This week, Tom Brady, an NFL quarterback of some note, announced for the second time that he would be retiring from professional football. I’ll believe it when I see it, because about a year ago I wrote an aggravated goodbye-to-Brady piece, watched him return to the game, and then learned about how he only retired as part of a lengthy scheme to personally wield total control over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ football operations. He can act like he’s done but I know he will be throwing pigskin around for the Niners next year, right up until an enterprising safety beats George Kittle off the line and personally breaks three of Brady’s ribs. And even after that arduous 47-year-old man rehab, I’m pretty sure he’ll just keep coming back until he dies on the field.  

At the end of 80 for Brady, a new movie concerning the adventures of a group of four older women who really like Tom Brady, our fearsome foursome is sitting on the beach, talking about retirement. Then, they say hey, buddy, what about you? And they cut to Brady, who says, “Hey now, how could I retire when I think I still got it!?” Hours after the news of Brady’s retirement dropped, I was sitting in a suburban movie theater, watching Tom Brady say that he doesn’t want to retire. 


He never ends. We will be stuck with this dude forever, slinging those silly slant passes to undersized white receivers until the next plague takes us all. It won’t get him, of course. He will have transcended death by that point, a barely corporeal form kept alive by soil transmuted into blood, more plant than man, living in Peter Thiel’s eternal life arboretum a thousand miles below the surface of the Earth. Soon, he will spread to the surface and bloom across the planet, sole possessor of the world.

There are four octogenarian friends living in New England. They are: Lily Tomlin, a cancer survivor. Jane Fonda, a former model and eternal good-time gal who writes erotic Rob Gronkowski fan-fiction. Sally Field, a stats nerd and a math professor at MIT. And Rita Moreno, a fun-loving woman whose husband just died. Any virtues this movie has are derived from these performers, who are all likable and funny. I’d have loved to watch them in anything else. Tomlin and Fonda, frequent collaborators in recent years, are even plotting to murder  Malcolm McDowell in their next film, Moving On.