Photo: Taylor Hill/WireImage; Jonathan Leibson/Getty Images
Tom Brady,Rob Gronkowski, and their teammate Sean Murphy-Bunting helped turn a silly mistake into a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for some young students.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers teammates helped surprise the Notre Dame Prep freshman basketball team in Pontiac, Michigan, with a special FaceTime call after one of the young players, Vinny Tartaglia,sent a text to the wrong numberwhile attempting to create a group chat for the freshmen, per Notre Dame Prep school counselor P. Jason Whalen.
Instead of texting a teammate, Tartaglia accidentally reached Buccaneers cornerback Murphy-Bunting the day before Thanksgiving.
“Ya’ll meant to add me to this?” asked the Michigan native, per the outlet. But the boys didn’t believe Murphy-Bunting, 24, was who he said he was — even after the cornerbacksent them a selfie, which Whalen shared on Twitter.
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So, Murphy-Bunting decided to FaceTime the group chat — and both Brady, 44, and Gronkowski, 32, eventually joined in.
After speaking with Murphy-Bunting, the boys wereintroduced torunning back Leonard Fournette, who then gave them a brief tour of the Buccaneers' locker room, according to Whalen.
That’s when the team met Gronkowski, wide receiver Mike Evans and cornerback Richard Sherman. In one screenshot from the call, Gronkowski is enthusiastically chatting with the boys.
Fournette stayed on the line for an additional 10 minutes so the team could meetthe one-and-only Tom Brady, who had been finishing up a meeting, Whalen said.
Eventually, the star quarterbackpopped up on the screenand said “What’s up fellas?!?!” — and the boys promptly lost their minds.
“Whatan awesome experiencefor our boys and what an amazing group of guys on the Buccaneers,” Whalen wrote on Twitter.
Brady, also a Michigan native, latertold ESPNthat he thought the surprise call was “sweet” and “fun.”
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“I didn’t know who it was,” Brady confessed. “[Leonard] said, ‘Here’s my boy’ or whatever he said. It was nice. It would have been nice for me when I had been in high school too.”
“They were shocked,” Fournette added. “I think that’s … to guys in high school, Tom is the figure for them. You know what I mean? Who wouldn’t want to look up to a guy like that?”
source: people.com
