One talking head sports media personality said that Tom Brady’s brand is age defiance. We will see how well that works when Brady dies, like the rest of us.
“Tom vs. Time.” I wonder who’s going to win that battle?
In real life, being in your mid-thirties means you are still a young man. In sports, thirty-something you is on the downhill side. You are past your prime. You are “old.” Actually, and increasingly, lots of Americans feel that way in general.
Mostly, the sports fanatic is no different than the average 21st century American. We are part of a culture that worships youth. We allow the newest thing, and the whims of the young, to shake our foundations. Then we wonder why our nation is so unstable.
We get off on mocking the “old, ornery man” who tells kids to “Get off my lawn” in a figurative sense. The old man is seen as anyone who holds to anything traditional, whether it be a value or a method of doing something.
But many times, the old man has a point. We like to joke that the old man doesn’t get it anymore, if he ever did. Except he would not BE an old man if he didn’t know a few things.
Case in point: Quarterback Tom Brady. Is he the best football player ever? The best team sport athlete, ever? Fun, but largely irrelevant. Just like all of the other sports arguments.
Brady will be gone soon, one way or another. Waxing philosophic and spiritual about “beating time” 
Yes, there are surely people who made it to elderly status without gaining much wisdom. I’ve met a few of those, and so have you. Oscar Robertson isn’t one of those, at least on certain points we’ve heard him speak on. Because, turns out, he was right about his observations of Steph Curry and today’s NBA.
Oscar Robertson told us that more physical play was a way to stop Curry. “Shut up, get-off-my-lawn old guy!” Robertson was told. The league rules hinder the Big O’s proposed strategy. But as much as it was allowed in the Cleveland Cavaliers’ 2016 title win, it worked.
I know that right now, Steph Curry seems like the new age god of basketball who changed everything, forever. Enjoy it while it lasts. Before you turn around good (there’s an old-man saying for ya), he’ll be just another aging athlete who has to transition into an old man-type game to stay in the league.
Just remember Kobe’s painful-to-watch last season. Remember that Kobe Bryant was the taste of a new generation not too long ago.
All older isn’t better than new. Most people say some version of that. Yet these same people rarely go on to say, “All newer isn’t better than the old, either.”
Brady’s age-defiance brand is an illusion. Playing to age fifty? It is just a talking point gimmick.
If Brady or another football player played that long, are you really going to believe it was genetics, diet, and routine? No. Just like the growing whispers about LeBron James, and Peyton Manning, the rumors of performance enhancers will grow like fire on dry straw.
Age defiance by any means necessary is laughable. Like the plastic surgery-addicted man who is sixty, who hangs in a nightclub. That man cannot beat time, and neither can Brady, and neither can you nor I.
Whatever happens, it is strange that NOW the older man is being admired instead of mocked… because Brady is still “doing it well.”
But in the sports universe, he is ancient as a forty-year-old. There are fans out there who don’t remember New England Patriots’ first Super Bowl, yet still feel qualified to weigh in on Brady and on the history of the NFL.
Professional sports are a younger man’s game. However, we ought to at least respect, if not outright admire, our elders. We can get something from them, even when we don’t agree with all of their views or methods. Our ‘profound progress’ was built on their shoulders, after all.
The youth, in his arrogance, may never even reach old head status. He may end up shot by police after he stole Now-n-Laters from the corner store. Older men know that the fun never really lasts.
Old methods are old methods for the same reason old men are old men. They lasted. Don’t believe that you can’t die, young’un! And then what will your youth matter?
The narrative of Brady, or any man, outdueling time and age is a weird storyline. Because the same people who admire Brady’s longevity still say, “Father Time is undefeated.” Fact.