Tom Brady is going through a difficult time – personally and athletically. Now a former teammate comes out of cover and mocks the superstar on a private and professional level. Scandal professional Antonio Brown has been working on his former sponsor for days.
Tom Brady, the best quarterback in football history, had already submitted his resignation. The hymns to the 45-year-olds had been sung and they were worthy. But shortly thereafter, the superstar backed down – and announced that he would return to his team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, for at least one more season. But it may be dawning on the great playmaker, who won the Super Bowl seven times with the New England Patriots and the Bucs, that it probably wasn’t a good idea: his team has lost four of the last five NFL games, and it was recently announced that Brady and his wife Gisele Bundchen are reportedly separating after 13 years of marriage.
“Nobody’s feeling good about where we are right now,” said a visibly contrite Brady after Sunday’s almost shocking 3:21 draw against the Carolina Panthers – a team that had lost 12 of the 13 games prior and started with the third quarterback was, in which Christian McCaffrey had given up their best player days before and was looked after by an interim coach.
At the beginning of February, Brady had argued in his resignation that he could no longer muster the necessary one hundred percent dedication. Instead of the many hours on the training ground, traveling and in the gym, he wanted to spend his time with his wife Gisele Bundchen and their three children Jack, Benny and Vivi. Just 40 days later, that plan lapsed. To Bummel’s displeasure. “It hurts her when she sees me getting hit out there,” Brady said, according to Rick Stroud of the Tampa Bay Times. “And she deserves what she needs from me as a husband and my children deserve what they need from me as a father.”
It’s not going well in sport, Brady was recently penalized twice because he first smashed a tablet on the sidelines out of frustration and then tried to kick an opponent. Now Brady must also endure the taunts of a former teammate in Tampa Bay: Antonio Brown. The controversial wide receiver used the Buccaneers’ recent unexpected loss to the Panthers to mock Brady with a meme he posted on social media. Brown was inspired by his own photo of him early leaving the Bucs and running shirtless towards the locker room at the 2021 game against the New York Jets.
As a result of the scandal, he was kicked out of the team. The US broadcaster CBS Sports quoted an unnamed source when Brown took office, who is said to have a lot of experience in dealing with the wide receiver: “I give him ten days until he comes late for a Covid test or the protocol not at all first followed. You can’t imagine the stories you could unpack about this guy. Everything with him is a struggle.” Antonio Brown is a constant headline producer, the latest scandal is just another in a long list: in December 2018 he was banned internally by the Pittsburgh Steelers because he is said to have attacked a teammate in training, and in the same year he is said to have thrown furniture out of a hotel window thrown and almost hit a 22-month-old child and his grandfather. In August 2019, Brown misses pre-season because he refuses to play with a new rules-modified helmet.
In early September 2019, he signed a mega contract with Brady’s New England Patriots, only to be fired two weeks later after allegations of sexual abuse were made against him. He is missing parts of the 2020 season due to an eight-game ban, which he is picking up for “numerous transgressions” against the league’s code of conduct. Brown has since been charged with multiple counts of sexual harassment, domestic violence and traffic violations. In the 2020 season, with Brown once again out of contract, Brady had been pushing to bring the short-term teammate from the Patriots to his new team. At the beginning of his time in Florida, Brady even accommodated the fallen superstar in his home for a few days.
Only with the hashtag
The week before, Brown had macabrely mocked his former teammate’s marital troubles, also with a meme: Brown posted the cover of the book “Daddy Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: A Book About Divorce.” The edited cover shows a man resembling Brady exiting a house, while a woman meant to resemble Bummel and her daughter look out the door. The post came less than a week after Brown shared a photo of herself with the Victoria’s Secret supermodel via Instagram.
Brown has played 15 games for the Buccaneers, seven of them as a starter, catching 87 passes for 1,028 yards and scoring 8 touchdowns. At the end of 2021, Brown was suspended by the NFL for eight games because the receiver obtained a fake vaccination card during pre-season.
