Four years ago in the Patriots locker room, Tom Brady was in the middle of a purposeful walk from his locker to the far door in the direction of the team’s meeting rooms when I mentioned I had to share a story one of these days.

Brady looked too busy at the moment, so I just wanted to put in on his radar. That’s when he stopped, turned around and said, “OK, how ’bout now?” I explained it might take a few minutes, but he was eager to hear it.

I’d never before mentioned this to Brady, but he casually knew my father, who was the bar manager at Abe & Louie’s in Boston for about 15 years. Brady had been there a number of times over the years, almost always uneventfully, but this story was about the one time he duped many of his Patriots teammates.

After the Patriots won Super Bowl XXXVI against the Rams, they held their annual rookie party in the private room at Abe & Louie’s. For anyone who doesn’t know, the party is the rookies’ rite of passage, as the ones with the biggest contracts pick up the tab for a night out with the veterans. This was Richard Seymour’s year.

At some point on their way to racking up a $30,000 bill, someone asked for the most expensive drink on the menu, which turned out to be a $375 glass of a cognac called Hennessey Timeless. When it’s your money, you sip it. When it’s a party on someone else’s dime, the rounds of shots add up, over and over and over again.

My father, Joe, was running the party, and Brady pulled him to the side with a request when the shots started flowing. Every time they ordered a round, Brady asked my father to secretly fill his glass with water. He’d pay for the cognac if necessary, but he couldn’t go shot for shot with the linemen all night.

At this point, Brady was cracking up in the middle of the locker room, and a handful of teammates joined the audience. He knew I uncovered one of his go-to moves.

What he didn’t know was the next part of the story.

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