When Tom Brady was drafted:
1. I weighed a hundred pounds less than I do now.
2. My oldest daughter had not yet had her first birthday.
3. You could fly in this country without needlessly being treated like a terrorist.
4. Immigrants, legal and otherwise, were treated like total sh*t; but within 18 months would be treated astronomically worse than before. Because it's
their fault the U.S. intelligence community...isn't.
5. Ernie Adams had just started his second stint with the Patriots, celebrating his 47th birthday on the seventh anniversary of the destruction of our logo and uniforms.
It was less than three months since Bob Kraft's much publicized hiring of Bill Belichick, after which Belichick hired OL coach **** Rehbein away from the Giants to be his quarterbacks coach.
O'Connor: Meet Tom Brady's first believer
Pam Rehbein grew up a Packers fan and lived the coaching life with **** from Green Bay to Minnesota, from Minnesota to the
New York Giants and from the Giants to the Patriots. It was an accidental career arc for ****, the former Division II All-American center out of Ripon College who planned to attend law school at the University of Pittsburgh after failing to survive Starr's final training camp cuts in 1977. As tough as it was for ****, son of Green Bay, to be released by his idol, Starr made it up to him by praising his intellect and offering him an entry-level job.
**** Rehbein would ultimately become Green Bay's special-teams coach and the league's youngest full-time assistant, whom Starr passionately defended when criticized in the media -- he scolded one critic and called Rehbein "as sharp a guy as we have in this organization." Fired with Starr in 1983, Rehbein made a brief stop with Los Angeles of the USFL before resuming his NFL journey and earning a reputation as a likable, even-tempered teacher who could reach all kinds of players in all kinds of systems. With the Giants, Dan Reeves kept him after Ray Handley was fired, and Jim Fassel kept him after Reeves was fired.
Bill Belichick, upon taking over in New England in 2000, asked him to coach his quarterbacks, but Rehbein was against uprooting his daughters one more time. Pam sat him down and said, "Do something for your career for once." So he did. If nothing else, Rehbein figured the Patriots' quarterback, Drew Bledsoe, might play effectively enough to help Rehbein become somebody's offensive coordinator.
But before Rehbein worked with Bledsoe, Belichick had him evaluate a couple of draft-eligible college kids who might develop into reliable backups: Tim Rattay of
Louisiana Tech and Tom Brady of Michigan. On his trip to Ann Arbor, Michigan, Rehbein looked beyond Brady's scarecrow build and heavy feet, just as he would ignore those images of Brady running the 40-yard dash at the pre-draft combine as if he were some panting insurance broker chasing after a downtown bus.
**** appreciated Brady's competitive desire and talent for pulling Michigan from the brink of defeat. Belichick's quarterbacks coach told Pam he thought he'd found another Joe Montana or Brett Favre.
"Twenty years from now," **** told his wife, "people will know the name Tom Brady."
A
San Francisco 49ers fan who dreamed of being another Joe Cool, Brady was hoping to go in the third round to San Francisco. The 49ers instead picked a quarterback from Hofstra, Giovanni Carmazzi. Six quarterbacks in all were taken off the board by other teams before the Patriots listened to their man.
Pam answered the phone in her home.
"We got him," **** said. "We got him."
Betsy, ****'s older girl, still recalls her old man returning from Patriots practices in 2000 and telling stories about this skin-and-bones rookie who had a certain something about him.
"My dad would talk about Tom Brady almost as if Tom was his own kid," Betsy recalled. "He would talk about Tom driving this yellow Jeep Wrangler, making fun of this little boy he was watching grow up. It's really cool to see Tom as an adult now with his own family. He's a megastar and a household name, but it seems like yesterday when he was that funny, young, cute guy with the yellow Wrangler."
Married with two stepsons, Colson and Jackson, Betsy was told by doctors she couldn't conceive a child without attempting in vitro fertilization. Betsy and her husband Jason Vallery preferred adoption and started exploring the process when, about six months later, she discovered she was 15 weeks pregnant. Betsy gave birth to ****'s first grandchild, Rylee, on Aug. 6, the date of ****'s death.
"Rylee was born at 8:22 in the morning, within the same hour of my father's passing at Mass General, and there was no denying it at that point," Betsy said. "It was totally my dad placing her right down to me and saying, 'See, she's going to be just fine.' I had mixed feelings about the date at first, but it's not sad at all. Rylee gets to be a part of my dad's legacy. ... Truly our miracle girl."
