It’s officially over: Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen confirm they’ve finalized divorce terms.
It’s the third such split in the past few years, all between athletes. The others, it seems, are more about the public’s perception of athletes than about the individuals’ personal lives.
At first glance the last one can seem counterintuitive.
What would it look like if, instead of the headline “Tom Brady and Gisele Bouchard Divorce,” we instead had “Gisele Bouchard and Halle Berry are divorcing?” The first sentence would be a question.
But here’s a second consideration: It’s harder to divorce athletes than anybody else.
For one thing, they live with their families. And for another, they live to play.
“That’s what makes athletes athletes,” says the NFL’s head of human resources, Jim Gray. “It’s the same reason you see the wives on the tennis court on Saturday. Just to stay out of their hair.”
What’s the real story here?
“They really are a lot alike,” says Jennifer Hawkins, a former Olympian and a writer at the New York Times Magazine. “They both love to compete.”
That certainly makes sense to anyone who has followed the two. They were born to compete; their parents competed at a young age. Since high school they have competed in an extraordinary variety of sports.
Both have become household names for their achievements on the field, and much of the media takes that love of competition for granted even when they’re not with their family at a sports event.
At times, the two have even been at odds with each other.
Bündchen got into a heated exchange with Brown a few weeks before the 2010 Olympics over her support for the American Olympic Committee.
The following year’s Olympics in London had to be postponed after both she and Brady suffered ankle sprains.
After the Boston Marathon bombing, Brady’s
