Although we’re more than a month removed from it now, it remains wild to think about how the Tom Brady retirement news came down.
On a Saturday afternoon, ESPN’s Adam Schefter and Jeff Darlington reported that the legendary quarterback was retiring. Shortly thereafter, people from the Brady camp began disputing the report, saying nothing was decided. Three days later, Brady officially announced his retirement.
One of the first people to dispute the report was Brady’s agent Don Yee, who released a statement minutes after the ESPN report came out. In the time between, Yee called Schefter, and Schefter shared what happened in that conversation during his appearance this week on “Pardon My Take.”
“The first contact I had with Don Yee was afterwards,” Schefter said. “When he called, he said – and my wife was in the office – and I haven’t talked about this before, but I’m in my office, it’s a Saturday afternoon, there was a snowstorm in New York, wife is sitting there, Don Yee calls and said “why would you not call me in advance?’ I said, ‘I did call you, multiple times, left messages, never heard back from you.’ He said, ‘I have a statement I want to read to you.’ Now, when he said that, I will say I thought OK, what have we got here? What’s this statement going to be?”
As it turns out, the statement was a relatively straightforward one, which Schefter and most other NFL insiders shared. It more or less said Brady would be the one to announce his retirement for real, which he did a couple days later – only proving that Schefter’s reporting was correct.
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