The 'Tom vs Time' Finale is Pretty Grim
I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to watch the sixth and final episode of Tom vs. Time. I honestly wasn’t. I’ve been burned before by really disappointing series finales. The Seinfeld gang sitting in a weirdly coed jail cell bickering about nonsense. Meadow Soprano parallel parking a car while the rest of the family listens to “Don’t Stop Believing,” which should have been the final scene of Glee, not a mob show. The big FU where everyone in LOST turned out to be dead after eight seasons of J.J. Abrams insisting the one thing they definitely were not was dead. So you’ll have to forgive me if I had trust issues with regards to a series I knew would end 41-33 and the hero sitting on the ground in despair, his heart and body broken.
But for you, I sucked it up. Faced my fears and watched it. And I’m glad I did.
Again, what makes Tom vs Time so compelling is it gives you a sense of what elite athletes go through in order to be elite. There are always those guys who can’t shut up about how much punishment they take and how much they endure just to be them [gives Lebron side eye]. And there are those guys who keep that stuff in house, thus making it look easy. To their own detriment, since it is anything but easy. So it’s refreshing to see how much he goes through. From his Massive Hand Wound Harry routine he kept hidden from the public and turns out to be much more gruesome than we were told, to just the normal maintenance he has to go through just to get through the week. It makes you appreciate the accomplishments of these guys even more. It humanizes them, whereas I think to some extent we’re all guilty of seeing them as human-shaped Fantasy Football numbers.
Another thing that humanizes Brady in this is seeing how high and low he gets with the wins and losses. All too often we see these guys trying to keep in on an even keel in the postgame and not let their emotions get the best of them. And forget that the losses hurt them more than they hurt us. Which is a good thing.
On that same note, the best part of this for me was hearing Brady and Gisele talk to Rob Gronkowski after he left the AFC title game with a concussion:
Because it shows you the emotional bond that can only exist between guys who sacrifice their bodies for a common goal. I mean, how often do you get to see that kind of candid, unscripted interaction. It’s what made this such a special documentary.
The worst part, without a doubt from a Pats fan’s perspective, is the end. Hearing Brady talk about the treatment he had to have on his hand and his Achilles and ask why he does it. “You go, ‘What are we doing this for?'” he says. “You know? ‘What are we doing this for, who are we doing this for, why are we doing this?’ You gotta have answers to those questions. And they have to be with a lot of conviction. You know, when you lose your conviction then you probably should be doing something else.”
I’d like to think that when he asks himself those questions his answer is “Because it’s wicked fun and I’m the GOAT and I’m going to fill both my hands with championship rings and choke Roger Goodell out with them and make Jerry Thornton really happy and then he and I be best friends and go live on a pony farm together.” Or words to that effect. But then you hear Gisele close out the show with the final words “These last two years have been very challenging for him in so many ways. And he tells me, ‘I love it so much and I just want to go to work and feel appreciated and have fun,’ ” and it’s hard not to read between the lines and conclude he’s not having fun. That he’s maybe beginning to question if the suffering and pain, the workload and the sacrifice aren’t worth the time away from his family. Which again, is him being human, but maybe more human than some of us are ready for.
Hopefully he’s already found his answers in the four or so weeks since this episode was filmed. But as glad as I am that I watched it, for now I’m just going to satisfy myself with this much, much lighter version of Tom vs. Time: