Tom Brady Threw the Lombardi Trophy. Its Designer’s Daughter Wants an Apology.

It took a lot of work to make that trophy

Tampa Bay Buccaneers Victory Parade
Tom Brady of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers celebrates their Super Bowl LV victory with the Vince Lombardi trophy during a boat parade through the city.
Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images

To state the obvious, Tom Brady is very good at throwing footballs. And it turns out that Brady is quite skilled at throwing other objects as well — certainly a useful skill to have. But one of Brady’s throws has gotten attention for the wrong reason. In this case, it’s not about the skill with which an object was thrown but whether it should have been thrown in the first place.

Last week, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers celebrated their Super Bowl victory with a boat parade in Tampa. During the parade, Brady threw the Vince Lombardi Trophy from his boat to one carrying tight end Cameron Brate, who caught it. The potential for things to horribly wrong was certainly present throughout: the trophy isn’t exactly aerodynamic, and the whole thing involved throwing a metal object over part of a body of water.

One person who was decidedly unamused by the throw was Lorraine Grohs, according to a new Sports Illustrated article. Grohs is the daughter of Greg Grohs, master silversmith at Tiffany & Co. for many years and the man who designed the first Vince Lombardi Trophy.

“It just upset me that this trophy was disgraced and disrespected by being thrown as if it was a real football,” Grohs said in an interview with Fox 4.

According to a recent Sporting News article, each season’s Lombardi Trophy takes 4 months to make — which is a lot of work for something that could have very easily ended up at the bottom of the Hillsborough River.

There haven’t been nearly as many Lombardi Trophy mishaps as there have been with, say, the Stanley Cup. Given the amount of work that goes into making a new Lombardi Trophy each year, that’s probably not a bad thing.

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