Trump a friend? Marriage to Gisele strained? Tom Brady opens up in rare interview
New Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady isn’t known for getting too personal when it comes to dropping details of his life in interviews.
But on Wednesday on SiriusXM’s “The Howard Stern Show,” the normally private Brady brought down his emotional walls and got candid with the host about, well, almost everything.
No subject was too taboo: from his friendship with President Donald Trump, to his marriage to supermodel Gisele Bundchen, to his thoughts on flattening the coronavirus curve.
In a rare feat, Brady quietly let his guard down in the loudest way possible for over two hours during the interview.
And, of course, he spoke about football.
“Fortunately for me, where I got drafted, it was such a confluence of factors,” the six-time Super Bowl champion quarterback said about being drafted by the New England Patriots in 2000. “I was ready to prove myself because of my college experience. I learned a lot about competition and teamwork and the things to me that really mattered.”
While he discussed his relationship with Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, leaving the only professional team he had played with, and his relationship with football in general, Brady touched base on more fascinating topics, including his friendship with the current president and how Trump wanted him to speak at the 2016 Republican National Convention.
“Yeah, he wanted me to speak at the convention, too, and I wasn’t going to do anything political,” Brady said. “I met him in 2001. It was probably very similar to our relationship that you (Stern) had with him. In 2002, after I won my first Super Bowl, he asked me to go judge a Miss USA competition, which I thought was the coolest thing in the world because I was 24 years old and had a chance to do something like that.”
Brady was highly criticized in 2015 when told Boston’s WEEI that he owned a “Make America Great Again” Trump presidential campaign hat. During Wednesday’s interview, he said that he shied away from Trump when it came to politics even though they’re friends and might have regretted voicing his political stance during the campaign.
“Then the whole political aspect came, and I think I brought into a lot of those things because it was so polarizing around the election time,” he said. “It was uncomfortable for me because you can’t undo things, not that I would undo a friendship, but political support is a lot different than the support of a friend.”
Brady also opened up about his marriage and admitted that it was strained during his final years in New England because Bundchen felt he was putting football ahead of his family.
“A couple of years ago, she didn’t feel like I was doing my part for the family,” Brady said about his wife of 11 years. “She felt like I would play football all season, and she’d take care of the house. Then, when the season ended, I’d be like, ‘Great, let me get into all my other business activities, let me get into my football training.’
“And she’s going, ‘When are you going to do things for the house? When are you going to take the kids to school?’ That was a big part of our marriage. I had to check myself because she was like, ‘I have goals and dreams, too.’ ”
He went on to say that he had to get his priorities straight for his family’s sake.
“I had to take care of my family because my family situation was great. She (Gisele) wasn’t satisfied with our marriage. I had to make a change in that.”
The quarterback also touched on the COVID-19 pandemic that’s overtaken the world and how society should handle the virus.
“I don’t have, no one can predict the future, but my strong beliefs are, ‘How do I approach this?’ I try to use the same common sense that I’ve had playing football all these years,” he said. “You can’t control all the external things that are happening. The only thing you can control is what you’re doing for yourself.
“What are you putting into your body to keep your immune system really strong? I think that’s super important. I wish that was part of our conversation. Why are we so dependent on waiting to get sick before we start thinking about how we can get better?”
In an offseason stunner, Brady announced that he wasn’t staying with the Patriots and signed a two-year, $50 million contract with Tampa Bay in March. Earlier this month, Brady and his family moved into a Tampa mansion owned by baseball icon Derek Jeter.
And of course, Brady joked that if something breaks in the mansion, it would be Jeter who has to come out to fix it.
“I call and (complain) to him and he gets it fixed,” Brady said. “So he does what he’s got to do.”
This story was originally published April 8, 2020 at 1:07 PM.