When Danny Amendola joined Tom Brady on the New England Patriots, they broke the ice with a ping pong match. And it didn’t go well.
Amendola and Brady, of course, developed into a fearsome tandem, with Amendola dealing with injuries and ultimately getting relegated to a small but enormously efficient role. But they didn’t get off on the right foot. Amendola is, apparently, a ringer at ping pong, and he challenged Brady to a game. Brady thought he’d win. He didn’t. And it got ugly.
Here’s a look at what MMQB’s Albert Breer dug up on the story of their game:
“Apparently, No. 12 saw himself to be a pretty good ping-pong player. But Danny Amendola was fantastic. So after Amendola signed with the Patriots in 2013, the two talked trash with each other over it, and then wound up playing. Amendola wound up winning, and winning pretty handily. As the story goes, Amendola hammered home the last point, and barely could turn around before he heard this whistling go by his ear. Brady’s paddle had come in hot and just missed him. Amendola, I’d heard, looked up expecting to see Brady laughing. Instead, he was getting the death stare. And Amendola—who’d become a trusted target of Brady’s, and Super Bowl hero in his own right—learned a good lesson about Brady that day.”
To a degree,
