A recent Instagram post from Tom Brady, professional football player, is generating a lot of interest. This happens with lots of things Tom Brady does! But a beach shot Brady posted as #sponcon for TB12, the sports thing he cofounded ("Tom Brady's holistic approach to achieving sustained peak performance"), has been overshadowed by something small: the shorts he’s wearing.
Now we can go back and forth all day about the proper length for shorts. But we won't brook any disagreement about the fact that Brady's are very short shorts. For contrast, here is Tom Brady in longer red shorts on the tb12sports Instagram page.
These shorts, however, end about an inch below Brady's gluteus maximus. Despite their second billing in the framing of the shot, these shorts are not shy: they’re covered in an intriguing, somewhat mesmerizing pattern, too.
At first glance, the pattern seems slightly baroque—maybe Versace or Gucci, or perhaps some kind of post-Internet art-kid print. (Does Tom Brady read Dis?) After a bit of debate, though, GQ's own Matthew Sebra came through with the following revelation: Brady's shorts display…a photograph of one of his sons. Printed on his shorts. Tom Brady is wearing short shorts emblazoned with a photograph of one of his children. Maybe both! On both the front and back.
Appropriately, Brady captioned his pic, “The More REAL You Get...The More UNREAL It Gets.” That line is generally, and dubiously, credited to John Lennon, but Tom Brady has chosen to attribute it to Muhammad Ali—because this is a man who does not just make his own shorts, he makes his own reality! And indeed: the closer we get to the heart of the shorts’ true nature, the more UNREAL they are. In the comments, some Brady fans were confused (“umm is that his kids on his shorts?”) while others were ready to rock them, if they just knew where to buy them (the two types of commenters did not really overlap).
