Tom Brady is finally comfortable letting the world know that his life off the field had an affect on his play on the field.
To be clear, Tom isn’t hoping that anyone feels bad for him. The 7-time Super Bowl winner has had quite the life, and will likely go down in the history books not just as one of the greatest football players of all time… but also as one of the greatest athletes ever, across all sports.
Brady, now 48-years-old, is more than a couple of seasons removed from his last NFL action now. The last time he threw a pass as a professional football player was in 2022, when he had his first losing season of his career with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. His struggles out on the field, as well as the losses that stacked up that year, helped Tom Brady realize that it was time to move on from being an NFL player.
And in a recent conversation with Colin Cowherd on The Herd, he explained that his divorce from Gisele Bündchen during 2022 didn’t help with his performance as a football player that year.
When it comes to celebrity breakups, Brady had quite the public split from his supermodel ex-wife back in 2022. That’s to be expected, since they were two high-profile individuals, and the media machine is always needing stories to churn out. And I’d be remiss if I also didn’t mention the other story that revealed itself around the divorce… the relationship that Gisele had with her jiu-jitsu instructor Joaquim Valente.
She now has a baby with that very jiu-jitsu instructor.
All reports say that despite that ugly end, Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen were doing their best to stay cordial for the sake of their children. The former celebrity couple have two kids – Benjamin and Vivian – and Brady has another son named Jack (from a previous relationship with Bridget Moynahan). Brady was trying his best to not let all of that seep into his work, but he admitted to Cowherd that it all kind of caught up with him:
“My last season was tough. I was going through… I had a lot of, you know, just a personal, family issue, and it was a challenge. It was very … it just took a lot out of me in terms of, you know, my ability to continue to play. I had 23 years of (football), so I didn’t feel like I was missing anything, retiring.
I felt like, okay, this time I always had a goal – 45. I was 45 years old, I wanted to spend time with my kids, I felt like, okay, now it’s time for me to be at all my kids’ games. They’ve been to enough of their dad’s games.”
And unless I’m mistaken, that’s one of the first times that Tom Brady has conceded that his off-field life had a negative impact on his performance as an NFL player.
In Tom’s defense, that’s a lot to handle in one year. He’s always been viewed as sort of a super hero in the sports world, and now a couple of years later, he’s ready to let the masses know that even the great Tom Brady can be weighed down by the end of a 13-year relationship and Father Time knocking on the door of his sport’s career.
It seems like he’s in a good place with it all now, and it’s also been great to see that the social media machine has somewhat changed their mind about Tom as a broadcaster. In his first year, many were quick to critique Brady in the booth. But this is TB12 we’re talking about here. He took the criticism in stride and worked to get better, and then delivered this moment this past weekend that got a lot of praise:
