Monday, February 1, 2021

Tom Brady Sleeps A LOT. Inside a Coffin. During the Daytime.

 
This week, the ageless wonder Tom Brady is back in the Super Bowl for what seems like the 57th time, and with a different team.  No one understands this.  Could it be his sleep habits?  

In pro football, it used to be there were really good, really successful quarterbacks.  

Some names leap readily to mind.  Joe Montana.  John Elway.  Jim Kelly.  Troy Aikman.  Brett Favre.  These people had legendary, Hall of Fame caliber careers.  

Then something strange happened.  A man named Tom Brady came along.  Unlike his predecessors, Brady was rather lightly regarded coming out of college.  As elite, world-class athletes go, he was relatively unathletic.  

Yes, he was a large, 6'4", right-handed white man, which is the preferred quarterback prototype in the NFL.  But he couldn't run very fast.  He didn't jump very high.  He wasn't particularly strong.  

Which explains why he was chosen 199th in the player draft by the New England Patriots, meant as a backup to the stud quarterback they already had, Drew Bledsoe.  199th picks don't generally have long, fruitful careers in football.

Elway, Aikman, Peyton Manning and even Bledsoe were all picked 1st overall.  But none of that really matters now.  

Tom Brady has experienced so much success in football, that he's had more success than entire combinations of elite quarterbacks.  Joe Montana, Peyton Manning, and Jim Kelly have won a combined 6 Super Bowls.  So has Tom Brady.  He's going for number 7 this Sunday.  

John Elway appeared in 5 Super Bowls during his career, which is the second most among quarterbacks, after Tom Brady.  This Sunday is Tom Terrific's 10th Super Bowl.  

Troy Aikman won 3 Super Bowls with the Dallas Cowboys in the 1990s.  Brady has twice that many, and is still playing.  It's easy to forget that these are real humans and not actual gods.  Troy Aikman the real human doesn't like Tom Brady very much.

And here's one more strange thing before we get on to the meat of this issue.  There used to be a quarterback named Vinny Testaverde.  Testaverde was a great athlete who was drafted with the #1 pick in the NFL college draft.  He went on to have a mostly lackluster professional career, bouncing around the league, playing with a bunch of mostly mediocre teams.

However, one thing about Testaverde stands out.  He played for a long time, 21 seasons in all, finally retiring at the age of 44.  Tom Brady, at age 43, is moving into Vinny Testaverde longevity territory, but is still playing at the highest level.  Testaverde was a backup and a fill-in at the end of his career.

What exactly is it about Tom Brady?

Tom Brady arrives for the 2018 Super Bowl in Minneapolis.  The Super Bowl used to be a game a player would reach once or twice in his life, if he was lucky.  Brady plays in another Super Bowl every couple of minutes.


Tom Brady is into Weird Shit

A lot has been made about all the weird things Tom Brady is into, so we don't need to reinvent the wheel here.  We'll just (barely) touch upon them.

In a league full of proud Christian warriors, Brady is into Transcendental Meditation.  He's also into Hinduism, and in particular, the Hindu god Ganesh, who is the Remover of Obstacles and the god of Success and Good Fortune.  

You know Ganesh.  He appears as an elephant, sometimes riding on the back of a mouse.  Elephants are quite large, and mouses are rather small, so you can't really see the mouse, but it's there.  You can't see the coronavirus, either, but it's there.  

Brady does not drink caffeinated beverages.  He does not take sugar.  He does not eat processed flour in any form, or anything with wheat gluten in it.  To summarize, Tom Brady does not eat delicious powdered donuts with his morning coffee.

He only eats organic food.  He does not eat tomatoes, or strawberries, or eggplants.  For a while, Brady claimed to be a vegan, though I never believed that, not for one second.  Now he admits to eating eggs and fish.  

Tom Brady claims to drink about two gallons of water a day, which is physically impossible, and will kill you.  This is how we know Tom Brady is not human, and may not even be a living thing in the way we think of life.  DO NOT drink two gallons of water in a single day, please.

Tom Brady wears magnetic bands around his wrists and his ankles, and around all his fingers and toes, and his penis.  

Tom Brady drinks the warm blood of small children, which keeps his DNA rejuvenated and his body and mind forever young.  

He uses a pair of microscopic tweezers to grab, stretch and lengthen his own telomeres.  


22-year-old Tom Brady's somewhat underwhelming physique at the 2000 NFL Scouting Combine, muffin top included.  The Combine is one way the NFL assesses the athletic ability of incoming draftees.  If you're into irony, you'll enjoy knowing that Thee Optimist looks much better than this in his underwear.  Still hasn't reached the Super Bowl, though.  


What About Sleep?

Ah.  Right.  We were talking about sleep.  

Tom Brady sleeps a lot.  Not so much in a coffin or during the daytime.  I just said that.  Trying to be funny.

Brady, like LeBron James and other high quality athletes, credits high quality sleep for the uh, high quality of his performance.  He says: “Proper sleep has helped me get to where I am today as an athlete and it is something that I continue to rely on every day.”

Most nights, Brady goes to bed by 9pm, and he tries to stay in bed for 10 hours.  

He sleeps without an alarm, and wakes up naturally.

He keeps his bedroom dark, and cold.  "Like a bear," is how he puts it.  

He does not use a computer or cell phone for at least an hour before going to bed.  Research has shown that the blue light from computers and cell phones interferes with sleep.

Among the many things Brady does not consume is alcohol.  Alcohol has also been shown to interfere with quality sleep.

Brady says that he is generally overstimulated by bedtime every night.  Since he doesn't drink alcohol, doesn't take caffeine, almost certainly doesn't do drugs, knows little or nothing about current events, has more money than the GDP of entire small countries, and he turned off his computer some time ago, we can only assume he is overstimulated by the sheer, stunning, mind blowing reality of being Tom Brady.

It is a lot to chew on.  

Overstimulation makes it hard to sleep.  This is when people start to toss and turn, thinking about thorny issues (like the time he lost that playoff game to the Jets after the 2010 season), and staying awake long into the night.

Brady defeats this overstimulation problem by doing cognitive exercises (so-called "brain games") designed to help him sleep better.  In fact, Brady has a whole series of his own patented cognitive exercises for a variety of purposes, which you can sample for yourself here.


TB12 dreaming the dreams of the innocent.

4 comments:

  1. Thank you Mr. Optimist for your extensive reporting on the unusual Tom Brady. But as far as being into "weird shit," I too have been lengthening my telomeres with a tweezer for, say, about six weeks now (it was one of my New Year's resolutions).

    I was wondering something: if I sign up for TB12 BrainHQ and do the cognitive exercises, I would also become a star quarterback in hundreds of Super Bowls, right?

    Soooo..., you claim to look better in your underwear that Tom Brady does in that photo. Is there any photograph evidence to substantiate your claim?

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  2. If you continue to lengthen your own telomeres, you will age backwards, becoming younger and younger, until you begin winning Super Bowls, starting in 1967. While of course there is copious photographic evidence of Thee Optimist in his underwear, it is not possible to share intimate imagery with strangers at this time.

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    Replies
    1. I wish my underwear could win some Super Bowls against Tom Brady.

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    2. Thee Optimist wears form fitting boxer briefs exclusively. That is a big win for everyone. In fact, it ain't nothin' but a party.

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