Tom brady sisters

SAN MATEO, Calif. - Before he won Super Bowls, before he dated supermodels and before he was stalked by paparazzi, Tom Brady was just "Tommy," a regular kid from the neighborhood.

He collected baseball cards by the boxful, played golf with his dad on Sunday mornings, served as an altar boy in the local parish and demonstrated his arm strength from the back of his mother's Volkswagen van, flinging newspapers to the neatly manicured lawns in this hilly suburb of San Francisco.

Brady was well-scrubbed and bright, a taller version of Kevin Arnold from the old TV show, "The Wonder Years" - sans the New York Jets jacket, of course. He didn't start playing football until the ninth grade, and he wasn't good enough to start at quarterback on a team that finished 0-8 and didn't score a touchdown.

Most of the people in Brady's life thought his best sport was baseball, but he practically willed himself into a football career. Even now, 13 years after he graduated from Junipero Serra High School, an all-boys Catholic school shoe-horned into one of San Mateo's upper middle-class neighborhoods, that is how they remember their Tommy.

Driven. Focused. Quietly confident. Well, quiet most of the time, anyway. "I'll never forget this one time, ninth grade, this paper he wrote for school," Maureen Brady-Timmons, the oldest of Brady's three elder sisters, says from her living room on Portola Drive - a Randy Moss fly pattern from their parents' home. "Us girls, we were all pretty good in sports, always in the newspaper. Tommy always used to be known as 'Maureen Brady's little brother' or 'The Little Brady.'

"So he writes a paper, saying one day he wants us to be known as Tom Brady's sisters. He wrote, 'One day, I'm going to be a household name.' That's what he told my mom: 'One day I'm going to be a household name.' "

They all laughed. As much as they loved and supported little Tommy, they never expected it would turn out like this:

Three Super Bowl championships, with a chance for a fourth a week from Sunday when the Patriots face the Giants. Two Super Bowl MVPs. The reigning league MVP. Magazine covers. Endorsements. Gisele Bundchen.

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