Former Buccaneers teammate shares touching Tom Brady tribute

Recently retired tight end and current media personality Kyle Rudolph shared a touching tribute to Tom Brady after the two were teammates with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers during the 2022 NFL season. 

"The way he treated the Glazer family [Bucs owners] is exactly the way he treated the janitor at 6:30 at night when he and maybe one or two other guys were the last players in the building," Rudolph said about Brady while speaking with NBC Sports' Peter King. "Second, the way he treated his teammates. Tom had an empty locker next to him. I would look over there and every day, guys would put helmets, jerseys, pictures, footballs, all the stuff they wanted Tom to sign for them. There’d be notes on the stuff, a post-it note on a football—'Sign this for Jimmy, it’s his birthday.' At the end of the day, almost every day, he’d sit there and sign everything."

King's piece went public less than 24 hours after the New England Patriots honored Brady before and during what became Sunday's 25-20 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles. Brady guided the Patriots to six Super Bowl championships from 2000 through the 2019 season before he signed with the Buccaneers as a free agent in March 2020, and he then helped Tampa Bay win Super Bowl LV in February 2021.

Rudolph noted that Brady "had the right to sometimes be an a------" last season due to the fact that the future Hall of Famer was dealing with his divorce from Gisele Bündchen after 13 years of marriage that the couple announced in October. Instead, Rudolph insisted Brady "was such a great teammate" throughout a campaign that ended with a 31-14 wild-card playoff loss to the Dallas Cowboys.

Rudolph explained how much it means to him that he caught the final regular-season touchdown pass ever tossed by Brady during the Week 18 game at the Atlanta Falcons even though the two-time Pro Bowl selection spent much of the campaign playing scout team. 

"The most amazing thing to me was, with all the negativity swirling around his life outside of football, he never carried it into the building," Rudolph added about Brady. "Always positive. I didn’t think it’d be possible when I walked into the team to be more impressed with Tom. But I was." 

Some suggested as far back as last fall that Brady was a distraction for the 2022 Buccaneers due to off-the-field matters that first impacted the team when TB12 took an 11-day break away from the organization during the preseason. Rudolph didn't directly say so, but it's clear he disagrees with such takes.