Mentioning Jordan and Brady in the same sentence is just stupid. Jordan won 6 rings and took several years off...plus he never lost a championship
If Brady had 5, then the discussion could get interesting.
I see Brady more as the Gretzky/Jeter/Duncan of football. He's been stuck on 3 rings for eternity it seems ...he should have 5, but Jeter could say he should have 8 rings since he lost several World Series.
He took a year and a half off, in the single most inexplicable decision ever made by a superstar athlete. And the NBA required Jordan so much that this was never discussed, just glossed over. Yep, the greatest competitor of all time decided he didn't want to compete! Or, maybe he was grieving his father. In public. On buses with young kids.
The Jordan retirement needs to negatively effect his legacy, not promote it. If all he cares about is being the best basketball player of all time (and that's all he cares about, he is an abject failure at every other aspect of life other than hawking product like he's Vince Shlomi), then this should be a true detriment.
Nobody has ever bothered to explain why he left. If he was grieving his dead father, it doesn't make sense to do so by staying in the public eye and playing professional baseball, something he had no business doing (he was taking at bats away from actual prospects at the Double A level). If he had truly accomplished everything he could on the court (which is what he said at the time), why was he diving back in less than 18 months later so Nick Anderson could steal the ball from him and knock him out of the playoffs?
Plus Jordan never once beat a great team in the playoffs. The Barkley Suns, Stockton and Malone when they were past their prime, and the Sonics were a year away until Kemp started drinking. Don't give me a Knicks team that could not shoot or dribble either.
I'm so bored with the Jordan myth. He's one of the greatest athletes I've ever seen. He's not this winged beast that magically graced us with his presence. He was a guy with a great turnaround jumper and a guy with a personality disorder.