(
)
INDIANAPOLIS — You are a New Yorker, and so you are conditioned to detest everything about Tom Brady.
He works and plays in New England, for starters, so he has a location problem. He is married to one of the most beautiful women in the world, so there always will be a glamor problem. He wears and endorses UGGs, so there is a footwear problem.
He has three championship rings, so there’s a bling problem.
But I am going to serve you up a tall glass of truth serum now, so you have no choice but to stay on the level when you answer this question:
Would you give your left arm to be Tom Brady for a day?
Or would you give your left arm and your left eye?
“I don’t know that there’s anything you could possibly say that’s negative about him,” Eli Manning said on Media Day Tuesday — when the whole world and a few oddly-dressed interlopers wanted to set a few sparks between today’s dueling quarterbacks, when some wondered if Eli would approach this as a Hatfield-McCoy war for all the times Brady has managed to break his brother’s heart over the years.
Regardless of what might be lurking in the Sicilian fragment of Eli’s heart, that place where revenge is plotted and scores are settles, even he couldn’t find anything bad to say about Brady.
“He’s as good as it gets at our position, and he’s been a positive force in the league for a long, long time,” Manning said. “What more could you ask for?”
So much of the momentum generated in the two weeks bridging Championship Sunday and Super Bowl Sunday has tilted the field toward the Giants. Regardless of what Las Vegas says, it almost is impossible to find a demographic that doesn’t believe in the Giants. Indianapolis — one of the home offices of Manning Inc., at least for now — is head over heels for the kid brother. A large chunk of the country still despises Bill Belichick for Spygate. The groundswell is not subtle. America thinks the Giants are going to win.
And they might. And maybe they should.
But there is one large, imposing obstacle standing between here and coronation. His name is Thomas Edward Patrick Brady. He is 34 years old, and he will be looking to join Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw this evening as the only quarterbacks to win four Super Bowls. He has won those three rings, but has none in the past seven years. If you’re looking for a wider bridge than that, you need to go back to Johnny Unitas, who won a second title in 1959 and waited until 1970 to win his third.
Nobody in sports hears a clock ticking louder than a quarterback.
“If you would have told me when I first came into the league I’d have a chance to play for one championship, I’d tell you that would be a worthy thing to build a whole career around,” Brady said earlier this week. “Now I’m getting my fifth opportunity and I’ve already won three and came close the other time, and it’s just a sense of feeling very fortunate to be on this team, at this time. We know how precious all of this is.”
You want to dislike him because he is gifted, because he has the supermodel wife, because he plays for a team that grinds out 12 and 13 wins every single year, because he plays for a team that slaps around the Jets every year.
Because if they do the same to the Giants today, it almost is certain that you will look at the postgame stat sheet and see that Brady completed about 75 percent of his passes, that he threw for three or four touchdowns, that he ran the offense — both no-huddle and traditional — with a peerless aplomb, that when he needed to run out the clock he did so with a cold efficiency that can’t be taught.
That’s your Tom Brady problem.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com