The Loop
Tom Brady and Gronk read some mean tweets and, sure enough, Tommy’s golf game came up
OK, so the Mean Tweets thing is pretty played out at this point. Sooooo 2017, as the kids might say. Everyone started doing it, feelings started getting hurt, producers started cherry-picking not-very-mean tweets and suddenly, the format was dead as fast it began. But none of that stopped the Tampa Bay Buccaneers this week, joining Tom Brady and Gronk poolside to revive the bit for a whole new post-Tik Tok generation. Throw on your dumbest pair of sunglasses and check it out.
Short of the raw entertainment value of watching Gronk try to read, this treads very familiar territory and suffers from many of the same pitfalls of it predecessors—namely the overwhelming smugness of multi-gazillion-dollar celebrity athletes and the knowledge that in just five minutes on Twitter we could find 100 meaner, nastier, more vile tweets than what the Bucs’ social media team managed to dredge up for Tommy n’ Gronk.
But amidst this bronzed, baby-oiled yuck-a-thon, there is one barb that clearly cuts Tom to the quick, even though he does his best hide it. “Tom Brady stinks at golf, LMAOO,” he reads, too annoyed to even credit the handle of his harasser. “They watch one golf match of me, for crying out loud,” he rants, refrencing his performance at The Match II while Gronk giggles away in the background. “I was bad six holes. I was bad six holes. Come on, give me a break!”
Sensing his buddy’s ego chaffing to dangerous levels, Gronk wisely intervenes, directing the attention, as all good golf partners do, to the good shots, not the bad ones. “But you did hit that like one great shot over the summer,” Gronk says, teeing up Brady for some self-congratulatory bullshit. Never one to let an opportunity for self-congratulatory bullshit go to waste, Brady jumps at the prompt. “It was a good shot. That was a good shot. I usually, you know, I can find a decent one in there.”
Sure, Tom. Whatever helps you sleep at night.