Lincicome: With Brady retired, only a matter of time before future GOAT surfaces

Everything weighs the same in a celebrated life, grief and glory. And yet the question persists, who is the Greatest of All Time?

It might have been Muhammad Ali who shouted "I am!" first, or at least the loudest, so the question has lingered and is always addressed when a great athlete retires.

Most can slip away, unmissed until someone looks around and asks, "Whatever happened to Jake Whatizname?"

This was never going to be the case for Tom Brady, of whom we have not heard the last. His noise was too loud to fade quickly, though it will.

Modesty should preclude an athlete from admitting to being the Greatest of All Time, never mind accepting the rudest of acronyms, GOAT, so familiar now it may have replaced the original accusation of being an embarrassing failure.

Looking for humility in greatness is like hunting for a coin on the floor of a movie theater, not worth the search nor the surprise.

Save for a few self-starters, like Ali or Usain Bolt, distinction is earned, not announced. Still, Michael Jordan would not disagree with anyone calling him the GOAT, though claims otherwise persist.

Clearly, Michael Phelps would not quarrel and would wear all his medals if anyone had doubts, and I'm guessing Serena Williams would not disagree either, nor Tiger Woods, only one of them being correct.

"All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street people say, 'There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.' " This quote is attributed to Ted Williams, and if he didn't say it, he surely thought it.

It is a place so very few of us live, at the very top, a place Brady lived for nearly all of this century. He will go on living, one assumes, and at some point he will be less GOAT than old goat telling tales of what used to be.

That's the adhesive of sports to generations, each era finding its own heroes, each convinced that this time, their time, is the best time and today's heroes are better than yesterday's.

Maybe the acronym should be GOOT, Greatest of Our Time, or maybe GOMT, Greatest of My Time, and then we could get Walter Payton into the mix, or Andre Dawson, the greatest ballplayer I ever saw, or Julius Erving, the pre-Jordan who only needed a jump shot to be a GOAT. Alas, there is no place for Oscar Robertson, who may have been better than both of them.

Will there ever be a better quarterback than Brady? Of course, there will be. Will another win seven Super Bowls as did Brady? Ah, maybe not. Will another be as productive at age 44 as was Brady? Very doubtful.

Brady leaves football with too many accomplishments to imagine another like him, but it will happen. Not so long ago the GOAT designation, at least for quarterbacks, belonged to Joe Montana. Every coach wanted another Montana and offenses were designed to find one.

From here, to find another Brady, it will be the human that needs to be designed, not the scheme, for Brady was the reason for everything, too smart, too strong, too tough, a leader and a doer.

And yet I recall covering a Rose Bowl where Brady could not beat out Brian Griese to start for Michigan. On that day the story was Washington State quarterback Ryan Leaf, who called his own news conference to announce his future greatness, GBE, the Greatest Bust Ever.

So now, Brady has his story and Griese and Leaf have theirs and we have the ongoing discussion of greatness.

Given the recent anointing of baseball's honorees - from Big Papi to Minnie Minoso, neither of whom matches the greatness required to join this discussion - we notice without regret the passing of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens from the Hall of Fame ballot into shadow land.

Bonds and Clemens were clearly the greatest players of their time, GPOTT, and if their time and achievements were extended and muddied by ego and deceit, well, they were never going to be Willie Mays or Sandy Koufax anyhow.

GOAT Wayne Gretzky once said sports endings are only passages, a moving on, not a passing on. This does not include the occasional finish to bullfights, auto racing and tightrope walking, of course.