To the uninitiated, which let’s face it is most of Britain, American football is a bit like rugby – only more headbangingly brutal and bewilderingly complex. Nevertheless, Super Bowl Sunday is a huge pop-cultural event, watched by millions around the world, us Brits included.
If you're the kind of person who tunes in for the halftime show, but doesn't know the difference between a wide receiver and a quarterback, let us encourage you to also watch the action on the field. The man you need to pay attention to this Sunday at Super Bowl LV is Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady, who for his fans is something akin to a real-life X-Man. At the age of 43, he holds almost every major quarterback record including touchdown passes and completions and at the age of 41 was the oldest ever player to earn the Super Bowl MVP title.
Happily, for the purposes of this column, he is also a big time watch collector and a brand ambassador for IWC. As we know, for top sportsmen an upscale watch is often purchased to mark a moment of success – and that's how Brady's interest in IWC began. Fresh from winning his first Super Bowl in 2002 at the age of 24, he wandered into the watch shop Tourneau in Manhattan and from the hundreds of watches available, chose a steel IWC GST Chronograph Rattrapante. For the next five or six years the watch was rarely off his wrist and his collection has since grown to 20 or so watches that include IWC’s Top Gun Miramar, Spitfire, Portugieser, Ingenieur and GST Automatic Alarm models.
This fact has not been lost on Richemont, the company that owns IWC. After Brady's triumphs at Super Bowl 51 in 2016, Johan Rupert, the chairman, gave him a special one-of-a-kind Big Pilot. Brady’s celebrity friends have also influenced his watch choices. He bought a chunky Father And Son Big Pilot after spotting it on the equally chunky wrist of Sylvester Stallone at the gym. For date nights with his wife, the Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen, he wears the IWC Portugieser Perpetual Calendar in white gold that she bought for him. And when he signed his contract with Tampa Bay Buccaneers after 20 years with the New England Patriots, he wore an IWC Timezoner Spitfire Edition known as “The Longest Flight”. It could just as easily have been a reference to his long and illustrious career.
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