Gisele Bundchen, left, comforts husband Tom Brady after the New England Patriots lost to the New York Giants at Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis on Sunday.
Rob Carr/GETTY IMAGES INDIANAPOLIS—It’s never been exactly clear what Tom Brady sees in his wife, Gisele Bundchen.
Obviously, she’s rich and attractive. But Brady had his pick of that type.
They seemed oddly matched — the soft-spoken California rube, a sort of half-clever Bill Clinton, and the gushy kitsch goddess.
Now, a day after Brady’s most crushing loss, we get to glimpse the root of the attraction — Gisele Bundchen is sort of nuts.
Any colour-between-the-lines sports spouse knows what their role is after their husband has had his head figuratively handed to him — to look sad. The ambitious ones will weep softly, but only get a pass on this if they’re consoling a small child at the same time. Otherwise, it stinks of self-pity.
Bundchen has historically chosen to recede from view, inasmuch as that is possible for someone that looks as she looks. For whatever reason, she chose Indianapolis as her big coming out to middle America.
When things were going well for Brady, she was shown pogo-ing around a suite, high-fiving people in the head and in serious danger of accidentally tipping a seatmate into the proletarian moshpit below.
Once it turned ugly, she hung her head like a priest at an execution. As soon as it ended, she ran downstairs to comfort Brady in full view of the leering press.
Having been served exulting Gisele, stunned Gisele and comforter Gisele, we were about to get the best Gisele yet — crazy Gisele.
Just after being razzed by a couple of rapier wits as she left the stadium (“Eli owns your husband!”), Bundchen was cornered beside an elevator. She turned her back, fuming. Seemingly unaware that she had a microphone pointed at her, she let loose at no one in particular.
“(They) didn’t catch the ball when they’re supposed to catch the ball,” Bundchen said, throaty voice rising. She was referencing all those dropped passes that killed the Patriots in the fourth quarter. “My husband cannot (expletive) throw the ball and catch the ball at the same time!”
She emphasized this rough candour with what passes for fist-pounding in the modelling world — angrily swigging from a bottle of spring water.
Gisele Bundchen has always been beautiful in an icy, science experiment-y way, but she glowed at that moment. There wasn’t much that Tom Brady appeared to lack in life, and now we can also scratch ‘good sense’ off the prospective list of wants.
Every guy would like a rich, attractive spouse. What every man yearns for is a lunatic.
You get a warm, fulfilled feeling the first time a woman looks up at you and says, “I think I could fall in love with you.”
That feeling will not compare in full-body intensity to a woman who takes hold of your collar, pulls you in hard and says, “If I ever catch you looking at someone else I will kill you in your sleep.”
That tingle in turn is only a kind of numbness when matched against the elation of being with a woman who listens patiently to your problems at work, and then decides she’s going to burn your workplace to the ground as revenge on your behalf.
Bundchen, God love her, is the third sort of woman. And that’s sort of what she did.
Predictably, she was getting eaten alive in the northeast almost immediately after the video leaked. It’s typically Boston to take every championship loss like a blimp disaster — something you never saw coming.
“Who’s to blame for the Patriots’ loss?” the
Boston Globe shrieked Monday morning. Stupidly, Bundchen was included in the attached fan poll. Much more stupidly, Brady was leading voting by a wide margin. Where do you think the Giants figure in that answer? The piece was clearly intended more as an
Auto-da-fe than an inquiry.
It turns out that Brady’s New England pedestal wasn’t terribly well constructed. He’s fallen off it already. In another piece, the
Globe referred to Brady’s Super Bowl performance as “embarrassing” and “hideous” in between calling him names.
Let’s recall that Brady was 27-of-41 with two touchdowns against one interception born over over-ambition rather than carelessness. Had, say, two of the four catchable passes that were dropped by Patriots receivers in the fourth been caught, New England would almost certainly have won the game.
That’s some ways off “embarrassing,” but fans who love as hard as Bostonians are always one bad loss away from a hate that’s just as deep.
That’s their right. Brady won’t be bothered much by it, or by his wife’s ruthless truth telling. What are his teammates supposed to say? “Your wife was really mean, Tom.”
No, they’ll laugh about it. Men so brittle that they can be cut to the core by a bit of reality TV wouldn’t last in a paramilitary unit like the Patriots.
However, were I the
Boston Globe and its ilk in the Massachusetts rank-and-file, I would keep the bile anonymous.
Remember, Gisele has resources, a you-and-me-versus-the-world-baby outlook and very little self-control. She will find you
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