Jesus that is a well thought-out parallel.
Well done.
I noticed it years ago, when I watched
When We Were Kings and started watching all of Ali’s older footage. As personalities go, total opposites. But the career arcs are so similar.
The point where I felt it was uncanny was watching SB49 and then Ali’s Rumble in the Jungle against Foreman.
Both athletes were long chasing redemption. Brady with all his setbacks. Two heartbreaking SB losses, Spygate, Deflategate, so many disappointments…and suddenly he went from the greatest young QB to a 37 year old fighting for his legacy. Ali had been stripped of his belts in his own scandal at age 25, avoiding the draft, and he, like Brady, had gone from celebrated champion to pariah. When he returned three and a half years later, he was no longer that superhumanly fast boxer who could literally run circles around opponents for ten rounds. He was slower and adapted his strategy to be more defensive/counter focused. It took him over seven years from the time he was stripped of his championships to regain the title from Foreman…and like Brady, he had met several heartbreaking setbacks, including a lost title fight against Frazier two years prior.
Rumble in the Jungle was where Ali used the Rope-A-Dope to strategically get pummeled by the strongest puncher in the world for many rounds before doing his thing...and after his youth (and exile from boxing), he was very much a fundamental fighter relying on defense…no longer flashy and brash in the ring but still great with his mind.
Foreman had emerged in a big way, annihilating Ali’s contemporaries like Frazier and Norton. This reminded me of Brady against the Seahawks, who had recently disposed of Manning and Rodgers, and appeared to be unstoppable. And of course, the counterintuitive strategy of Ali in absorbing blows from the hardest puncher wasn’t unlike Brady throwing 50 times against the league’s most dominant secondary.
There are also big parallels with Ali’s next famous bout, Thrilla in Manilla, where he outlasted Frazier in 100 degree temps and basically collapsed afterward. That reminded me a lot of Super Bowl 51 with Brady’s exhausted triumph. And these matches established both of them as the undisputed greatest ever.