Patriots
The Patriots didn’t want to base the statue on a singular play from Brady’s career, seeking to “embody his life’s work.”
There were several iconic moments from Tom Brady’s Patriots career that could’ve been immortalized in statue form. However, sculptor Jeff Buccacio opted to take a different route in making Brady’s statue.
The statue of Brady, which was unveiled outside of Gillette Stadium on Friday night, shows him raising his right fist in the air while holding his Patriots helmet in his left hand. Even though the statue wasn’t based on an iconic moment from his career, Buccacio sculpted the statue based on an image from one of Brady’s final seasons with the Patriots.
“This was one of the ones that was sort of one of the favorites,” Buccacio said in a video released by the Patriots on how the statue of Brady was made, showing an image of the quarterback raising his first and with his helmet off.
That image was one of roughly 10 “signature” poses of Brady that the Patriots sent to Buccacio to sculpt the statue from, according to Patriots senior vice president of marketing Ali Towle. Towle didn’t share what the other images were, but the video alluded to images of Brady’s on-field entrance from warmups and hoisting the Lombardi Trophy after their Super Bowl LI win being among the candidates.
Neither of those images, nor the image the Patriots opted to base the statue on, was of Brady passing a ball. That was by design.
“Another thing we did was look at some of the other football statues that exist out there in the world and wanted to make sure that this was different from those,” Towle said. “Obviously, with the quarterback, the tradition was a passing motion. We didn’t want to do that.”
Buccacio also received the directive to avoid making the statue of Brady in a game action pose.
“The way it was expressed to me, they wanted him to feel sort of stoic and just after victory,” Buccacio said. “Sort of exhausted, but still standing tall and proud.”
In a separate interview with MassLive’s Matt Vatour, Buccacio said the Patriots wanted “something timeless” and “all-encompassing of the legacy of Tom Brady, not one specific moment.”
“We have however many years of images of Tom Brady, and even more than that, so many memorable images of Tom Brady — six Super Bowls, AFC Championship Games,” Patriots director of brand identity and design Dwight Darian said in the video. “There was no one play that we could really single out from Brady’s career that could really embody his life’s work.”
Eventually, Buccacio, Towle, and others presented the image they wanted to base the Brady statue on to Patriots owner Robert Kraft and president Jonathan Kraft before sculpting began.
“We all gravitated towards this sort of victorious pose and this was the inspiration shot we gravitated towards for the presentation,” Towle said, pointing to the previously mentioned image of Brady with his helmet off and right fist in the air.
When Buccacio began sculpting the Brady statue, he said he wanted to take the pose from the image they basing it on and “give it a bit more grace.”
“We wanted it to be emotion, but we also wanted it to stand as a piece of artwork by itself,” Buccacio said.
Buccacio, a lifelong Patriots fan and a native of Natick, added in his comments to Vatour that he listened to Brady’s podcast and old interviews he gave in order to help personalize the statue as Buccacio Sculpture Services spent over 20,000 hours to create it.
“In his podcast, he talked about himself as a man, what he deals with, how he grows. How he views his life on and off the field,” Buccacio told Vatour. “As the work evolved, that’s what I was trying to evoke out of the piece. Not just a football player, but the man that he is.”
Buccacio and his team presented a three-foot version of the Brady statue to the Kraft family in December 2023.
“I think the figure is pretty special,” Robert Kraft said in the video of him seeing the three-foot statue for the first time. “We always like things perfect, whatever that is to us, and I think it really has the makings of something tremendous.”
The final product wound up being a 12-foot statue of Brady, with a base that’s five feet tall to make it 17 feet in total height, commemorating the 17 AFC East titles he won. The statue was made of 12,300 pounds of bronze. The figure weighs 1,800 pounds, and the granite base is 10,500 pounds. In total, it weighs around 6.15 tons. The base is also hexagonal, with each side paying tribute to Brady’s six Super Bowl wins with the Patriots.
“More than the record and rings, Tom gave us moments that felt timeless,” Robert Kraft said during Friday’s ceremony. ” Sundays became sacred. Families gathered. Generations shared together. Tom and the Patriots brought millions of people together and brought great pride to Patriot Nation.
“Tommy, you have not only etched your name in Patriots history, you have etched it in all of our hearts and now your likeness will forever stand tall here at Gillette Stadium just like you did.”
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
