Even one of America’s most famous football stars—the second-highest career-earning quarterback in the history of the National Football League—isn’t immune to being sniped at for his failure to keep a woman happy, and this by a commentator who admits she knows nothing about his actual life.
Last week, media personality Megyn Kelly, host of The Megyn Kelly Show, expressed her disapproval of Tom Brady, who had just announced his (second) football retirement in a video he posted to Twitter. Brady is leaving the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the team he anchored for three seasons. Before that, Brady had played twenty seasons with the New England Patriots, where he was largely responsible for the team’s outstanding record, which included six Super Bowl championships (he won a seventh with Tampa Bay). He holds nearly every major quarterback “best,” including for career wins and playoff wins, and is widely considered one of the greatest quarterbacks to play the game.
Perhaps not surprisingly, none of this counts much with Megyn Kelly, who thought Brady should have been happy to let it all go exactly when his wife wanted. Brady had originally planned to retire last year, but changed his mind to return for one (not particularly lustrous) season. If only he had kept away from the game, Kelly charged, he might have saved his marriage. She seemed especially annoyed by Brady’s comment, in his video, that in reflecting on his career, he “wouldn’t change a thing.” That was, in Kelly’s estimation—surely a fantastical over-reading—a “middle finger” to his (now) ex-wife, Brazilian model Gisele Bündchen.
Let’s put aside for now the idiocy of a complete stranger professing to know enough about the dynamics of a marriage to excoriate one party so exclusively. Anyone who has ever experienced the breakdown of a marriage knows that it is rarely destroyed by one decision. Kelly admitted as much, yet persisted in chastising Brady for not trying hard enough to placate his wife—even when what was being demanded was no ordinary sacrifice.
What kind of a woman would choose a football champion as a husband and then leave him because he loved the game too much to quit? Bündchen married Brady fourteen years ago, at a time when his NFL career was in full swing. If she wasn’t necessarily marrying him because he was one of the most glamorous quarterbacks of all time, she can’t have been unaware that that’s who and what he was. Whatever personal qualities made Brady an attractive spouse, Bündchen could have had no doubt about the qualities that made him a superlative athlete: outstanding drive, desire, and all-consuming dedication. Men who put family time or wife-pleasing over football do not tend to stay at the top of the NFL.
And let’s face it: being a top quarterback requires a great deal more skill, training, and toughness than being a top model. Only Brady can know what football has meant to him, and only Brady—pressed by the exigencies of the sport—should have made the decision to retire.
I struggle to understand why anyone would even consider trying to persuade—let alone coerce under threat of divorce—a brilliant player to give up the game before he was ready, and I hope and trust it is not the case that Bündchen made football the red-line it is touted to have been. Sports articles are now rife with speculation that Brady’s decision this year is an attempt to win back his ex-wife, which I also hope to be untrue. As Kelly put it on her show (seemingly with approval), Bündchen has decisively moved on and is now “living her best life” with a new man (ahem—talk about a middle finger!).
Assuming that Brady’s postponed retirement was what killed the marriage, I find it bizarre to see blame placed solely on Brady. Yes, he chose to return to football for at least one more year; but it was Bündchen who apparently found his decision unforgiveable. Responsibility for the marriage breakup has to be equally shared between them, or might even fall more heavily on an intransigent “My way or the highway” Bündchen.
But for reasons already suggested, it seems far more likely the marriage was headed for the rocks regardless of whether Brady played on, in which case his destroying his career at her request would have been a devastating mistake. One can only imagine what he would have felt if he had quit football under duress and lost his marriage anyway. In that case, I doubt Kelly would have been up in arms about Bündchen’s betrayal.
The insouciance with which Kelly launched her “Blame Tom” tirade illuminates a cultural moment in which any criticism of a woman is misogyny, while any criticism of a man is a woman’s prerogative.
Fortunately for him, Tom Brady’s future will not be determined by the approval or lack thereof of women like Megyn Kelly. And she knows it. Though she aimed her criticisms at Brady, they were really a directive to all husbands on behalf of the sisterhood: If you want to keep your family, you’d better jump when your wife says. Some part of Kelly’s irritation with Brady may have been owing to his honest recognition that in the matter of his career, his own desire and need were all he could ultimately trust. I hope more men, in similar circumstances, will follow his lead.
