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Tom Brady will be a first-ballot National Football League Hall of Famer, but he could’ve been a Canadian icon.
At Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, the biggest draw these days is its fitness facility. Major League Baseball’s Montreal Expos left nearly 20 years ago to become the Washington Nationals, and their mascot Youppi has been with hockey’s Montreal Canadiens (18 years) almost as long as he was with the Expos (25).
Could one man have prevented that from happening?
The active imaginations at Fanatics-owned Topps and their creative partners Flower Shop think that Brady—the Expos’ 18th round draft pick as a catcher in 1995, who chose football over baseball and was the Expos’ last active draft pick when he retired from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers last year—could’ve been that guy.
The alternate reality Topps’ Bowman Draft series envisions is glorious: Brady hits nearly 600 home runs over the course of his career, convinces former Expos sluggers and future baseball Hall of Famers Larry Walker and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. to stay with him, and even gets former Expos ace Pedro Martinez to similarly shun Boston for the chilly confines of Quebec.
Yes, there’s still an active movement to bring the Expos back to Montreal and a costly effort to get Olympic Stadium’s roof into baseball shape, but this Topps ad is dream fuel.
It has Brady selling cars in the Montreal metro, “Tommy” as a topping for poutine, the greatest baseball comeback of all time against the Atlanta Braves and, of course, three MVPs and seven World Series titles… not to mention two losses to Eli Manning and his San Francisco Giants.
