The Big Lessons behind Tom Brady's Smallish Hands

First appeared on May 21, 2015
in The Lebanon Reporter

So Tom Brady has little hands. Or maybe the Patriot equipment managers have metric pressure gauges. They can spin it all they want but nothing will change the fact 95% of football fans, and nearly every person outside a 2 hour radius of the Metro Boston area, consider the Patriots dirty.

This just in, Robert Kraft has another Title, Brady another ring and the NFL is happy because it’s almost June and people are still talking Football. The real issue in Deflategate has been lost amongst the noise, overshadowed by the shock jocks and buried in the claptrap. This isn’t about whether a few underinflated footballs could have made any difference in the outcome of an incredibly lopsided AFC Championship game. The real issue is the message being sent to young people everywhere.

Cheating is no longer reserved for American politicians or the East German Olympic team. Like it or not, cheating is in vogue. Steroids, Spygate, cutting a baseball, greasing your jersey, corking your bat, none of it matters as long as you can hide it and ride it to the top. What we’ve really learned here is that a guy can cheat in front of millions and millions will still buy his jersey, name their first born for him and plaster his Fathead on their walls.

So you sit your seven year old down to explain that copying answers from Sally’s spelling test is called cheating and cheating is a very bad thing we shouldn’t do. “The American Dream was built on the backs of hard working people who didn’t take short cuts.” You explain as he sits quietly, wide eyed and longing for more, “Men who built barns out of logs hewn from trees they fell by hand. Men who didn’t cut corners because cutting corners only created more work in the long run. These were real men, men who didn’t wear protective padding and didn’t have time to waste doing interviews or hocking glorified Kool-Aid.” And he shakes his head as if he were thinking the exact same thing and you pat him on the back, feeling satisfied by your Clark Griswold-“Good talk son” moment.

But then, breaking news hits the TV screen. A shot of Tom Brady backing an SUV from a garage larger than the Governor of North Dakota’s mansion. His Supermodel wife waves through a tinted window as they head off on their six week hiatus in Tahiti. And all this, the images of private jets and Gucci suits, lavish estates and Lombardi Trophies, flash across the screen above a banner reading “Deflategate: NFL says Brady cheated”

We all want our children to achieve great things, to go farther than we did. And the beauty of being an American is the fact they will have every opportunity to do so. Yet amidst all the compassionate pushing and prodding, it becomes so easy for a parent to get bogged down and lose their bearings.

A well rounded kid will become their own toughest critic. For when the crowds fall silent and the stands empty out, they will be left alone with their thoughts. Forget the Little League trophies, job titles and bank statements, when it’s all said and done, we’ve failed as parents if our children don’t like the person looking back at them in the mirror. So the NFL cries foul, fingers get pointed and time marches on and you are left to watch your son grab his bat and head for the on deck circle; all the while hoping the values you’ve worked so hard to instill follow along.

© 2015 Eric Walker Williams