Tom Brady: I motivated myself by thinking of Peyton Manning as my enemy

After facing each other 17 times during their careers, Tom Brady and Peyton Manning came to think of each other as friends. But Brady says he didn’t let himself think of Manning that way while they were trying to beat each other.

Brady wrote on TomBrady.com that he had to convince himself to dislike Manning in order to play his best against him.

“When I look back on my relationship with Peyton Manning, my respect, admiration, and appreciation for him as a competitor has grown with each passing year,” Brady wrote. “It was always there, don’t misunderstand, but while we were competing against each other I couldn’t let that get in the way of the fact that he was my enemy, that he didn’t respect me, that he thought he was better than me because he was a #1 pick from an SEC school—or at least that’s what I made myself believe. Convincing myself that those things were true created a sense of urgency within me to prove him wrong, and it provided the extra bit of energy and motivation necessary to lock in and focus and execute just that much more so that I could beat him more often than he beat me.”

Brady wrote that rivalries are at their best in sports when the athletes think of themselves as enemies, not friends.

“I also believe—and this is kind of an old school point of view considering where we are with social media these days—that you have to allow your rivals to become your enemies,” Brady wrote. “True enemies, in your mind and on the field. You can, and should, respect them, but you can’t look at them like ‘friendly competition.’”

Brady considered his teammates to be his only friends in the NFL during his playing career.

“I didn’t have any real friends on any other teams when I played,” Brady wrote. “I had the guys on my team and that was it.”