More than a dozen executives, coaches and scouts huddled in the Giants Stadium draft room as a fateful decision approached. This was April 16, 2000, and the Giants were seriously considering a prospect from Michigan with the 177th-overall pick.
Only one of those scouts, Raymond “Whitey” Walsh Jr., thought his team was focused on the wrong prospect from Michigan. Walsh had been evaluating players for more than a quarter century, and his reputation preceded him. He was honest, direct and precise in his reports, and his verbal summations were known to be free of BS. Walsh had a dependable eye, and he quietly earned his colleagues’ attention and respect.
He was a man who ordinarily would be listened to when, in the sixth round, he told the Giants to draft Thomas Edward Patrick Brady Jr. with that 177th pick. In fact, Walsh had instructed his team to draft Brady in the fourth round, with selection No. 105, and again in the fifth round, with selection No. 140. He thought it made sense in the later rounds to gamble on the game’s most critical position, and he really liked Brady even before the quarterback overcame two 14-point deficits and threw for 369 yards and four touchdowns in Michigan’s Orange Bowl victory over Alabama.
“I thought he had something,” Walsh recalls. “I thought he could help us.
“But nobody in the room had anything to say about Brady.”
Now 79, Walsh is wearing dark-rimmed glasses and an argyle cardigan while sitting at his dining room table in the same New Jersey home he bought as a starter in 1975, three years after he married Judy, his former airline co-worker at JFK. A large American flag hangs near their driveway. Walsh is an Army veteran who takes 45-minute walks to stay in military shape, and he’s a passionate football fan who still emails Giants GM Dave Gettleman a couple of suggestions before each draft.
Yes, he will be watching his Giants play Brady, a seven-time Super Bowl winner, and the defending champion Buccaneers on Monday night. And yes, Walsh will be flashing back to the day he could have forever changed pro football and made Brady as big a sports star as New York has ever seen.
“Every time I watch Brady I think the same thing,” Walsh says.
“I feel exonerated,” he adds through a smile.
Man, does he ever have the perfect name for a wildly fascinating tale. Whitey Walsh has the sound of an old-school Boston mobster or an old-school New York scout, and he was very much the latter. As a 10 year old, Walsh was given his nickname by a friend who was a fan of Giants first baseman Whitey Lockman. It stuck.
Whitey Walsh was 6 years old when his father, Ray, a front-office man under Fordham classmate Wellington Mara, started taking him to Giants games at the Polo Grounds and inviting him to spend Saturdays at the team headquarters on West 42nd Street. Ray Walsh became traveling secretary around 1950, and then office manager five years later, while Mara ran football operations. In 1956, Walsh’s teenage son was appointed ballboy for the Giants’ training camp in Vermont. Whitey spent a lot of days hanging out with Sam Huff in the rookie’s dorm room.
Whitey was a Catholic school kid at Archbishop Stepinac in White Plains, and then at Fordham, where he studied Inter-American Relations and hoped he might land a job at the United Nations. He ended up at United Airlines instead — after his time in the Army — and spent eight years at JFK using his even-tempered disposition to calm aggrieved passengers. In 1973, his father told him about a low-level position in Giants personnel, a job pushing papers. Whitey took it, and six months later was promoted after a team scout had suffered a heart attack. Walsh then spent nearly four decades with the Giants proving he was far more than the beneficiary of his old man’s clout.
Over the years he scouted and recommended some slam-dunk prospects (Lawrence Taylor) and some riskier propositions (Brandon Jacobs, Ahmad Bradshaw) who helped the Giants win championships. Walsh was also in on the entire offensive line (David Diehl, Rich Seubert, Shaun O’Hara, Chris Snee and Kareem McKenzie) that would help author the franchise’s signature story — the Super Bowl XLII triumph over the 18-0 Patriots, the first of Eli Manning’s two victories over a quarterback Walsh first saw almost accidentally in the fall of 1999, on a trip to Ann Arbor to see more highly regarded teammates.
Walsh carried with him a list of Michigan players divided into two camps — serious prospects, and others considered “you-alls.” They were the leftovers, the additional seniors worth no more than a cursory glance. “A lot of scouts were ex-coaches, and that’s what they used to say about [the non-star players], ‘You all guys come over here,’ ” Walsh recalls. “So that was our nickname for them.”
Tom Brady was lumped in with the “you-alls.”
Michigan was not a make-yourself-at-home kind of place for NFL scouts, so Walsh was not allowed to watch practice on his visit. He was given some game tape and some time in the school’s film room (but not much), and he decided to watch a few throws from the tall, skinny, fifth-year senior who was doing his damnedest to hold off the wonderboy underclassman, Drew Henson, a Yankees draft pick who had spent his summer playing third base in the Florida State League. A few Brady throws turned into a few more, and suddenly the scout was hooked.
“He kept making play after play, and he was so accurate,” Walsh recalls. “He knew what he wanted to do, and he was very careful to throw to the right guy. It would’ve been nice to go to practice to find out if he could throw the out-cut, because if that stays in the air too long, that goes the other way. But when I wrote my report, I included Brady with the prospects.”
Walsh kept an eye on him throughout the ’99 season, as he outperformed his coach’s unique rotation — Lloyd Carr would start Brady in the first quarter, play Henson in the second, and then make a halftime call on the rest of the game — and ultimately kept Henson on the bench. In a late-season scouts meeting, Walsh first told Giants GM Ernie Accorsi and player personnel director Tom Boisture that he’d given Brady a mid-to-late round grade.
At the combine in Indianapolis, where Brady famously looked and ran like a middle-aged salesman, Walsh was disappointed in the extra 15 pounds the quarterback had added since his season ended. “It wasn’t good weight,” the scout remembers. “It was sloppy weight. He had no muscle definition and he was soft, but he threw the ball good.”
Walsh again spoke about Brady’s accuracy and poise at the team’s pre-draft meeting in Giants Stadium. “I said what I said and nobody cared,” Walsh recalls. “They were waiting for backup from some other scout in the room that saw him, and nobody did. … I thought someone might say, ‘Oh yeah, he was great in the Orange Bowl,’ but nobody said anything. Dead silence.”
The Giants had a good starting quarterback in Kerry Collins, who would lead them to the Super Bowl. Jason Garrett was the veteran backup. Walsh remembers Boisture reached for the card carrying Brady’s name in the meeting. “It was, ‘OK, thanks Whitey,’ and they put him up on the board, about seven quarterbacks down,” Walsh says. “He put him almost with the ‘you-alls.’”
On that momentous second day of the draft, Walsh was determined to take one more run at it. He wasn’t the only scout or coach who believed in Brady. Baltimore offensive coordinator Matt Cavanaugh, now a Jets assistant, would advise the Ravens to pick him in the third round (they instead drafted Louisville’s Chris Redman) and New England quarterbacks coach Dick Rehbein would press Bill Belichick to take him in the middle rounds, too.
“I thought he had something. I thought he could help us. But nobody in the room had anything to say about Brady.”
Whitey Walsh on the 2000 NFL draft
And yet Brady was still there in the fourth round for the Giants, a 7-9 team with plenty of holes to fill. The executive running the room, Accorsi, knew a winning quarterback when he saw one. He grew up in the league around Johnny Unitas, and drafted John Elway and Bernie Kosar. In later years, Accorsi would make the big draft-day move for Manning.
“But we were all asleep on Brady,” Accorsi says. “And for the life of me I can’t figure that one out. Brady was at Michigan, not at Augustana. What were we doing? Where were we on this guy?”
One Giants evaluator was all over him. He was right there in the draft room, speaking up for Brady, when the Giants took Penn State linebacker Brandon Short in the fourth round, and Nebraska cornerback Ralph Brown in the fifth. In the sixth round, certain his employer had nothing to lose, Walsh delivered what would be his final appeal. Accorsi confirms that the scout was “very forceful” in his Brady bid; Walsh confirms that the GM was a more enthusiastic and open-minded listener than his predecessor George Young. “I got shot down again anyway,” the scout says. The Giants selected Brady’s teammate, linebacker Dhani Jones.
“And I respected Whitey,” Accorsi says. “He had great instincts, and it wasn’t complicated. You ask, ‘Can this guy help us or not?’ and with Whitey it was yes or no. I’d wait for guys to play four or five years in the league, and then go back and look at what our scouting reports said on them. Whitey’s held up.”
The night that New England selected Brady with the 199th-overall pick, Walsh headed home and told his wife Judy, “I think we might have missed on somebody today.” More than two decades later, 253 of the 254 players chosen in the 2000 draft are no longer active in the NFL. The last man standing is now preparing to face the Giants as arguably the greatest football player of all time.
Brady and Walsh have never met, though they were under the same roof at the 2000 combine when the scout was running the vertical-leap test. Brady jumped 24.5 inches — a dreadful mark beaten by every offensive lineman but three — and Walsh was smart enough not to care.
He would retire in 2011, ending a distinguished football life he started by traveling with his own 30-pound, 16-mm projector. Walsh wrote thousands upon thousands of reports as a scout and the team’s director of research and development. “And yet people still remind me, ‘You’re the one who found Brady,’ ” Walsh says all these years later. “I say, ‘I didn’t find him, he was at Michigan.’ But his career makes you wonder how we would have done if we had him on our team.”
Whitey Walsh was on site when his Giants beat Brady in two Super Bowls, ultimately keeping his ring count at seven instead of nine. Monday night, the scout will be watching in his suburban starter house with his wife of nearly 50 years. Whitey will be rooting for his old team to defeat his would-be quarterback, and thinking long and hard about what might have been.