Tom Brady had a pretty remarkable way of accommodating autograph requests from teammates during his final season with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, according to one of his teammates.
Retired tight end Kyle Rudolph revealed that Brady had a vacant locker next to his own where teammates could leave requests for items to be autographed, and that Brady unfailingly signed everything that was asked of him.
“But my experience with Tom was incredible,” Rudolph told Peter King of Football Morning in America. “First, the way he treated people. The way he treated the Glazer family [Bucs owners] is exactly the way he treated the janitor at 6:30 at night when he and maybe one or two other guys were the last players in the building. Second, the way he treated his teammates. Tom had an empty locker next to him. I would look over there and every day, guys would put helmets, jerseys, pictures, footballs, all the stuff they wanted Tom to sign for them. There’d be notes on the stuff, a post-it note on a football — ‘Sign this for Jimmy, it’s his birthday.’ At the end of the day, almost every day, he’d sit there and sign everything.”
It’s a good summary of just how respected Brady must have been among teammates. Then again, Brady has accommodated some painful autograph requests over the course of his career, so signing things for his teammates was probably quite painless.
Brady and Rudolph spent the 2022 season together in Tampa, though Rudolph barely played. It wound up being the final year of both of their careers, and Rudolph was the recipient of Brady’s final regular season touchdown pass.
