CELEBRITY
Tom Brady is heavily BOOED during his Fox broadcasting debut in St. Louis 22 years after he beat the hometown Rams to win his first Super Bowl
Tom Brady was heavily booed in his broadcasting debut for Fox this past weekend as he covered the United Football League (UFL) Championship.
The 46-year-old, seven-time Super Bowl champion was in the booth with Joel Klatt and Curt Menefree for Sunday night’s game before being jeered by folks in St. Louis when gracing the field to reward Birmingham Stallions quarterback Adrian Martinez with the MVP Trophy.
The Stallions had defeated the San Antonio Brahmas, 25-0, to accomplish a three-peat.
Perhaps, the animosity stemmed from Super Bowl XXXVI on February 3, 2002, when Brady, who was 24 years old at the time and in his second year on the New England Patriots, caused an upset against the heavily favored St. Louis Rams.
What’s more is that before the UFL game, Brady had chatted with Kurt Warner, the opposing quarterback in that Super Bowl and one of the leaders on The Greatest Show on Turf.
In their discussion, Warner questioned the validity of the Patriots win after Brady and Co. were later entrenched in the Spygate scandal in 2007.
It began when the Patriots were disciplined by the NFL for videotaping New York Jets’ defensive coaches’ signals from an unauthorized location during a September 9 game from that year.
Videotaping opposing coaches is not illegal in the NFL, per se; there are designated areas allowed by the league to do such taping.
Because the Patriots were instead videotaping the Jets’ coaches from their own sideline during the game, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell deemed it to be in violation of league rules, stating that the act represented a calculated and deliberate attempt to avoid long-standing rules designed to encourage fair play and promote honest competition on the playing field.
After an investigation, the NFL fined Patriots head coach Bill Belichick $500,000 (the maximum allowed by the league and the largest fine ever imposed on a coach in the league’s 103-year history) for his role in the incident.
The Patriots were also fined $250,000 and docked from their original first-round selection in the 2008 NFL Draft which would have been the 31st pick of the draft.