And now a few more words about Thumbgate. You know, the injury to the passing hand of golden boy Tom Brady, the one that had all New England fretting and ended up not costing the New England Patriots a trip to Super Bowl LII.
Brady opened up about the injury, which occurred during an accidental collision with a teammate during practice last Wednesday. Or he opened up about as much as a member of the Patriots ever opens up.
“We ran into each other and my thumb just got bent back. It wasn’t his helmet or anything,” Brady said an interview Monday morning on WEEI’s “Kirk and Callahan” show. “Just kind of got bent back. That is why I felt it was a lot worse. The doctors went in and checked it out and we did things just to kind of check on everything [for ligament injury] and fortunately there wasn’t any damage that normally comes associated with that. I think we were very lucky.”
The cut, just below his thumb on the meaty part of his hand, required 12 stitches and left a frightening bloody scene in its wake. It stoked panic when Brady missed practice Thursday and Brady fanned the flames by wearing red gloves on his hands in his session with the media. When he took the field for warm-ups before the AFC championship game Sunday, he had a large piece of black tape over a wound that Brady called a “really good cut.”
Patriots fans weren’t the only ones freaking out over the injury, either.
“It was pretty stressful. I was stressed out,” he said. “You drive home and you have all these stitches in this place. You’re driving home and I saw my wife and she said, ‘What happened?!’ and I said, ‘I know, it was just an accident in practice.’ She said, ‘What is going to happen?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. We’ll see how it goes.’”
Brady added that his “we’ll see” comments about whether he could play were honest and not a mind game.
“I wasn’t sure, I really wasn’t,” Brady said. “Wednesday, it happened and Wednesday night I definitely wasn’t sure, but it was just a crazy injury in practice. It didn’t look good there for a little bit, but fortunately, Thursday, I didn’t practice, I took some time off. Friday, did just a little bit and things kind of felt a lot better on Saturday and [Sunday] I was just able to kind of do what I needed to do. Everyone deals with injuries. It is just part of the season and part of the year. The timing and where exactly it was wasn’t the best thing in the world for a quarterback, but it is what it is.”
Brady threw for 290 yards (138 in the fourth-quarter rally from a 10-point deficit) and completed 26 of 38 passes for two touchdowns. The stitches are due to come out this week and he says he’ll be fine when the time comes to play in his eighth Super Bowl in 16 seasons as a starter on Feb. 4.
“I think hopefully sometime this week and at that point, again, I was fortunate not to tear any ligaments or anything like that,” he said. “There [were] no broken bones. That was obviously the best news I could ever hear based on what you think it could be and we found out that it wasn’t.
“After an unlucky injury, it turned out to be a lot of good luck that it wasn’t more serious than it was.”
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