A handful of duos in the world of sports have drawn as much focus as Rob Gronkowski and Tom Brady. Throughout their careers with the New England Patriots and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Gronkowski’s strength and agility while Brady’s accurate passing ultimately rendered the pair a pile of accolades including their winning of four Super Bowls.
However, with a less-than-impressive start to their partnership, the early phases of their relationship could not really light up the world as the former TE revealed recently.
Tom Brady helped Rob Gronkowski realize NFL reality wasn’t like the movie
In 2010, Gronk debuted his NFL career with the New England Patriots, almost ten years after Tom Terrific did the same. Initially, Gronkowski and Tom struggled to coordinate their connection, which he discussed on the sports podcast “New Heights” with Jason and Travis Kelce.
TB12 was already a dependable player for the Patriots when the 34-year-old started off his career at the national level. Rob said that as a rookie player, he witnessed the seven-time Super Bowl champion’s firing glare. The words and the first official meeting between the two made the Kelce brothers genuinely chuckle.
“I was in the training room getting my foot and ankles taped and he comes up and says ‘hey, I’m Tom.’ I was trying to play it cool, I’m just going to introduce myself, I’m not going to say I am a big fan or anything so I was like, ‘Hi, I’m Rob, man. I know you’re Tom, dude, we are in football gear and I am not meeting you somewhere else.”
The five-time Pro Bowler asserted that finding the rhythm of his relationship with Brady was not easy for him. At the time he was clueless about how to build up familiarity with the “crazy man”.
“Not the same wavelength at first. I thought he was out of control and I was like ‘this dude is crazy,’ I had never seen anyone like it,” he said.
According to the former tight end, Brady was more of a coach to him than a comrade who enjoyed bowing to him periodically. The four-time first-team NFL all-pro was made to understand by the fifteen-time Pro Bowler that the NFL was not like a movie that primarily showed the positive aspects of the player’s life.
“He was playing like a d*******. He was like a coach…I thought [the NFL] was like Any Given Sunday. That was how I lived my first couple of years in the NFL. The movie had tricked you. It wasn’t anything like Any Given Sunday.”
However, as they came to a deeper awareness of each other’s talents and preferences, their relationship later developed into one of the most powerful alliances in the NFL.
Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski have been friends since 2010
With their friendship spanning more than 10 years and their numerous accomplishments, while playing together in the NFL, Brady and Gronkowski captured the attention of the sports world radically. Together they have won four Super Bowls, three with the Patriots and one with the Buccaneers, and there is little doubt that their on-field chemistry was a major factor in their success.
Both of them spent about the same amount of time with each of their respective teams, having both begun and concluded their careers with those identical teams. The two were almost always finding time for one another and were each other’s support systems when things got tough.
Tom and Rob fostered the same kind of brotherhood and closeness outside of the field, which could be seen as apprehensive cooperation to legendary bonding.
