Tom Brady is considered one of the GOATs in sports. The acronym, which stands for greatest of all time, is often handed to players who have gone on to establish themselves as the best athletes to play their own respective sport or any sport at a level higher than most other athletes.
Determining one athlete as the greatest of all is almost impossible, just because of how different each sport is. The best athletes of one certain sport might not have the facilities to thrive in another.
We have very rarely seen 2-sport athletes find success in both fields. Players like Michael Jordan, Tim Tebow, and Usain Bolt have tried to find success in multiple sports, but could never reach the heights they wanted to in both.
LeBron James could have been a 2-sport athlete, as he recently revealed that he was offered a contract by the Cowboys and the Seahawks during the NBA’s 2011 lockout. Many analysts have suggested that LeBron’s physical gifts would have allowed him to thrive in the NFL.
More recently, Tom Brady and Draymond Green spoke about the debate between football and basketball. Both athletes defended their respective sport, with Brady saying basketball demands less in terms of physicality, whereas Green believes that football doesn’t require players to play on both the offensive and the defensive end.
https://twitter.com/playoffdraymond/status/1442121872154390528
Tom Brady: “I see all these NBA guys getting hurt all the time, in my mind I’m thinking ‘it’s so easy – no offense – you don’t have to run that far, there’s not a lot of contact, you’ve got nice comfortable shoes on, it’s nice climate all the time’. If I was a basketball player, I always thought LeBron, if he felt 100 percent every night it’d be scary and I’ve been very fortunate to feel not always 100 percent but close to that.”
Draymond Green: “I think you’ll see it from your perspective and we see it from our perspective. What we see as a basketball player is – as a football player, I don’t have to be in as great of shape because you stop after every play. You can get called on a basketball court and be running for seven minutes straight without a timeout back and forth. By the way, I’m not getting on a football field – I’m good on that.”
Both Brady and Green made some valid points, while also showing respect to each other’s sport. While neither agrees with the other, they do understand where they are coming from.
Fans across the US have often debated about which sport is harder to play; basketball or football. While basketball has a higher degree of intensity and asks more of its players, football’s physicality is unparalleled in American team sports and is a lot more physically demanding for the athletes.
