The Patriots won the Super Bowl again (hooray, whatever). As the celebrations for the lowest-scoring title game in this era of the league’s history began, an inescapable scrum of photographers, security personnel, and CBS’s Tracy Wolfson immediately began to surround Tom Brady as he celebrated with teammates and coaches. Among his congratulators was Patriots owner Robert Kraft who got, let’s say, intimately close to Brady. This being a sports website, I decided, naturally, to go to the tape.
But how close did the child-kissing quarterback come to planting a big ol’ smooch on Kraft’s 77-year-old lips in jubilation of a sixth title? Let’s try and enhance the clip to see if we can get a closer look.
Hmm. Still not entirely clear there either, but it looked like it had all of the makings of an appropriate setting to kiss. The two quite close to each other physically, and Brady made some cute forehead-to-forehead contact with his team’s owner—often a precursor to a dramatic kiss. There was some light tussling of the hair on Brady’s part before Kraft appears to pull away a little, as if he knows that something is coming.
But, once the quarterback removed his hand from the owner’s hair, Kraft immediately leaned in toward Brady as if he was craving the contact that had just left him. There was no smooching sound, but as soon as the two got to the peak of their closeness, a microphone popped right at the moment they would have most likely kissed—which at least gave the illusion that something happened.
But even beyond the game tape, there’s some outside context to consider here. On the one hand, there’s history of Brady taking his lip-kissing to debatably unconventional lengths and surely winning a Super Bowl doesn’t exactly lose its luster—even after all these damn years—so emotions are probably running high for him. On the other hand, there are probably about a million different reasons why you wouldn’t want to kiss Kraft for any reason, regardless of the situation.
We’ll just leave you with this uncomfortably-close still of the two’s embrace and let you decide.