Tom Brady walked away from Tampa Bay Buccaneers training camp for 11 days in 2022, telling coach Clyde Christensen only that he had “personal things” to take care of, according to a new biography. What he was actually doing, the book says, was flying to a private resort in the Bahamas in a last attempt to save his marriage to Gisele Bündchen.
The book, “Brady: An American Story and the Price of Greatness” by Lars Anderson, reports that Brady’s sudden absence left the Bucs coaching staff in the dark about whether he’d come back at all.
“Tom didn’t know what the heck was going on,” an assistant coach told the author. “And we didn’t know if he was ever coming back.”
He did return, but Christensen said the trip clearly hadn’t fixed anything between the couple.
“Tom was an empty shell of who he was when he got back,” Christensen said. “There was no joy. Everything was hard work.”
The book also reports that coaches and teammates privately worried about Brady’s appearance during that stretch, with some saying he looked like a cancer patient.
By Anderson’s account, the marriage had been under strain for years, with Bündchen pushing Brady to retire and spend more time at home. After Brady led the Patriots past the Falcons in Super Bowl LI in 2017, Bündchen reportedly asked him on the field, “Would now be the perfect time to retire?” He allegedly told her later that day, “Too bad, babe. I’m having too much fun right now.”
The following year, after New England lost the Super Bowl to the Eagles, Bündchen wrote Brady an emotional letter again asking him to step away from football.
“She needed him to be present when he was at home, not responding to text messages on his constantly buzzing cell phone or replaying a game in his mind,” Anderson writes. “She needed more help with the kids. She needed the chance to sleep in just a few days a week. She needed more time for her own career.”
Bündchen, one of the world’s best-known models, had paused her own career to raise the couple’s two children, Benjamin, 16, and Vivian, 13, and to help raise Brady’s son Jack, 19, from his prior relationship with Bridget Moynahan.
Anderson writes that Bündchen ultimately decided to end the marriage after consulting an astrology book.
“One day, Gisele, who is really into astrology, basically looked into the stars and told Tom, ‘We’re not compatible,'” an insider close to Brady told the author. “And just like that she was done.”
The couple, married since 2009, announced their divorce on Oct. 28, 2022, saying their focus was on their children. “We have grown apart and while it is, of course, difficult to go through something like this, I feel blessed for the time we had together and only wish the best for Tom always,” Bündchen wrote on Instagram at the time.
Bündchen remarried jujitsu instructor Joaquim Valente in December 2025; the two now have a 1-year-old son. Brady has since been linked to model Irina Shayk and internet personality Alix Earle.
