Tom Brady called in to a San Francisco radio show Friday, unleashing an angry rant against the show’s host , as well as against the National Football League. Of course, the Tom Brady who made the call was not the New England Patriots quarterback, who on Thursday beat the NFL in federal court and had his four-game “Deflategate” suspension lifted.
The caller was Brady’s father , whose name is also Tom Brady.
The 71-year-old elder Tom Brady (pictured above, right) was apparently listening in to KGO radio talk show host Chip Franklin on Friday, when he heard Franklin refer to his son as a “cheater and a bad sport, and a big freakin’ baby,” and even declare that he would rather have Tim Tebow — who was cut from his fourth NFL team Saturday when the Philadelphia Eagles trimmed their roster to 53 — on his team than the four-time Super Bowl winner.
While the latter assertion may simply indicate why Franklin, a 20-year-veteran of talk radio as well as a professional stand-up comedian, makes a better radio personality than an NFL coach, the claim that Brady is a “cheater” was, at least in a narrow technical sense, not addressed by Federal Judge Richard Berman in his decision vacating Brady’s four game suspension.
The judge was legally prevented from making any finding about Brady’s guilt or innocence in the Defategate affair — but Tom Brady, Sr. definitely did not suffer from any such restriction, angrily defending his son from the allegations that he “cheated” by playing with deliberately deflated footballs.
“You have no evidence of that and if you read any of the articles and discussions that have gone on in this thing for six months, you would know that you are full of crap,” Brady, Sr., of San Mateo, California, told Franklin.
But he saved his greatest wrath for the NFL and in particular Roger Goodell, whom he accused or running a “kangaroo court.”
“It’s all lies,” Brady declared of the Deflategate allegations. “It’s all ESPN, it’s all NFL propaganda. The only person that’s testified under oath in this is Tom Brady. We know Goodell is lying. He lied in the Ray Rice case, he lied in this case and has lied in the [Adrian] Peterson case. How many times do you need to know this guy is a flaming liar?”
The younger Tom Brady on Friday posted a Facebook message that was much more controlled in tone than his father’s radio rant, expressing his gratitude to Judge Berman, but also decrying the lengthy Deflategate drama , saying, “I don’t think it has been good for our sport — to a large degree, we have all lost.”
Listen to the entire Tom Brady, Sr. radio call-in rant in the video at the top of this page.
[Image: Grant Halverson/Sam Greenwood/Getty Images]