Tag: Tom Brady

A Man Who Gets Divorced Loses Leadership Ability: What is wrong with Tom Brady

I haven’t talked about the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in a while because, honestly, the world is at war, and who really cares about NFL football? But this story is about Tom Brady, who almost everyone agrees is the best football player of all time. His marriage, his retirement, and why the Bucs aren’t as good on the field as they are on paper is an interesting study on the impact of good leadership on any culture, whether it be business, entertainment, or politics. What Tom Brady is going through is a good baseline for just how important leadership is to any culture. He has traditionally been the best on a football field not because he is the strongest, fastest, tallest, or most creative, but because he has a way of making the people around him better, which is why he’s been in so many Super Bowls and Championship games and won many of them. And when that leadership isn’t working, it’s obvious why. So with the Bucs at 3 and 3 at the point of this article is not over for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. They are playing in the weak NFC South division, so they are still in first place even though the Bucs should have won close games against Kansas City, Green Bay, and Pittsburg. But they lost those games because they were simply outplayed, and it’s quite clear that the team is distracted by Tom Brady, his retirement status, his marriage trouble, and his general age. It has to be tough to be 45 years old and playing with a bunch of kids who are 25 years old, old enough to be his own kids. And the head coaches are all the same age or even younger. 

What’s different about this year with Tom Brady is that the NFL obviously doesn’t want him around. The media doesn’t either. They have moved on to the Patrick Mahomes types, the Josh Allens, the much younger and mobile quarterbacks who are part of the new story of the NFL. The Bucs have done the woke thing and put people of color in charge of their coaching staff, even though they obviously have problems making decisions. They aren’t the best people for the job; they were put there because of color, although Todd Bowls, the head coach, made great news when he recently dismissed the measurement of color, which gained national attention. Bowls is a great defensive coordinator when he can dominate the other team. But his playcalling is terrible in close games when the other team isn’t intimidated, and that has certainly carried over into this year, where he remains the defensive play caller, and he just can’t stop the other team. Everyone has gotten so used to being lazy on the field and on the sideline because they just expect Tom Brady to get the ball at the end of the game and win it for them that some of these games are just getting out of reach. Tom Brady usually has an opportunity to still win the game for them, but people are happy to let him do most of the work. And that problem comes from leadership. The coaches are lazy; the players reflect the coaches. One thing about leadership that is always obvious, people adapt to the personality of the leader, so when a good leader is present, it’s evident to the world because the culture takes on their personality; when there isn’t good leadership, it’s just as evident for all those reasons. 

And every day, the news is that Tom Brady is getting divorced from his wife, Gisele Bundchen, a person many consider the most beautiful woman in the world. During the Super Bowl year of Tom Brady’s first year in Tampa, she was a tremendous asset. The other players looked at Brady and his wife, their children, Tom’s love of his parents, and his good-guy image as the best in the world, and they played off it. They listened to Tom Brady because they wanted to be like Tom Brady and have what Tom Brady had: good successful life in every way people measure success, money, beauty, ethically, and categorically. But this year, Tom Brady looks like a person like everyone else. Even at press conferences, Brady goes way out of his way to appear just like the other guys, that he’s nothing special and that he continues to play because he wants to be around his teammates. This is to other players who often have to think about whether to tackle at full speed a 300-pound player with their 250-pound bodies at 20 MPH with a head-on collision that will undoubtedly hurt the next day, a weak proposal. While they know, they have a few million dollars in their bank accounts. Why are they going to hit the other player so hard again? Especially since everything is always about Tom Brady?   Unless you have a special coach who can motivate such players, a lackluster effort is almost baked into the problem.

But specifically for other guys, they look at people they follow, and if the leader can’t hold together a marriage, then why should they listen to them about anything? A guy going through a divorce is a loser, no matter how fair that assessment might be. If you can’t hold a family together, why should anybody listen to you about anything? If a woman who knows you in your most vulnerable state, behind the media curtain, isn’t so in love with you that she’ll do anything to stay with you, then there is something wrong, and a locker room will quickly figure that out. And that holds true for everything, not just sports. If a leader can’t lead a family, they certainly can’t lead an organization, a school, or a society. All men know that once a wife leaves a man and is off to Chuckee Cheese with a new one, and a man loses his kids to a stepfather, it’s over. A family is broken beyond repair, the children will grow up with likely problems as a result, and the leadership potential of that man is gone. There is a lot of effort in the world to try to hide personal behavior behind processes, but that is just not how human beings are wired. Tom Brady is the best of all time because he did everything well. His private life was successful, which then carried over into on-field behavior. But this is the problem when you stick around too long, people start thinking of him as just another guy, who has problems just like everyone else, and at that point, the magic is gone forever. This is why I thought it would be good for Brady to stay retired, ride off into the sunset, and let history remember him as the best. But to lose that leadership ability, which he clearly has, especially now that his wife is clearly not with him, the cost is far worse than just lost games. Tom Brady has lost his leadership brand. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers may still win their division. Tom Brady may even win another Super Bowl. But in doing so, he has lost what is most important, his leadership brand. And once a man loses it, it’s nearly impossible to get back. And to the way I think, that isn’t worth another chance at a Super Bowl. 

Rich Hoffman

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How to Find a Leader: Joe Biden is not one

It is one of the most misunderstood concepts of our society.  I am going through the editorial process with a publisher on a book on this topic called The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Still, we need to address the difference between a leader and a politician for our case here today.  Because obviously, most people don’t know the difference.  Every day in the news, somebody talks about Joe Biden as if he’s our “leader,” even Tucker Carlson on Fox News.  There is a treacherous psychological mind trick going on here that is costing us a lot of national bandwidth that we need to straighten out because we are different in America than other places globally, and we need to understand why.  We don’t elect leaders into office in the United States.  We don’t make an effort to be led by titles.  Remember, unlike what everyone tells us, we are not a Democracy; we are a Republic.  And we elect people to represent our views in America.  Not to lead us, leadership is scarce, and when we find them, we like them.  But we can’t limit our scope to always waiting for some leader to emerge before leaving the campfire and exploring the nearest cave the way leader-driven cultures tend to do.  We built our country to assume that leadership would be hard to find and was very rare, so leadership wasn’t needed in the political class.  We just needed representatives to carry out the interests of the people who elected them, which is a vast difference from what we are told. 

As I talk about in my upcoming book, leadership is forged like gold from the massive pressures of the universe.  Not everyone has the stomach or the heart to be a leader.  Typically we don’t see leaders emerging in our political circles because the conditions for making a leader do not exist there.  We see them come about in military life to some extent, we see them in sports, but most of our leadership in America comes about in the business world.  The percentage of authentic leadership is noticeably low; it’s a fraction of the total percentage of an overall population.  For example, Tom Brady is a prominent leader in sports.  He makes his coaching staff better with his leadership and teammates no matter what team he’s on.  Tom Brady manages always to find success.  You can see that type of leadership in CEOs, such as Steve Jobs.  Modern-day Elon Musk has excellent leadership.  It’s not the money he has which exhibits it, but it’s in his long string of successes and how he can communicate complicated vision to many people.  Of course, when we think of leadership, we think of General Patton.  I think of Claire Lee Chennault, who created the great Flying Tigers.  But these are all names unique to the history and within our populations.  They are far from commonplace. 

The health of any culture should always be measured by the number of leaders it produces.  But for that to occur, you have to understand what a leader is, and by calling politicians leaders by their titles, or worthless CEOs who expect to lead by title, then we are kidding ourselves toward the objectives of success, in a healthy culture that proportionally, America is the best globally. We have our Tom Brady types coming out of leisure activities and our Elon Musks in science and industry.  Other countries don’t have those people.  It’s not because the skills aren’t in the population.  But those cultures do not have a means of emerging them from obscurity into change state contributors, just as Indians of the Wild West spent much of their lives walking over gold but having no means to bring it out of the ground. And even if they did get to it, what would they have done with it?  They had no economy to make money.  They had no concept of money, so they never extracted gold for sociological use.  There needs to be a means to bring about the treasures of existence, and if that culture does not develop those means, you will never get to the prize. That is what leadership is; it’s a treasure of human endeavor that can advance a society when it is found and utilized.  But it is not created by silly titles, which is the prevailing belief by those too lazy and ill-equipped to develop a culture that produces leadership.

If we recognized that simple leadership trait, we would eliminate much of the corruption we see in politics currently and in the past and future.  Because we have by default given out leadership designations to people by title and not merit, we have prevented authentic leadership from emerging and improving our lives and circumstances.  Back to Tom Brady, think of all the professional football players we have seen over the years.  But not until Tom Brady came along was the whole leadership package developed into a guy who had taken his football teams to so many Super Bowls and won when the surrounding players were all different, and even the teams were different.  Tom Brady is proof that it’s not teams that win big games; it’s one individual who is a true leader.  Socialist and Communist countries always fail because they have no interest in finding leadership.  They have built their entire societies around collective consensus instead of leadership.  That is undoubtedly the case of our institutions of learning and our government of today in general.  They think leadership comes out of group behavior when it is forged from the pressure of success and failure—through much pain and turmoil and a refusal to take the loss as an answer to living. 

By calling any political person a leader, we are cheapening the word for its true meaning and use.  It is worse than all that it is a general punt by a declining society to be so quick to call worthless people leaders because the culture desires to shift away responsibility for leadership to people with titles instead of hashing out the problems themselves.  They might fail in the task if they did try, but by not trying and giving the responsibility over to a titled person who does not have leadership, but is like Mitch McConnell, a politician in a high office, then a failure shouldn’t come as a surprise.  Mitch McConnell will never be a leader of anybody.  Joe Biden will never be a leader, nor is Vice President Commie Harris.  Skin color can’t make a person a leader.  Bootlicking doesn’t make a leader.  Diversity training won’t make a leader, so globalism will ultimately fail because they seek to suppress leaders in favor of a system that makes politicians by title into positions of authority without earning the right through the pressures of living and becoming the best, thus creating leadership. 

Not understanding leadership has led to many of the problems we see today and destroys the lives of those unable to see leadership for the value it brings.  But make no mistake, just because someone wins an election, it does not make them a leader.  Just because someone gets a promotion, it does not make them magically a leader.  Not even a Super Bowl can do it; in the case of Tom Brady, he has shown that you must win many Super Bowls under many different conditions to show the power of leadership.  But without these tests and high expectations, you get sorry performance and a culture destined for failure.  And that is the danger of calling worthless politicians leaders when they are only haphazard politicians who represent us in politics at best.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior


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Tom Brady’s Invisible Hand: The kind of leadership that Adam Smith wrote about

Everyone who has read at this site for any amount of time knows how much I love the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.  When I need a break from the serious stuff, I do enjoy the NFL product, and specifically I am a big Glazer family fan who owns the team.  Brian Glazer not that long ago sent me personally some nice flags and a kind note which I have displayed here out of respect.   I have always respected their commitment to winning, in having a winning mindset which I of course see as a metaphor for all things that we do in life.  I often say that the games we create in life reflect the nature of our existence and in spite of politics that are seeking to eat the NFL from the inside out, I have great value for the kind of decision making behind the X’s and O’s of professional football, including all the business stuff that goes on with salary caps, union negotiations, and the construction of stadiums to satisfy local market needs.  With that said, how the Glazer family managed to get their team to the first home Super Bowl in Tampa, Florida is amazing by itself, but to lure Tom Brady to helm the quarterback position, and to have the sense to leave him alone and not to micromanage him even with all they invested to make it happen is nothing short of a miracle to me.  In the business world, I would call it all an extreme anomaly.  Yet the Super Bowl for me was one of the greatest games I have ever watched.

I’ve been working on a business theory for quite a long time, I have a book coming out this year on the topic, but when the Buccaneers signed Tom Brady as quarterback my hopes shot up because I understood what the Glazers were thinking, and I knew what Brady was thinking.  As I said in the video above, taken very early in the morning, so the light is very low, if Brady had stayed in New England he would always be known as the creation of Bill Bilichick, the master offensive mind of a team that has won six Super Bowls.  At the end of his career, at least for the last few years anyway, Brady wanted to show that it was he who drove those winning teams.  Nothing against Bilichick but we see this in most organizations, from other sporting events, to business, even within family structures.  Ayn Rand dealt with this problem in her books, who makes who, is it the organization that wins or is it the individual.  Many people would like to say its both, but they would be wrong.  And they would also say that it’s the organization of classic top-down leadership that is in charge of wins and losses.  That is certainly the position of most governments of the world, and most communist leaning corporations.  Yet they always miss the truth. 

I saw Tom Brady going to Tampa as the quarterback as a perfect test case for my thoughts on this matter.  We know winners when we see them, but they are so rare that its hard to make a case study.  The Buccaneers were a 7-9 team last year with pretty much the same players.  They picked up Brady and some other hole fillers this year but give the kind of leadership they had in Tampa, I knew they would let Brady be Brady just as when Trump was Trump as President, great things happened.  It’s a Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi kind of thing, finding the flow of a process and the way that flow is conducive to the humans who interact with it.  A good leader can always find the flow of the people in a process.  Top down management establishes the flow and expects everyone to meet it, and the limits of the process are then limited by the weakest and worst in that process.  A leader like Tom Brady isn’t just about accurate throws and football basics, with him he knows how to get flow out of his fellow players not with a top-down approach where everyone is looking up at him because he’s the greatest of all time, but because he knows how to set goals that everyone can rally behind and believe in.  The most understudied and least talked about regarding Brady’s leadership ability is just how important it has been in setting him apart from everyone else. 

Brady had a chance to unleash that side of himself in Tampa Bay.  That has been in fact what the Glazers have been looking for the entire time I’ve been a fan of the team starting in 1993 when Sam Wyche brought some of the same characteristics to the team way back then.  In Tampa they have experimented with this kind of thing for a very long time which is why I have been a fan of them so intensely.  Its not just about football or the NFL experience, it has been a science experiment for me where I could watch them play around with the leadership formula and measure the results from year to year.  Sometimes it works in bits, sometimes not at all.  But this year was exciting because Trump was president, I was writing a book on the topic, and now my favorite team had made a clear decision to value individualism over the communist concept of individuals come and go, but the team is forever. 

At the end of Super Bowl LV nobody is questioning why Tom Brady was the greatest of all time in his field.  There was no talk about the raw skill of youth beaten by nature the wisdom of age.  Brady wasn’t just the quarterback; he was the coach and cheerleader.  He had the defense playing like there was no tomorrow and the passion on the field showed.  I have seen this passion in many professional activities that I’ve been involved in.  But this was happening on a huge global stage, and it defied the wisdom of everything that institutionalism preaches.  By the time it was all said and done, Brady had done something everyone thought was impossible, and it was impossible not by his age or skill, but by the intellect of the situation.   It was happening outside of conventional logic and was forcing people to deal with prejudices they have had all of their lives and they didn’t have definitions for what they were seeing.  But it was clear to me, and I was thankful for the experience. This wasn’t a lesson on how to move a football down field to score, it was on the very essence of leadership and how it works in the world.  When the same players a year ago with a losing record suddenly are winning the Super Bowl and all that really changed was the acquisition of Tom Brady, there is no other explanation.  A leader can be a leader anywhere.  But an organization can’t be a winning one without such a leader in their midst.  Once the games of life are done, its not so much the score, but in the flow of energy that is unleashed by a great leader that wins and loses in life.  It is Adam Smith’s invisible hand we are talking about, in this case the invisible hand of Tom Brady that made all the players and coaches in the Buccaneer organization just a little bit better, good enough to go from 7-9 a season ago to being unstoppable toward a Super Bowl victory.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior
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Tom Brady is going to Tampa Bay: Lessons in leadership that our government could stand to learn

In spite of the entire country being shut down due to stupid politicians overreacting to an obvious power play by the CDC and World Health Organization to get funding for their mythical universal vaccine that they want to implement by 2025—more on that later—I’ve been having a fantastic week. With everything closed it has given more time to read with less distractions and honestly, I wouldn’t mind if it went on this way forever. If I have a reading light and we lost everything of modern convenience, I wouldn’t notice much. But I do not like having the culture we have built as Americans robbed from us. It’s a punch in the face and it deserves us hitting back. So, it has been fun to learn that Tom Brady has signed with my favorite football team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, which I haven’t talked about in a while because there hasn’t been much to talk about. However, in the realm of leadership the Glazer Family in Tampa continues to show truly what is at the heart of American innovation and optimism. The Buccaneers have not been to a playoff game for a number of years, but its not because the ownership hasn’t been trying. They have went through a number of coaches and players looking for just the right combination to find a winning team and now that they have signed Tom Brady after his two decades with the Patriots and his six Super Bowls with them, the Buccaneers have nearly guaranteed themselves a shot at that final elusive game at their home stadium since the next one will be at Raymond James Stadium. And the way the deal went down and why is something about leadership worth talking about.

The problem with government is that they don’t understand people and human innovation. Even well intended governors in top tier states like Mike DeWine through limited intellectual bandwidth thinks that his top priority as a governor is to save lives. But through his leadership if he mismanages those priorities he could scare everyone to death trying to save them and that is not uncommon in any top political office where they are put there by popular majority opinion rather than the true nature of a skill set. If you can scare people enough and get them to vote for you, then in politics that is a measure of success, but when real leadership is needed, nobody is there to do it because the job doesn’t flush out those traits in people and you end up with a bunch of losers trying to put a cap on life to measure success within those limits—then we end up with a society of losers. I know Trump understands this trait and he is personal friends with Tom Brady and all those guys get what real leadership is, especially in the context of games. Trump didn’t have much of a choice but to go along with this massive CDC, WHO scheme to get funding for their projects. Panic driven politicians will pay them anything they want now, so the mission has been accomplished for those organizations and if Trump resisted during an election year they would have massacred him in the press. So he is using the virus to unite people from both parties which will pretty much guarantee his re-election. It’s going to cost us trillions of dollars, but who’s counting anyway? We must save lives. (LOL) Trump, like Tom Brady has such great leadership that they think there is no surrender so long as there is time on the clock. If Trump gets re-elected, he figures he can fix everything, which is why he’s a winner. And that is likely what attracted Tom Brady to the Buccaneers, a chance to do the same and punch his own ticket as an individual for a return to a Super Bowl with a loaded team looking for that much needed leadership.

The Glazer Family is unlike other NFL team owners in that they don’t stick with a losing formula long. They will make quick and drastic adjustments to get a winning team, which works in every field—not just sports. So, I have been a Tampa Bay fan since the days that Sam Wyche was with the team after he was fired from the Cincinnati Bengals. I have not been a Bengal fan since. I cheer them on because the Bengals are my home town team, but the Mike Brown ownership of the Bengals and that family in general has a loser mindset that has sealed their fate as long as they own the team, so my decision was to put my sentiment in central Florida, a place I consider my second home anyway. The Buccaneers are loaded with talent trying to make a mediocre quarterback that they had there a champion, but the kid just couldn’t do it. Tom Brady can see it, so he has signed to lead the team to one of the most spectacular seasons that the NFL will ever see. The passing attack will be unstoppable with a quarterback as good as Brady. But those conditions weren’t created by Brady, they were created by an ownership trying every day to win. They had all the pieces in place with the payroll to show for it, but a quarterback. Now they have the best that there has ever been and anybody would have to admire that effort.

As we look around at a world closing itself off from a hidden virus, afraid of their own shadows, it was refreshing to hear from the real world and culture of America when there wasn’t any other positive news. And as bad as things have been, I enjoyed tremendously getting this news. It has been such a let down to see that the mighty American economy could be switched off so easily over a fear provoked by health officials who are always looking for money and attention that it has ground our culture to a stop and given our enemies the benefit of a laugh. I have watched the Buccaneers struggle through many seasons where they entered it with optimism and ended in failure but what I always love about them, and why I have stuck with them for so long is that they always keep trying and are perpetually on the hunt for great leadership. And that’s why they were willing to do whatever they had to do to acquire Tom Brady. In politics we have elections that allow us to look for great leadership and when we have had it, the established order of losers have attacked it with everything they have. And what’s depressing about this China Virus scare is that we have allowed it to even ruin our elections. That’s why this news about Tom Brady going to my favorite team was so optimistic. Its good to see out there that some people still get it, Brady gets it, the team gets it, and the ownership in Tampa gets it. And maybe when other people see all these elements coming together they might learn something about having a winning attitude, even when failure and loss is the only thing they experience. There is a lot of merit in continuing to try until you do get it right and after America comes out of this fake virus scare, they’ll learn a few things by watching Tom Brady pick a franchise up on his back and carry it to a victorious season. The same kind of sentiment can be done in politics if only people had the courage to do it.

Rich Hoffman

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The Best Superbowl in History: Making America Great Again starting with football and Lady Gaga

https://twitter.com/overmanwarrior/status/828755449201774593

I wasn’t particularly looking forward to Superbowl 51 (LI) because the Patriots were not my favorite team, especially after (deflategate) and their long run as a dominate team. Additionally, I’m not a Lady Gaga fan so I didn’t want to see her halftime show.  I didn’t want the preachy progressive commercials—so I didn’t have high expectations for the game.  However, I was explaining the psychological meaning of the Superbowl games to American culture with people from other counties last week, because they were mystified by the wall to wall coverage of the game they were seeing on television.  I explained to them that American football was a special game specific to our culture and that the Superbowl in America was like a holiday celebrating the great gifts of capitalism.  Even the altruistic aspects of the various charities that the NFL supports are direct derivatives of the excesses produced by capitalism for which football is so symbolic.  With that in mind I watched the game with just a little bit of renewed interest because Tom Brady and the owner and coach of the New England Patriots were personal friends of Donald Trump.  I thought it would be nice if the Patriots won since Tom Brady has shown that he’d often do anything to win even if it sometimes crossed the line—much like Trump.  The spirit of winning was important, and I thought it would be a good thing if the Patriots won in the same year that Trump won the presidency so from that perspective, I was interested.

After the late score in the fourth quarter after a 2-point conversion my wife asked me what the odds were of closing the 8-point gap between the Patriots who had essentially been written off in the game and the Falcons who had a 25-point lead at halftime.   I mean it was 28 to 9 with two minutes left in the third quarter—so like I told her, it was unlikely that the Patriots would be able to get the ball back and drive down the field over 90 yards with only a few minutes left on the clock—score a touchdown and get another two-point conversion within the same quarter.  The odds were just too overwhelming.  Yet in the back of my mind I thought of the type of people who win a lot—who always feel that as long as there is breath in their lungs, they have a chance.  I know I’m like that, but I don’t meet many people who are—who never feel they are down and out.  The last time I’ve seen it outside of some situations in my family was the night before the Trump win when the then presidential candidate went to Michigan at 1 am to hit one more rally—which ironically pushed him through the Blue Wall of politics—and gave him the win in within the electoral college.

Tom Brady and Bill Belichick looked like there was all the time in the world.  Brady never looked frazzled, never looked desperate, never looked like the game was in jeopardy.  Quietly Brady amassed an incredible 466 yards through the air most of it in the fourth quarter forcing the game into the first overtime Superbowl in the history of the game.  Brady and company won the coin toss and proceeded to march down the field and score a touchdown which ended the game.  And with Brady’s hands on the ball in overtime it just always felt like the Patriots were going to win because the best quarterback in history has that kind of feel—like Joe Montana used to have as a field presence.  It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in sports—and a metaphor for many things that are distinctly American.

Tom Brady had a lot of reasons to blame the NFL and free agency for why he could have lost and never had to apologize for it. After all, Brady started the season with a four-game suspension for deflategate.  There were no “big receivers” on the Patriots team—like a Randy Moss from the past, or the great Julio Jones on the Falcons sideline.  The big name tight-end on the Patriots team was not able to play the game and the running game with one of my favorite players from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, LeGarrette Blount, was struggling and going nowhere.  All Brady had was a bunch of undersized receivers who were scrappy, aggressive, and playing way above their head.  Julian Edelman is only like 5’ 10” and he was playing like he was 6’ 5” with a 40” vertical leap.  He amazingly out-worked most of the Falcons secondary to get open for Brady to hit with laser blasts that were simply amazing—and he did it with his head down into a grinding fashion and without a lot of fanfare.  It was a very impressive performance that I never expected to come out so positively.  Yet it did by working with what he had around him.  It was pretty amazing.

But before all that I was enjoying the Americana aspects of the Superbowl festivities and was greatly relieved to see that the Lady Gaga Halftime Show was actually really good. She may have supported Hillary Clinton and works toward progressive causes—she may actually be one of those Spirit Cooking people that John Podesta likes so much—but any woman who jumps into a stadium after singing a song on top of the roof is good in my book.  She was actually fearless in a way I haven’t seen since Michael Jackson performed in a Superbowl, but these stunts that Lady GaGa performed were actually dangerous, especially considering that she was going into full choreography once she hit the stage below.  It was an amazing performance that I was worried would be filled with political anti-Trump messages—which were there in small degrees, but not enough to matter.

She did a classy, tasteful show that indicated that this particular Superbowl had a really uniting factor to it which defined much what I had told my foreign guests.  I know the Falcon fans are upset, but overall, they played in one of the greatest games in sports history.  And the best that entertainment could put forward performed under the sponsorship of companies thriving under our capitalist system and the best players in football with the best coaching and ownership staffs won.  So it was a great experience.  A real treat in the middle of winter setting off a continuation of the Trump election victory—because after that game, it felt fun to be an American.  The conclusion of that game is what it now feels like to be an American again—and that’s not a bad thing.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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