The Boston Globe reported that Belichick had revoked Guerrero's privileges earlier this season. Guerrero, Brady's friend, trainer and business partner, had been allowed to fly on the team charter. He had a sideline pass for game days. Guerrero set up an office in the team's facility, near the Patriots' locker room. He still has the office, but he can only treat Brady there, not the other Patriots who had begun to use his services. The seat on the plane is gone and so is the primo credential.
"Alex has been a huge part of what I do and I'm so fortunate to have him not only as a friend, but with everything we've been able to do together," Brady said when asked about the situation on WEEI. "It takes a lot of people for an NFL player to achieve. Your career and teammates and coaches and family and support and friends, and Alex has been a huge, huge reason why I'm still playing."
There is no shortage of material being spoken and written about this. From Brady being compared to the Scientology-driven couch-jumping Tom Cruise to Belichick fielding strange questions about paternal triangulation between coach, quarterback and trainer. There's plenty out there on Guerrero, too. Those stories center on his qualifications or lack thereof.
Oh, the drama. Grab your popcorn, sit back and enjoy. We'll speculate about a breakup between Yoda and Luke Skywalker. (Yes, I peg them as the good guys, the winners.) But Brady and Belichick will do what they do. They will shut down that line of questioning. They'll say nothing publicly. Both of these guys are too smart and they like to win too much to let this stop what they've already created.
This isn't really about the melodrama. Stay woke, friends. Guerrero's setup with the Patriots isn't that strange. It shouldn't be. The office in the team facility, the treating more than half the team, that's different, but it shouldn't be surprising. Almost everybody has a guy outside of the team's sports medicine and training staff. The New England situation is getting a lot of attention because Brady is Brady. He's built his personal brand on getting older and somehow still looking fabulous and playing like he's 25 years old. With Guerrero at his side, Brady turned the brand into a commercialized product with a brick and mortar shop.
Having a personal sports guru is not new. Remember, Barry Bonds had Greg Anderson. Kristaps Porzingis, the Latvian basketball-playing unicorn, has a Dr. Dan Colker, "a man of movement and some mystery," according to the New York Daily News.
Players will always look for the edge. They want that thing, whatever it is that will have them perform better than the next guy. They want to recover quicker, execute faster, and last longer. This goes back decades. In Jeff Passan's The Arm, there is the story about 20-year-old Jim Palmer and his injured rotator cuff. Palmer went to a sports medicine pioneer who was associated with the Los Angeles Dodgers. The advice: pitch and hope the arm gets better. Palmer also had a friend in the pharmaceutical industry who suggested the young pitcher take the anti-inflammatory drug Indocin. Palmer did. He started throwing 95 mph and he pitched 18 more seasons. There have always been outsiders offering a hybrid of medicinal/training options for athletes.
This isn't going away. Players have grown in power. That's why a player of Brady's caliber could have his sports guru business partner planted in the Patriots' building. What organizations across sports have to figure out is how to maintain trust with the players and balance the relationships between the players' personal trainers and the team's in-house training and medical staff.
Beneath the histrionics of the Brady-Belichick-Guerrero fuss is the tension between the Patriots' medical and training staff, which complained about Guerrero a couple years ago. If teams take the hardline, they risk alienating the player. At the same time, teams view themselves as the standard bearer for treatments and training. They question alternative methods, which is healthy and the right thing to do so long as it is an inquiry versus automatic disregard.
The future is now with sports gurus and teams will either succeed or fail at figuring out relationships with them.
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