GQ Man Of The Year : Tom Brady

It's been a busy week for the greatest and sexiest men of our nation. People Magazine just shared with us that their Sexiest Man of the Year is David Beckham. Not to be overlooked, GQ announced that its Man of the Year is Tom Brady. Do you agree? GQ writer Chuck Klosterman seems to think it was a great choice.

Tom Brady is . . .
A) The greatest of all time
B) A slow man with a strong arm
C) A cheater
D) The quarterback we deserve
E) None of the above
F) Some of the above
G) All of the above.

Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback in NFL history.

That’s just my opinion, and that opinion is fungible. If someone else had made the same claim five years ago, I would have disagreed; five years ago, I didn’t even think he was the best quarterback of his generation. But the erosion of time has validated his ascension. Classifying Brady as the all-time best QB is not a universally held view, but it’s become the default response. His statistical legacy won’t match Peyton Manning’s, and Manning has changed the sport more. But Brady’s six Super Bowl appearances (and his dominance in their head-to-head matchups) tilt the scales of hagiography in his direction. He has been football’s most successful player at the game’s most demanding position, during an era when the importance of that position has been incessantly amplified. His greatness can be quantified through a wide range of objective metrics.

Yet it’s the subjective details that matter more.

America’s fanatical, perverse obsession with football is rooted in a multitude of smaller fixations, most notably the concept of who a quarterback is and what that person represents. There is no cultural corollary in any other sport. It’s the only position on the field a CEO would compare himself to, or a surgeon, or an actual general. It’s the only position in sports that racists still worry about. People who don’t care about football nevertheless understand that every clichéd story about high school involves the prom queen dating the quarterback. It serves as a signifier for a certain kind of elevated human, and Brady is that human in a non-metaphoric sense. He looks the way he’s supposed to look. He has the kind of wife he’s supposed to have. He has the right kind of inspirational backstory: a sixth-round draft pick who runs the 40-yard dash in a glacial 5.2 seconds, only to prove such things don’t matter because this job requires skills that can’t be reliably measured. Brady’s vocation demands an inexact combination of mental and physical faculties, and it all hinges on his teammates’ willingness to follow him unconditionally. This is part of the reason Brady does things like make cash payments to lowly practice-squad players who pick off his passes during scrimmages—he must embody the definition of leadership, almost like a president. In fact, it sometimes seems like Brady could eventually be president, or at least governor of Massachusetts.

But this will never happen. – GQ.com