Tom Brady came out of the bunker Thursday, the first time he's spoken to the local media since he got hurt last September.

The key word in that last sentence was "local."

For Brady has not been local for a long time now, not when his wife is one of the most famous models on the planet and paparazzi follow their life together the way defensive backs follow Brady's receivers.

Local media?

That's so yesterday.

It's also somewhat symbolic.

The day he met the local media he was on the cover of this week's Sports Illustrated, saying more in the magazine than he said last Thursday in Foxboro. In the same magazine he's featured in a two-page spread for something called smartwater.

Truth is, no longer is Brady the great rags-to-riches story he was when he first came out of nowhere in 2001, with his boy-next-door looks and aw-shucks style, back when he first jumped into a football fantasy. Three Super Bowl rings changes that. Being married to a mega-celebrity changes that.

Which always has been Brady's dilemma.

Or how do you remain one of the guys when you are so clearly not one of the guys?

It's a facet of Brady's personality that first surfaced nearly three years ago in a book called Moving The Chains: Tom Brady And The Pursuit of Everything, still the most insightful look at the phenomenon that's become Tom Brady.

It's written by Charles Pierce, and the first scene is very telling. It seems Brady was in a composition course at the University of Michigan, one full of football players who had little interest. With one exception. Not only did Brady actually do the reading, he also seemed to dress differently than the rest of the players, and according to the teacher, was also polite and sincere.

And the most surprising thing of all?

The other players not only liked him, but respected him, too.

It was Pierce's contention that that is Brady's great gift, this ability to be one of the guys, but also to be true to his own self, his own dreams.

"All I ever wanted," Brady says in Moving The Chains, "was the camaraderie, to share some memories with so many other guys. I mean, if you choose to alienate yourself or put yourself apart, you know, play tennis. Play golf.''

I was thinking of all that Friday morning listening to him being interviewed on WEEI. It's a regular gig he does through the football season, and it always seems as if he's just gotten out of bed, personable certainly, but not something he's particularly dying to do.

There is still the aw-shucks quality to Brady, even if he now has a paparazzi life, the kind of celebrity life no athlete in Boston history has come close to having, the result of both his wife and this new 24-hour news cycle we live in, this new landscape where celebrities are now public property in ways they weren't before.

But things are different now, too, and it's not just the celebrity bubble he now lives in.

He's always been a football player and last year that was taken away from him.

That's what is so easy to overlook.

We see the glamour. We see the pictures in the tabloids. We see the life that Brady now leads, one that's so different from his first year with the Patriots when he was just a kid trying to make the team, back when he and some of the younger players used to walk down trendy Newbury Street in Boston's Back Bay and nobody cared.

We don't see that, at his core, Tom Brady is a football player, always has been a football player. It's something he's always worked at it, something that didn't always come easy, something that he had to pay his dues for. It's also something he always had to prove to people, whether it was college recruiters, coaches at Michigan, NFL scouts. Just about everyone.

And I suspect that in his heart of hearts he still defines himself as a football player, and neither the money or the fame or the paparazzi following him and his wife around changes that.

He talked about that on the radio Friday morning, how he used to go to 49ers games with his family when he was a kid, how he used to throw the ball around in the parking.

"I've wanted to play football all my life," he said.

And that's what got taken away from him last year, what he now wants back.

For let's not kid ourselves here.

Brady no longer needs to be a football player. He could walk away today and always have his slice of football immortality. He could walk away today and always be a New England icon. He could walk away today and still be elected to the Hall of Fame some day, one of the great quarterbacks in NFL history.

All this and a wife who makes much more money than he does.

He also has to know that he's in uncharted waters here: coming off knee surgery; someone who will be 32 in August, no longer a kid, not in football terms anyway; someone, who in many ways now will compete against his own legend.

So why is he still playing?

"I feel very grateful to have a job I love," he said Friday.

A football player.

Even if the rest of his life is so different than that, a life that now lives in the epicenter of a celebrity-obsessed country.

A football player.

What he's always been.

Even if it now sometimes seems more complicated.

breynold@projo.com