Depending on where you’re based regionally, Tom Brady is actually either very likeable or very unlikeable. The people whose teams he helps win championships? They like him. The people whose teams he helps prevent from winning championships? Well, they don’t like him so much.
But anybody has to admit that watching Brady with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers this past season was certainly a different experience than seeing him for the past two decades under the eye of Bill Belichick with the no-nonsense New England Patriots.
Even former Pittsburgh Steelers lineman Ramon Foster took notice, and he couldn’t help but just watch it and appreciate the run that unfolded—and the fact that he had a vested interest in it to root for his guys, something that he touched on a bit recently on 93.7 The Fan.
“Seeing Tom Brady be a human being, being somebody who was like, ‘man, he’s just like me, he’s having fun at the Super Bowl parade’”, he said. “The way they won this ring, the way they celebrated it, it looked fun. Everything about it, I was like, ‘god, that looks awesome’. And the fact that I knew guys—Steve McLendon, Byron Leftwich, Larry Foote—everybody got a ring that deserved one. AB got one. It was all of that, and a ball for me”.
Those are all former teammates of his, of course, with Leftwich and Foote being on former Steelers offensive coordinator Bruce Arians’ coaching staff. McLendon, as a defensive lineman, is surely a guy that he saw a lot in practice. And AB, well…he was AB.
With his first Super Bowl in Tampa, Brady now has seven in his career, which is more than any organization as a whole. In contrast, Foster failed to win a single championship during his playing career with the Steelers, which ran from 2009—coincidentally, just a year after winning the Super Bowl—through the 2019 season, having retired a year ago.
He’s now transitioning into his life’s work, so to speak, moving on into the media, with both a radio show and a writing outlet, and he’s doing his thing. I’m sure like some other prominent former Steelers that we will continue to hear from him on Steelers-related matters a fair bit going into the future.
For now, he’s just happy for some of his friends and former teammates, who were finally rewarded with something they strove for for a number of years.
