Fans of 31 NFL teams deride Tom Brady as a “pretty boy.” A courtroom sketch artist does not agree.
New York City scribbler Jane Rosenberg saw Brady on Wednesday as a Cro-Magnon man, less gridiron Superman than courtroom Bizarro. Her pictures from the Deflategate hearing in a Manhattan federal courthouse do not paint a pretty picture. The Super Bowl MVP looks like the kind of man who abducts rather than marries a supermodel.
If he’s not guilty of deflating footballs, the sketchy man in the sketch appears guilty of something. Perhaps the destroyed cell phone hides where the bodies are buried.
Is the picture of Tom Brady really a picture of Dorian Gray, showing the dark soul beneath the shining package that surrounds? Like Picasso, Jane Rosenberg inspires a multitude of interpretations. That’s what good artists do. That’s not what court artists do.
The four-time Super Bowl-winner routinely scares opponents. His portrait now scares small children. He’s still Hollywood, but in a Wes Craven kind of way. It’s a picture fans have never seen on Sunday afternoons. But it has surely appeared Saturday nights on America’s Most Wanted.
“What do you mean?” Rosenberg responded to a Boston Herald question about her strange sketches. “I don’t try to be different. I try to draw what I see. So that’s what I did.”
Jets fan?
Should Judge Richard Berman see what Jane Rosenberg sees, a permanent cell, not a four-game suspension, awaits #12.