Bobby Sabelhaus has never met Tom Brady. But he might be responsible for Brady’s rise to the NFL’s Mt. Rushmore—at least in part. This is a story 30 years in the making, starting with a single decision Sabelhaus, a Parade All-American high school quarterback, made as an18-year-old high school senior. It turns out that without Sabelhaus, there’s a good chance Brady would not have been signed by Michigan out of high school in 1995. Without Sabelhaus, there’s a good chance Brady would not have gone on to win seven Super Bowl titles.

“I might have a hand in one of the greatest NFL careers of all time,” said Sabelhaus, a real estate agent at Great Point Properties on Nantucket. Sabelhaus and Brady had a lot in common in the mid-’90s. Sabelhaus, a 6-foot, 5-inch, 225-pound Gatorade Player of the Year out of Baltimore, was the number-one ranked prospect in the country with nearly 6,000passing yards to his name, a Maryland high school state record at the time.

He was a hot commodity in the college recruiting circuit. He was also Michigan’s top choice for a new quarterback. Brady, a competitive high school quarterback from California, was seen as a solid backup plan. But Sabelhaus went down a different path. He chose coach Steve Spurrier’s Florida Gators over Michigan, leaving the Wolverines with second-pick Brady. After a rocky start, Brady turned out to be the right choice, setting single-season school records in pass attempts and completions in his first year as a starter. Sabelhaus, meanwhile, struggled as a college quarterback, ultimately transferring from school to school before giving up the game altogether.

“Coming out of high school, I was on top of the world,” Sabelhaus said. “Going to the University of Florida, I was feeling great, and then all of a sudden I started to doubt myself and get depressed and not function the way I used to. I had always had football as an escape, but I didn’t have that anymore because I wasn’t playing well, and that was a direct result of my depression.”

But this is still a success story. It’s a story about reinvention after the game that had promised Sabelhaus the world turned out not to be all it was cracked up to be. Sabelhaus bounced around from Florida to Pierce College in California to West Virginia, where he lasted less than a week. He transferred to San Jose State for his junior year but left the sport before he ever took a snap with his new team, telling his parents he was done. Sabelhaus, who had just two years earlier been lauded by the Prep Football Report as “the biggest name to sign with Florida in quitesome time,” was now nicknamed the “patron saint of recruiting busts” by Sports Illustrated.

But then things turned around. Sabelhaus found a career in the film industry of all places, first cutting his teeth as an assistant at Village Roadshow Pictures, the production company behind Training Day and The Matrix franchise. He got his big break working for Richard Donner, the legendary Hollywood film director responsible for the original Superman, The Goonies and Lethal Weapon. He also worked with Donner’s wife, Lauren, for four years, producing movies like Constantine ,X-Men: The Last Stand and She’s the Man. During that time, he managed to break out on his own at one point, developing projects and selling them to major studios. One of those projects was sold to Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema. At one point, he successfully pitched a story to ESPN for its documentary series 30 for 30 about the legendary Baltimore high school basketball team that launched the careers of late Celtics star Reggie Lewis, as well as Reggie Williams, David Wingate and Muggsy Bogues, who at 5 feet, 3 inches remains the shortest NBA player of all time. The episode was Sabelhaus’ first experience as an independent producer.

“I’ve always had a passion for movies,” Sabelhaus said. “If I wasn’t watching football on Saturdays and Sundays with my dad, I was in my room watching Spielberg movies, watching Star Wars or Scorsese or Tarantino, some of these great filmmakers who really connected with me. I would disappear for hours because I would go to the video store, get a stack of movies and watch them.”

Sabelhaus had reinvented himself—and it wouldn’t be the last time he’d do so. After leaving Los Angeles for a new start on Nantucket, Sabelhaus landed a job at Great Point Properties selling real estate. Sabelhaus sees that reinvention as another similarity to Brady, now an announcer on Fox.

"The perspective you get is that these NFL players, they end up retiring and they have to reinvent themselves, and that’s kind of like what I’ve been doing,” Sabelhaus said. “I have a new chapter on Nantucket and still feel youthful and have a lot left.“

I think about five years ago, in my head I knew the movie business was going to be in my rearview, and especially with COVID, I started thinking about what that next chapter would look like,” he continued. “My parents had always been involved in real estate on the island. I said I love Nantucket, I know this island, I’ve been coming here my whole life, and what a dream it would be to get an opportunity to come to live on Nantucket year-round and work in real estate. I got the ball rolling and started networking.”

Looking back, Sabelhaus can joke about his connection with Brady, even though the two have never met. Sabelhaus, a longtime Baltimore Ravens fan who idolized Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino as a kid, rooted for Brady during his years as a New England Patriot and a Tampa Bay Buccaneer.

Sabelhaus also does not live in a world of what-ifs. Football, he said, presents a small window of opportunity in college, and if you don’t succeed in that window, your prospects dwindle. That’s a fact Sabelhaus has always known. In what turned into a prophetic interview with The Baltimore Sun in his senior year of high school, Sabelhaus acknowledged that “football is only going to take me so far, I don’t know where it’s going to take me. It could end tomorrow and then where am I going to be?”

“I’ve had second chances,” Sabelhaus said. “Now, [Nantucket] is anew chance at love, a new chance at a career, a new chance at a place to live.” As for whether he will ever meet Brady, Sabelhaus is still hopeful.

“I would love to cross paths with him some day,” Sabelhaus said. “I think we would have a lot to talk about. We got recruited by the same college—the same guy—and had two very different experiences, but I havea ton of respect for him. The least Tom can do is buy a house from meon Nantucket.”

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