National Football League

Roger Federer's injury shows time waits for no one, except Tom Brady

Published Aug. 16, 2021 8:55 p.m. ET

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By Martin Rogers
FOX Sports Columnist

They came in from the front and from the back, two men combining to make a single, all-encompassing battering ram, ready to pulverize their intended target, which happened to be a 44-year-old football player who goes by the name of Tom Brady.

The defensive linemen in question, Trey Hendrickson and Joseph Ossai of the Cincinnati Bengals, burst through the protective shell designed to stop them Saturday, looking to take down the Hall of Fame QB, which is what they are supposed to do, of course.

Brady’s response?

"[He] just folded up like a cheap tent," Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach Bruce Arians said.

He did indeed. Brady, the split second he realized that only violent things were going to happen if he remained on his feet and tried to squeeze out a pass, crumbled into nothing on the sixth play of the Bucs’ preseason opener.

Brady dropped himself to the ground a moment before Ossai and Hendrickson spilled over the top of him. Moments later, he popped up, headed for the sideline and stayed there, and the Bucs went on to lose their 2021 NFL preseason opener by a final score of 19-14.

If you’re a Tampa Bay fan, it was probably momentarily terrifying to see Brady submerged beneath two giant defenders. For a neutral intrigued by the possibility of Brady going for an absurd eighth Super Bowl ring, it was a little concerning that he was out there to begin with.

But more than anything, the snapshot went a fragment of the way toward explaining how the National Football League’s oldest active player has just kept going, with a mixture of a lot of smarts, a little luck and an uncanny intuition for doing whatever it takes to keep playing pro football for what might as well be eternity.

A day or so later, a long way away and in a completely different sport, there was some news about another old-timer who also happens to be a true legend of his craft.

Roger Federer is 40, positively youthful compared to Brady but showing some significant similarities to the former New England Patriots quarterback who headed to Florida and collected another title.

Federer hasn’t necessarily gotten better with age, but he has stuck around masterfully, staying very relevant and highly competitive in the sport of tennis for as long as anyone can remember. He’s tied with Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic for the most Grand Slam titles ever (20), and he won three in four attempts in a glorious spell as recently as 2017 and 2018, when he also returned to No. 1 in the world.

However, Federer has revealed that he must undergo knee surgery for a third time, admitting that he has only a "glimmer of hope" that he will be able to resume competitive action once his rehab is complete.

"Unfortunately, [doctors] told me for the medium to long term, to feel better, I will need surgery, so I decided to do it," Federer said on his social media. "I will be on crutches for many weeks and then also out of the game for many months."

Federer is now certain to miss the US Open, and while the hope is that this is a brief farewell for now, it is inevitable that many will wonder whether it’s goodbye forever.

If the Swiss tennis icon decides to hang it up, it will have been an extraordinary career. Heck, he could have quit at any point in the past decade, and his still would have been an almighty, historic run. The only sadness is of the selfish type: that tennis might not get to say a proper goodbye to a player worthy of the most fulsome celebration.

For quite some time, Brady, Federer and Tiger Woods were spoken about in the same breath. They were sports apostles analogous to one another, possessing not just the ability to keep on going but the desire to do so as well.

In Brady’s case, continuing to play the game was worth risking getting flattened by men such as Hendrickson and Ossai; for Federer, worth tirelessly traversing the globe with a young family in tow; and for Woods, worth trying to come back from all those back ailments and that persistent discomfort.

Woods had his majestic moment, the one that made sticking around worth it, when he won the Masters in 2019. Per reports, he has not played any golf since a car crash earlier this year. As for Federer, for now, we just don’t know.

Yet Brady keeps going, dodging injury despite playing a game of brutal physicality in which the dangers come not just from the aging effects on the body but also from the malevolent intent of opponents.

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Much is made of his healthy diet, but the mental fuel that comes from within might be more powerful than all those expensive nutrients. The longer he goes on, the less tempting it is to believe that Brady is starting a trend of 40-something QBs and more that he’s one man doing outstanding things for an amount of time that escapes all logic. Even LeBron James is facing questions about how much longer he can be the NBA’s alpha, and he’s eight years younger than Brady.

Brady doesn’t just hang around. He enters the new season as a reigning champion and absolute X-factor. He won’t occupy the top spot when the NFL’s Top 100 list is finalized before the start of the season because technically, structurally, Xs-and-Os speaking, Patrick Mahomes, Russell Wilson and Aaron Rodgers can do more things.

But Brady wins and just keeps winning, with the pursuit of more triumph part of his reason for being. He has somehow avoided all the pitfalls, all the obstacles, all the doubts.

He has avoided them in a lot of different ways: with an unshakeable mentality and, yep, lots of sleep, water and vegetables but also by being swift-minded enough and not too proud to throw up the white flag when angry defenders burst into the pocket in a preseason game.

"Smart as hell," Arians added when describing the sack.

Keep the descriptors coming because there are a lot to choose from, a never-ending supply of clichés to put with the name of an athlete who is the opposite of a cliché. He's a one of a kind.

Brady is smart as hell, old as time, fit as a fiddle and wouldn’t you know it, still alive and kicking and ready for another season of NFL football. He's still doing it, still chasing it, upturning the usual rules and making the impossible seem possible.

Well, kind of, because it’s possible only for him.

Martin Rogers is a columnist for FOX Sports and the author of the FOX Sports Insider Newsletter. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.

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