Tom Brady Telling Tom Cruise and David Beckham the Story of Getting Savagely Heckled by a Preteen Jets Fan is the Reason the Internet Was Invented
YouTube - David Beckham was join in star-studded UCL watch along by Tom Cruise, Tom Brady, Odell Beckham Jr. and more as PSG put FIVE goals past Inter Milan to lift their first ever Champions League title.
I'm not even going to pretend to know what half of this is referring to. Whether UCL is a league or a sports talk show or a ligament in your knee is irrelevant. All I know is some team or other scored a lot while winning some kind of championship and David Beckham was happy about it. Good for him.
All I know is that when you get Tom Brady, Tom Cruise and David Beckham (Odell Beckham Jr. less so) in one room at the same time, I feel like that's almost a dangerous situation. That's too much fame, success and preternatural youth together in one place. Like it could set off a chain reaction that could create a singularity that destroys the galaxy or something. I don't know how physics works. I just think that when you have these three together, we need to put Keanu Reeves in a safe, undisclosed location to be our Designated Universally Beloved Celebrity.
That said, all three - OK, make that four for the OBJ fans still talking about that one-handed catch he made for the Giants in that game they lost while going 6-10 they haven't shut up about for 10 years - lived through the show without tearing a hole in spacetime. But as good as that news is, it's nothing compared to the sight and sound of Brady entertaining the shit out of these two megacelebrities with one of his - and my - favorite topics. Which is the way he spent 20 years in the AFC East harvesting souls of hapless New York Jets fans:
“I’ve heard it all. Actually, in my last season with the Patriots, we were playing at the Jets in the Meadowlands. And I’m standing in the tunnel before the game, and this kid’s yelling down at me, ‘You bleepedy-bleep bleep.’
“And I look up at this kid and I just said, ‘How old are you?’ He goes, ’11!’ I go, ‘Where are your parents?!?’ And I’m like, you know, you teach ’em early and they’re into it too, so it’s fun.”
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In case you missed it as it flashed on the screen, the final in the game in question was 33-0. Which brought his Patriots career record against the Jets to 30-8. And a tidy 18-4 over the lifetime of an 11-year-old in 2019.
To any Patriots fan, this is familiar territory. One of the simple but profound pleasures of living in the time of The Dynasty. To a Tom Cruise it has to be impossible to imagine. And anyone who's seen the South Park with ancient aliens putting souls into cavemen or whatever it was, will understand Cruise is able to imagine quite a bit. (With all due respect. Don't come after me. We Catholics can strain credulity too.) But a guy who's been the toast of show business for over 40 years, whose life has been mostly adulation on red carpets and fawning interviews from entertainment outlets can't possibly relate to his NFL equivalent catching hell from some child.
As for Beckham, here's another worldwide icon. Whether he's ever caught grief from some 5th grader in his travels I honestly can't say. My guess is he's had more posters on 11-year-old's walls than he's ever gotten booed by them.
So my guess Brady's experience is unique among this group of legends. Of towering figures with statures similar to his. And he took 20-plus years of such abuse as punishment for the crime of being so good in his chosen field. And crushing the hopes and dreams of generations of his shitty family of dead-eyed, slack-jawed J-E-T-S! shouting yokels from Staten Island. As Reggie Jackson put it so eloquently, they don't boo nobodies. And preteens aren't raised to yell,"You bleepedy-bleep bleep" to anyone but the best among us. The icon among icons.
Never forget how good we had it all those years.