Tom Brady grew up a 49ers fan. Ahead of San Francisco homecoming, a look at his past

Greg Auman

NFC South Reporter

In an NFL career blessed with the most ever of so many important things — 724 touchdown passes, 283 victories, 10 Super Bowls and seven championships — Tom Brady has only had one true homecoming game.

In 23 seasons, it’s almost cruel that he has come home to face the 49ers of his childhood just once, throwing four touchdowns for the Patriots in a 2016 win at Levi’s Stadium.

That changes Sunday, when Brady goes home to his city by the bay (4:25 p.m. ET on FOX). Long before he got to the Bucs, before two decades in New England and five years at Michigan, he figured out how to be an athlete playing with neighborhood kids on Portola Drive in his hometown of San Mateo.

“We would get home from school, and the whole block would be filled with kids,” said Maureen Brady, the oldest of Brady’s three sisters, who would go on herself to become an All-American softball pitcher at Fresno State. “Big Wheels and baseball games going on, and when it got dark, we played Capture the Flag. It was just so fun, and that’s why we’re all still such great, close friends. Those are our people. It was a great neighborhood.”

Bobby Aguirre, whose parents still live across the street from Brady’s parents on Portola, remembers at one point the lower block of Portola had 42 kids 16 years old or younger, and one of the youngest was always eager to play, whatever the sport was. Long before Brady made a name for himself in college and beyond, they got the first glimpse of a future champion.

“Tommy’s younger than I am, but whenever we were out playing, we needed numbers,” Aguirre said. “Everything revolved around playing sports.”

Tom Brady (center) and friends. (Photo courtesy of Maureen Brady)

San Mateo is 20 miles south of San Francisco, and if you fly into town, it’s maybe 10 minutes into the half-hour drive down Highway 101 toward Santa Clara, where the 49ers now play.

“The block we grew up on was a very special block,” said Bobby Paul, a friend of Brady’s since childhood. “We had a lot of kids playing on the street. It could have been baseball, it could have been throwing the football around, could have been getting on our bikes and going to the local park. We were always outside. It was a great time growing up in San Mateo.”

Baseball had its own set of neighborhood rules. A manhole cover served as home plate, a fire hydrant marking the pitcher’s mound.

If a batted ball hit a power line, it was a dead-ball do-over. Hitting the ball past a certain tree constituted a home run.

“If you were left-handed, you had to be able to pull the ball, because that’s how the street went,” Paul said. “If you hit it off the end of the bat, it would go in somebody’s yard and you had to knock on a door and go, ‘Hey, Mr. and Mrs., can we get the tennis ball?’ We broke windows, brother. We broke windows. We broke bones, but we had a lot of fun. The parents involved were just like, ‘The kids are outside playing, they’re not in trouble.'”

Brady was a talented enough baseball player to be drafted by the Montreal Expos as a catcher, though he wisely chose football and signed with Michigan out of high school. The stories of his baseball prowess growing up are as legendary as his football exploits.

“I remember throwing tennis balls at him in the driveway, he’s probably 9 years old, and I’m throwing as hard as I can at 16, 17 years old, and he’s driving these balls over the house,” said Paul Aguirre, Bobby’s brother. “So we knew the kid was good, could be a professional baseball player. I never thought it was football until I saw him play at Michigan.”

The neighborhood kids would compete at anything. Families would camp together at Pine Mountain Lake, three hours east near Yosemite, and they’d hold contests to see who could eat the most jalapeno peppers without yielding for a drink of water. Whatever the activity, however much older or bigger the opponents were, Brady wanted in.

“Even then, he was the most competitive kid out there,” another childhood friend, Scott Cannel, said. “He hated to lose. He hated to strike out. He hated to misthrow somebody. It was kind of funny to see how competitive he was then, to how competitive he is now.”

Tom Brady and his mother attend a 49ers game. (Photo courtesy of Maureen Brady)

Brady will have all sorts of family and friends flying in for Sunday’s game, and his neighborhood friends from childhood will gather to watch him play their 49ers, but they have seen him play in person many times. There was a standing offer from Brady over the years — if you can get a flight to catch one of his games with the Patriots or Bucs, there would be tickets waiting, and many times, a hotel room at no cost as well.

“We live large while we’re there,” Bobby Aguirre said. “There’s always someone here taking off to take advantage of that.”

Aguirre used to work for Electronic Arts, which makes the popular Madden NFL video game, and remembers introducing Brady his rookie year to a player rep. Brady was still largely unknown, and the EA staffer asked him “Who do you work for?” and Brady replied “The Patriots.”

“He got snubbed by our player rep, because he was nobody as far as he was concerned,” Bobby Aguirre said. “I took it personally, like, ‘C’mon, at least meet him, say hi.’ Sure enough, next year, he wins the Super Bowl, and this guy wants to be his friend. Thankfully, Tommy was like, ‘No thanks.’ Years later, he’s on the cover of Madden.”

Brady still jokes about unfair ratings assessed to him in the Madden game his rookie year — a fan posted a screengrab of the game assessing him with a 41 grade (out of 100) for “awareness,” which Brady tweeted was “unnecessarily mean.”

Aguirre points to that as a sign of Brady’s unending competitive drive, something you could see 40 years ago, regardless of whatever he was playing with friends.

“Being younger than me, the bigger guys, we were the quarterback and the receivers and Tommy’s [saying], ‘Throw to me! Throw to me!’ and the most interesting thing to me was his persistence at that age,” he said. “He’s got to be in the game, and he’s going to give it all. As he got older, God forbid you beat him in a pool game, or Rochambeau [rock-paper-scissors], he’s competitive. That’s the edge it takes to be good at that level.”

Aguirre said he’s played golf with Brady’s father and tennis with his mother, and it’s the same experience. This is a family that always wants to win, always keeps score and always remembers, win or lose. “It’s not for fun. It’s for the W,” he said.

The Aguirre brother Brady was closest to, David, was one of his best friends growing up, and when he died suddenly in 2011, Brady couldn’t attend the funeral because the Patriots were playing their season opener on a Monday night at the Dolphins. Brady asked Paul Aguirre if there was anything he could do, and he replied, “Yeah, just kick the s— out of Miami.” That night, Brady threw for four touchdowns and a career-high 517 yards.

“That was for David,” he texted Paul after the game.

Paul Aguirre was in attendance for Brady’s first career start in 2001, against the Colts. The two returned to Brady’s condo in Franklin, Massachusetts, and Aguirre remembers how overjoyed Brady was to simply win an NFL game. Aguirre watched the Super Bowl that first year at the Brady house on Portola, part of a huge gathering that had strong local media coverage of its own.

Back in January 1982, on the way to the 49ers winning their first Super Bowl, Brady was in attendance with his family at Candlestick Park when Joe Montana connected with Dwight Clark on “The Catch” to beat the Cowboys. Two weeks later, after they beat the Bengals for a championship, Paul Aguirre and Brady were lucky enough to have their parents take them out of school and drive to San Francisco and City Hall to watch the 49ers’ celebration parade in person.

Young Tom Brady outside Candlestick Park. (Photo courtesy of Maureen Brady)

Perhaps Brady could have grown up in any city and become the champion he has been, but it’s no coincidence that his formative years were in the shadow of an NFL dynasty.

His father, Tom Sr., grew up in San Francisco with a different 49ers team, as they made the playoffs only four times between 1950 and 1980. But Tom’s youth lined up with Bill Walsh and Montana, and the 49ers won four Super Bowls between the 1981 and 1989 seasons.

“All everybody talked about was the Niners during football season,” said Brady’s aunt Terri, known to 13 nieces and nephews and their kids as “Tootie.” “It was so exciting. Joe Montana, Ronnie Lott, Jerry Rice, they’re just legends. Football, it really came of age.”

The family’s roots with the 49ers go much further back, as Terri’s godfather, Bill O’Grady, was the original team physician when the franchise started. She lived close enough to walk to 49ers home games when they played at Kezar Stadium in the city.

“I’ve literally been a lifelong 49ers fan,” she said. “My whole family has, and the family just has a real history with the game, but Tommy has brought it to a whole different level. He’s like nobody else, anywhere, ever. And that’s a heresy to say in San Francisco, because Joe is Joe, but Tommy has even eclipsed Joe.”

There are fans, those not directly related to Brady, who will still pull for their 49ers on Sunday, but if the crowd is a bit divided, it would be much like the 2016 game he played there.

“I’m telling you, for being a 49er home game, it was a Tom Brady home game,” said Bobby Paul, who still calls San Mateo home. “It was 60 percent Patriots, 70 percent. Those fans were Tom Brady fans, chanting his name coming out of the tunnel. It was pretty exciting to see. We’re all 49ers fans, grew up 49ers fans, Joe Montana, Dwight Clark, Steve Young. But when he was playing the 49ers, it was like the 49ers weren’t even there. He was half the game.”

It seemed like Brady games in San Francisco just weren’t meant to be. AFC teams played in NFC stadiums once every eight years, and when the Patriots finally came to San Francisco in 2008, it was weeks after Brady sustained a season-ending knee injury.

Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara got to host a Super Bowl after the 2015 season, but Brady and the Patriots lost to the Broncos in the AFC Championship Game, on a missed two-point conversion with 12 seconds left. Over a span of five seasons, the game right in his backyard was the only Super Bowl he didn’t play in.

Brady was still in attendance for that Super Bowl, as the NFL honored the top 100 players in its history, so Brady got to stand alongside his boyhood idol in Montana, both wearing the same red blazer to commemorate the game’s all-time best.

Tom Brady talks with Hall of Famer Joe Montana prior to Super Bowl LIV on Feb. 2, 2020, in Miami. (Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)

“It was so cool for us, because that’s who we idolized,” Maureen said. “That was like everything to us. We loved Joe Montana. That was like God to us. When Steve Young took over, my mom could not get over it, had such a hard time rooting for Steve Young, but Tommy loved Steve Young and now they’ve become friends.”

The night before the 2016 game, the whole gang gathered at Scott Cannel’s house, and they’ll do the same thing Saturday, this time as more of a “farewell party” for Brady, he said. The first time Brady played in a Super Bowl, the residents got a petition to close Portola Drive from traffic, granted by the city, setting up the block party to end all block parties. This might be just as festive.

“It’s really exciting. I think we’re all thrilled he’s coming back, and I hope to heck he beats the Niners,” his aunt said. “I shouldn’t say that. I love the Niners, and I’m a Niners fan. The 49ers have a great defense, but Tom has as strong an arm and is as accurate as he’s ever been.”

There’s a nostalgia to Brady returning home to face the 49ers, but for friends and family, there’s also an acceptance that there won’t be many more opportunities to watch the 45-year-old play quarterback, so this is a weekend to cherish and remember.

“It’s all the people who have supported him for 23 years,” his sister, Maureen, said. “It’s coming to an end. He’ll probably never play in San Francisco again.”

Greg Auman is FOX Sports’ NFC South reporter, covering the Buccaneers, Falcons, Panthers and Saints. He is in his 10th season covering the Bucs and the NFL full-time, having spent time at the Tampa Bay Times and The Athletic. You can follow him on Twitter at @gregauman.