Tom Brady Sr. admits his son doesn’t tell him everything. But if his kid had a concussion last year — as his daughter-in-law suggested — he didn’t know about it.
The father of the Patriots quarterback told Christopher Gasper of the Boston Globe that he wasn’t aware of any head injuries, such as the kind Gisele Bundchen talked about in a television interview.
“It’s a topic that’s inflammatory,” Brady Sr. said. “It’s a hot-button issue, so if somebody alludes to something, it’s going to be blown up whether it’s a big deal or not.
“We didn’t get to any games last year, except the Super Bowl, so I wasn’t aware of his health condition throughout the year. He wouldn’t tell us.”
Kids hiding bad news from parents is nothing new (Sorry Dad, see you this weekend), but the elder Brady also acknowledged one of the trickier parts of this story — that the culture of the league would push his son to hide a concussion from everyone, lest he risk losing his starting job.
“I think every parent that sees their kid playing football knows that these guys are big and fast and things can happen that aren’t always good,” Brady Sr. said. “Hopefully, if something does happen, it will be dealt with as intelligently as possible.
“This is all kind of a new phenomenon. Some of the concussion catastrophes we’ve read about were sad, and frankly, the ballplayers were kept in the dark on the severity of the issue for a long time. The league didn’t open up until they had to.
“That’s kind of the way they deal with things. Players are much more apprised of the situation now than they were before, and I’m sure they take their injuries far more seriously than they were led to believe they had to in the past.”
Brady has never appeared on the injury report with a concussion, and his father thinks that not playing Pop Warner football helped. Brady didn’t begin playing until his freshman year in high school when he barely got on the field, and wasn’t even a regular through college.