Most Valuable Product

His office tucked deep into the NFL's headquarters in midtown Manhattan, Phil Guarascio markets the league. He's slim and dark, and he seems to crackle with a kind of urgent energy. Within the first five minutes of stepping into his office, Guarascio will attempt to give you something. He came to the NFL from General Motors, where he signed golfer Tiger Woods to his first major contract. He talks about athletes as "platforms" through which various products can be marketed. "A lot of great athletes, the younger, newer athletes, like Andy Roddick and the Williams sisters, they want to be seen as entertainment platforms," he explains.

"The great ones, the ones who really represent extreme value for marketers, tend to be people who are self-possessed but not really full of themselves. They have an appeal to men and women, and they can cut across age groups. They can represent different things to different age groups and cohorts, but do it in a way that stays within their brand. It's hard to find those kinds of people."

Tom Brady caught the NFL's marketing people as much by surprise as he caught everybody else in the league. His "brand," such as it was, consisted only of his being the successful quarterback of a Super Bowl championship team. While that certainly was more than enough for the Patriots - and, very likely, quite enough at the time for him - it was just an embryonic stage in how he could be marketed. "He's absolutely a work in progress," Guarascio says. "What makes you a platform starts with what you do on the field, and there are some athletes who can actually rise above that, and he may be one of them. If the Patriots have a bad year, or they fall into the middle of the league somewhere, Brady might be one of those guys who can rise above that.

"If I were marketing Tom Brady, and I was looking toward the future, I might do some things differently to build up his personality value outside the game, as opposed to relying on the exposure he gets from being part of a winning team."

If the podium was a problem for Brady because it set him apart from his teammates, it's hard to imagine that being considered a "platform" is altogether comfortable. "I don't need to be the showstopper, the entertainer," he says. "I'd much rather be one of the guys." Brady has been as cautious with his commercial endorsements as he has tried to be in the locker room and in his public pronouncements. While he has been able to pick up endorsements for Gap, Nike, Sirius Satellite Radio, and Visa, the success of the Patriots didn't translate into increased endorsement opportunities for his teammates. Ironically, according to many people in marketing, the very thing that New England had come to symbolize - meritocratic egalitarianism among teammates - made the other individual players less marketable than the quarterback.

"He's done a good job so far managing his brand," Guarascio explains. "Clearly, he needed the platform more than some of the more extroverted guys did. I don't think of him necessarily as a shy guy, just a little more introspective than a lot of them are.

"I would say, to look at him, All-American with an edge, an edge toward hipness and coolness, and understated elegance, low-key, but there's that edge there, when he gets into the red zone, there's that steeliness, that '[Expletive] you, we're going to get this in the end zone' thing. Sort of a Cool Hand Luke thing. A guy people like, but who you don't fool with. If I were managing him, I'd exploit that." That there is an actual human being under discussion here seems oddly beside the point.

Every public person makes peace with the artificiality of his or her public existence. There are athletes who give themselves over so thoroughly to their public brands that they become indistinguishable from them. They become Commodity People, shiny and perfect, round and edgeless and slightly inhuman. Michael Jordan was like that, and Tiger Woods seems well on his way. In almost every case, the process of converting the private person into a vehicle for public consumption of everything from soda pop to cardinal virtues is the creation of something artificial that can never evolve but only shatter entirely. This is how we end up with athletes who are purely platforms, loyal to their brands and not to their teammates. You can freeze yourself there, as though the primitive tribesmen were right all along about what happens to your soul if you allow someone to take your picture.

The Visa commercial campaign that debuted last year during the opening-night telecast of the game against Oakland was a measure not only of how cautious Brady is about the commercial aspects of his personality but also of how stubborn he is about bringing his own definition of himself as an athlete into every enterprise in which he becomes involved. He will not be summarized. He will not be frozen in place. It's his first big commercial, and he's not lounging on the beach in Cancun, tossing back a beer surrounded by what appears to be the Cinemax late-night starter kit. Instead, he's the straight man, sitting in what looks like a candlelit restaurant, an actress who is not the actress he's dating sitting next to him, and surrounded on all sides by his actual offensive linemen, all in full uniform, including helmets.

They get laughs just by sitting there. They tell all the jokes. In the second commercial of the set, which ran later in the season, the linemen overrule the director and hijack the entire production, and Brady says hardly anything. It was more than an effective spot. It was a demonstration of the star as teammate, as clear a one as any that ever happened on the field, and that the demonstration further cemented Brady's "brand" in that regard seems more natural than any marketing contrivance could be.

"They probably hadn't seen each other in a couple of months," recalls Jimmy Siegel, a mystery novelist and producer who created the spots for Visa. "And you felt that they liked each other and that he was happy to have them around. I think it made him more comfortable as opposed to having it be just him and this girl on the set. Here he is, surrounded by his buddies, his offensive linemen, and I think he was happy to share the spotlight with them, too."

They shot the commercial over two days on a soundstage south of Boston. Brady committed to one day of shooting, so they filmed everything they needed from him for both commercials on the first day. His teammates heckled him mercilessly from off camera. When someone blew a line, Brady would whisper, "Red zone," to get things back on track, and all of them quickly grew acclimated to the hurry-up-and-wait process involved in shooting any film, even a television commercial. And the linemen turned out to be a comedy troupe. "They all had sort of a different character that came out," Siegel explains.

Siegel noticed that Brady was far less loose than his teammates. "He was probably a little stiffer than all five of the linemen were, which was part of the surprise," Siegel says. "He was sort of the focus of things, and he was only there for the one day. It's hard to be natural on camera for a lot of people. It wasn't hard for the linemen, which was amazing, but it was a little hard for him."

They, after all, were all wearing uniforms. Brady was the guy in the suit.

This tailgate is a Time - which is what Massachusetts politicians throw whenever they must once again run for office. Since Massachusetts politicians never stop running for office, this means that any social gathering at the center of which you find a politician is a Time. A Time is usually a fund-raising dinner, but it can be a fund-raising lunch, a fund-raising trip to the ballpark, or, yes, a fund-raising wake, where, very likely, Jimbo Jr. will be shaking hands over the departed Jimbo Sr. preparatory to a run for the Governor's Council.

For almost three decades now, congressman Marty Meehan has thrown tailgates at Patriots games. His district is a hodgepodge northwest of Boston, a living legacy to gerrymanders long forgotten. He has tailgated at both Patriots stadiums, and he has tailgated for very good Patriots teams and very bad ones. On this afternoon, there were steak tips and shrimp and cold beer and plenty of time to eat and drink, and there was an odd lot of politicians, journalists, and everything in between, swapping lies under a tent on a rise above the stadium.

In January 2004, just after the Patriots had defeated Indianapolis for the AFC championship, Meehan relayed a request from the White House to Jonathan Kraft, president of the Patriots, whom Meehan had invited to attend President Bush's State of the Union address later that week.

The president, Meehan told Kraft, would like Tom Brady to be his guest as well. Moreover, Brady was invited to sit in the box in the House gallery reserved for special guests of the president. Kraft and Brady flew down together, and Kraft mentioned that he was happy to have had a chance to win two Super Bowls. Brady scoffed. He had no intention of going to the Super Bowl and losing. They didn't talk about football for the rest of the day.

When they got to Washington, Kraft and Brady met Meehan at a White House reception before the speech. Meehan was struck by how at ease Brady was in the unfamiliar setting, how he seemed to lock in on whatever person was talking to him. He's got it, Meehan thought.

Not long thereafter, Brady was whisked away to join the president's special contingent. It turned out that, for all the honor of the invitation, Brady had been asked to attend the address as a visual aid. There was a passage in the speech in which the president called for strong action to be taken to combat the use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs in professional sports. Just as the applause for the line rose, the national television cameras cut away to Brady in the gallery. It was clear that he was there not simply for who he was. He was a prop, a character in a commercial not his own.

Now Tom Brady is one of the least oblivious people on the planet, and the State of the Union address is approximately as spontaneous a production as the Rose Parade, so it beggars belief that Brady didn't know why he was there or to what use he was going to be put. However, Kraft thought Brady was uncomfortable about it the whole flight back. But he also had soaked up the experience. His curiosity was piqued by another new world that football had opened up to him. "On the way home, talking about the speech, we didn't talk about the game at all," Kraft says. "We talked about the Middle East and about the tax cuts that [Bush] had made after 9/11. He didn't profess to be smart about it. He was more posing questions [rather] than giving opinions."

He had to know he was being made an icon in that moment, for a specific political purpose, and in the context of a specific issue - performance-enhancing drugs - in which suspicion was regularly treated as fact, every rumor took on significance, and about which every hint could become a headline. It was at that speech, in that moment, in the context of a volatile issue touching close on Brady's own profession, that the discussion opened up about Brady and his possibilities as a political figure. Brady himself told ESPN magazine that his "craziest ambition" was to be a United States senator, which touched off widespread speculation as to his party affiliation and whether he would run in Massachusetts or his native California. Brady dodged all the questions with a smile, but the buzz was serious enough to set the tireless folks at thesmokinggun.com to digging. They discovered, embarrassingly enough, that, while Brady had registered as an independent in both California and Michigan, he'd apparently never actually voted.

"People say he's a Republican, but I'm not so sure," Marty Meehan says. "I do know that you can watch him in a room, and you can see him learning from the people he's talking to and focusing on them."

In many ways, Brady became a careful, cautious public figure, but a public figure nonetheless. He found a way to deal with what was coming at him through a part of himself that always eluded people who only thought they knew him. He was endlessly curious. At Junipero Serra High School in San Mateo, California, he'd taken an architecture class, losing himself in the minute technical details of construction. He loved figuring out how things worked and why they worked the way they did, and his curiosity was a part of that interesting mind he showed at Michigan. The curiosity was part of the reason he was so very good at breaking down defenses while looking at films. He saw how the pieces fit, and he was able to recognize when they didn't and why they didn't. Off the field, as he became more successful, he determined to study other successful people in other fields, to see how they put their lives together. It was why he and Patriots owner Bob Kraft talked at length about how Kraft ran his other businesses. "He's smart enough to know that the profile from being a star quarterback gives him an advantage," explains Jonathan Kraft, Bob's son, "but he'll be intensely driven to be good at whatever his craft is."

The destructive side of celebrity is inertia. You can get lost in pointless motion or you can get mired in isolation. But learning was something Brady knew how to do. It was a way to keep his life moving so he wouldn't find himself, at 45, locked away in a trophy room. It was also a way to keep his life moving in a specific direction over which he had some control. In April 2005, when he went off to New York to host Saturday Night Live, he involved himself in all aspects of the production. He talked to the cast members, and he chatted up the writers. He sat through the long, grinding midweek meetings, in which 45 or 50 proposed skits are winnowed to the handful that actually are performed on the show. Part of this was the fact that he is incapable in any enterprise of not being a teammate. But it also reflected his genuine desire to learn.

"In the meetings," recalls Lorne Michaels, the creator and executive producer of SNL, "he was willing to express his opinion. I found him open and thoughtful, and he pretty clearly was open to what we thought might be funny for him to do. He was very interested in all the steps of the process of putting the show together."

However, there was a skit involving the Philadelphia Eagles, whom the Patriots had defeated in the Super Bowl two months earlier. "He was open to everything," Michaels explains. "But he was worried about the stuff with the Eagles, that it might be disrespectful. He was willing to make fun of himself, but I got the feeling he didn't want to be mean about anyone else." On the show, Brady's opening monologue poked fun at his clean-cut image. He was required to sing a mock-boastful song that not only included the immortal couplet "I won the Tour de France/without wearing any pants" but also had him singing the praises of "my sweet behind." Later, in a how-to skit about sexual harassment, he was filmed walking through an office in his briefs. In New York to watch the show, Nancy Brady, who hadn't seen her brother on any stage except a football field since an eighth-grade production of The Wizard of Oz, was stunned.

"I didn't go to any of the dress rehearsals, because I wanted to see it live,'' she says, "and he comes out in the first act, and he does the whole song and dance, and I was laughing and cheering, and I just couldn't believe how he really threw himself into it, and the fact that he was so amused and whatever they asked him to do, he would do it, and that he didn't take himself so seriously."

Brady had begun to control his brand, as the marketing people would say. But, by instinct, he also seemed to know that the first order of business was not business at all. It was to recognize what was authentic and what was not. It was to recognize what was authentic in yourself and what was authentic in those things you were being offered for a piece of yourself. And the best way to do that was to see how all the other parts of this new world worked, at your own speed and on your own terms, while hanging on to first principles - which, in Brady's case, were those of being a teammate - because without them, none of the rest of it would be possible or right. "All I ever wanted," he says, "was the camaraderie, to share some memories with so many other guys. I mean, if you choose to alienate yourself or put yourself apart, you know, play tennis. Play golf."

The path that Brady had chosen is not the easiest journey to make or the simplest life to lead. It's full of contradictions. It's potholed with paradox. But it's still the truest path across the public landscape, because it recognizes that, while that celebrity - and its confinement - is what this country adopted when it gave up on thrones, it's also what this country adopted when it gave up on the stocks.