SportsTalk: Lars Anderson on BRADY

Event Details

New York Times bestselling author and former Sports Illustrated journalist Lars Anderson speaks with Seth Wickersham of ESPN about his new book Brady: An American Story and the Price of Greatness.

“This book is what happens when one of the greatest sports writers of our time steps up to chronicle one of the icons in American sports. Lars Anderson could write about a pee-wee football game and make it a beautiful read; imagine what happens when he turns his talents to Tom Brady. To say this is a rich, compelling read doesn’t do it justice. For those of us who have always wanted more of the story behind THE quarterback, this is it.”
—Rick Bragg, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist

About the Book

Based on years of in-depth reporting and sources from every corner of his life, Brady is the definitive biography of the life, career, and retirement of one of football’s most legendary figures, Tom Brady.

Anderson plunges into Tom Brady’s childhood to discover the origins of what Brady later described as his “sickness”: his category-five obsession with the game. The obsession dictated every choice Brady made, from what foods he ate to how he managed his day-to-day schedule to how he viewed his role as father to his three children and husband to supermodel Gisele Bündchen.

From more than 350 original interviews with people who know the quarterback on and off the field, Anderson paints a detailed psychological portrait of Tom Brady, a self-described loner whose life is defined by discipline, resilience, a fascination with preparation, an intolerance for wasted time, and a relentless pursuit of the extraordinary. What he finds is a man riddled with contradiction, defined by both a prolific career of unmatched success on the field and the agonizing cost of greatness in his personal life.

Brady is a comprehensive view of the life of the most accomplished player in the history of America’s game. Anderson digs deep behind the headlines to provide a richly detailed answer to one of the most vexing questions in sports: Who, really, is Tom Brady?

About the Author

Lars Anderson is a New York Times bestselling author of twelve books, including The Storm and the Tide and The Mannings. Five of his books have been optioned for movies.

A twenty-year veteran of Sports Illustrated, Anderson wrote more than two dozen cover stories for the magazine. He has been a senior writer at Bleacher Report, which published his 2017 story “The Death of a Teenage Quarterback,” winner of the Associated Press Sports Editors award for the nation’s top feature. His work has appeared in the Best American Sports Writing series, and in 2025, the University of Alabama honored Anderson with the Clarence E. Cason Award in Nonfiction Writing, the school’s top literary honor, which has been given to twenty-six past winners of the Pulitzer Prize.

A senior instructor at Alabama in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media, Anderson earned his master’s degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with his children, Lincoln, Autumn, and Farrah.

About the Moderator

Seth Wickersham is a senior writer at ESPN and the author of two instant New York Times bestsellers, American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback and It’s Better to Be Feared: The New England Patriots Dynasty and the Pursuit of Greatness. Focusing primarily on long-form enterprise and investigative work on the National Football League, Wickersham has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting, and his stories have been anthologized in The Best American Magazine Writing, The Best American Sports Writing, and Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists, among others. It’s Better to Be Feared was named Nonfiction Book of the Year by Sports Illustrated and Best Sports Book by the National Sports Media Association. American Kings was named a Best Book of 2025 by the Boston Globe and NPR. A collection of his ESPN work, Be on That Hill, was published in the fall of 2026. He lives in Connecticut with his family.