VANKIN is an award-winning journalist and writer who now covers baseball and other sports for Heavy.com. He twice won New England Press Association awards for sports feature writing. He was a sports editor and writer at The Daily Yomiuri in Tokyo, Japan, covering Japan Pro Baseball, boxing, sumo and other sports. More about Jonathan Vankin
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