Some of Tom Brady’s most uncomfortable press conferences came during President Donald Trump’s campaign. And that’s exactly how Brady described that phase of the quarterback’s friendship with Trump: “uncomfortable.”
When Trump was running for president in 2016, he asked Brady to speak at the Republican convention, and Brady had to turn him down.
“Then the whole political aspect came, and I think I got brought into a lot of those things because it was so polarizing around the election time. It was uncomfortable for me, because you can’t — and not that I would undo a friendship — but the political support is so different than support of a friend,” Brady said in an interview with Howard Stern on Sirius XM on Wednesday.
Brady added: “I didn’t want to get into the political thing.”
Still, Trump said at a Manchester, N.H., rally that he had the support of the quarterback. But Brady never openly endorsed Trump, saying only that the he supported Trump as a friend.
During the interview on SiriusXM on Wednesday, Brady explained that he first met Trump when he was the New England Patriots’ quarterback in 2002. At 24 years old, Brady had just won his first Super Bowl, and Trump asked Brady to judge the Miss USA competition. Brady admitted to enjoying the perks — like this one — to suddenly being a famous, professional athlete. So their relationship evolved from there.
“He called me after games, and he’d say, ‘I watched your game, Tom. Let’s play golf together,'” Brady told Stern on SiriusXM. “He became someone that would come up to our games and watch on the sideline and he would cheer for the Patriots. He always had a way of connecting with people — and still does.”
