Tom Brady’s childhood trips to see his Minnesota relatives sound sort of brutal
“He’s just a nerd that made it big."
Super Bowl LII will hardly be the first time Tom Brady has traveled to Minnesota. As the Patriots quarterback recently mentioned, his mother grew up in a small town outside Minneapolis, where some of his family still lives.
Well, The Athletic’s Chad Graff visited that small town — Browerville, population: 753.
Graff’s conversations with Brady’s relatives serve as another reminder that he wasn’t always the suave superstar athlete that so many New Englanders perceive him to be.
“We had to drag him wherever we’d go,” Paul Johnson told Graff, recalling his youngest cousin’s visits to the family farm, during which “Tommy” was sent tumbling down sand hills and beaten up during Wiffle ball games.
“We weren’t always super nice to him,” Johnson said.
Brady’s grandfather, Gordon, also saw his grandchildren’s visits “as an opportunity for free labor,” Graff wrote:
He brought the Californian cousins to the dairy bar, where Johnson learned to milk cows before he could drive. Now it was the Bradys’ turn to learn.
Always up for a challenge, Tommy squatted in front of a cow and began pulling at the udder with little guidance. Milk splashed across the floor. The cousins laughed. Gordon, though, saw only his product being wasted.
“Grandpa scolded him a bit,” Johnson said. “Tommy was in the way more than he was helping.”
Even though those days are now separated by a few decades and a few more Super Bowl rings, the perception of Brady hasn’t changed too much among his Minnesotan relatives.
“He’s just a nerd that made it big,” Gary Johnson, Brady’s 80-year-old uncle, told Graff.
