James Harrison wanted to hate Tom Brady when he joined Patriots

When linebacker James Harrison joined the Patriots in 2017, he didn’t trust Tom Brady.

Harrison made an appearance on the Pat McAfee show on Wednesday, where the hosts asked him about his brief stint in New England. Harrison described the Patriots as regimented, which isn’t for everyone (Harrison said he didn’t mind the structure).

“A is A, B is B,” Harrison said. “It’s the same thing from the top to the bottom.”

Harrison went on to describe his first encounters with the Patriots’s superstar quarterback.

“When I first got there, obviously the first person I met was Tom,” Harrison said. “He introduced himself as if I didn’t know who the hell he was.

“But he does that with everybody. He’s just a genuinely good person.”

Harrison isn’t the only teammate of Brady’s who was bemused to find one of the greatest football players in history introducing himself in the locker room, but Harrison still maintained a preconceived notion of Brady.

“I wanted to hate him when I got here, so I was like, ‘He’s feeding me some B.S. He’s just being a good guy in front of me,’” Harrison said. “I’m just sitting back watching for a week or two. Finally, I had to tell him, ‘I wanted to come here and hate you.’ …

“That’s why everybody likes him. He’s a good dude. From the practice squad guy he comes in the first day, he’s like, ‘Hey, how you doing, I’m Tom Brady’ like they don’t know who the hell he is. That’s just him. That’s just his personality. He’s just a good dude.”

Brady quote-tweeted the clip, wondering how anyone could be anything but nice to Harrison.

Harrison responded with his own quote-tweet.

“If you only knew the names I called you before I met you, you wouldn’t have been!” he wrote.