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‘You’ve got to let him do what he loves’: Gisele Bundchen can’t get Tom Brady to retire

December 13, 2018 at 11:17 a.m. EST

If given her druthers, Gisele Bündchen sounds as if she would prefer that her husband’s days in the NFL were over. Especially now that he’s 41 years old and has taken more of a beating than usual this season.

But Tom Brady has shown no inclination to quit, no matter what his supermodel spouse says.

“I think you should talk to him about that,” she told Ellen DeGeneres, who reminded Bündchen that she’s a Saints fan, on “The Ellen Show.” “I haven’t been very successful. I want him to do whatever makes him happy, but maybe if you have a conversation with him — explain that you love the Saints.”

Fat chance. Brady may have talked about the toll the game takes during his “Tom vs. Time” Facebook series, but he’s still playing for the 9-4 New England Patriots. In May 2017, Bündchen created a stir when she told “CBS This Morning” about his concussions, although both the NFL and the NFL Players Association said that they found no validity to her claim that Brady suffered a concussion during the 2016 season. “I just have to say, as a wife, I’m a little bit — as you know, it’s not the most, like, let’s say, unaggressive sport, right?” she said at that time. “Football, like he had a concussion last year. He has concussions pretty much. I mean, we don’t talk about — he does have concussions. I don’t really think it’s a healthy thing for your body to go through, through that kind of aggression, like, all the time. That cannot be healthy for you, right? I’m planning on him being healthy and doing a lot of fun things when we’re like 100, I hope.”

She still worries about him, she told DeGeneres, but steered clear of making flashy headlines.

She joked that the dangers of playing football means she wouldn’t “want to have his job,” but added, “It’s definitely something that you get concerned [about], but he loves it so much, and you’ve got to let him do what he loves.”

Brady was upfront about Bündchen’s feelings on the matter in February 2017, just after the Patriots won their fifth Super Bowl.

“If it was up to my wife, she would have me retire today,” Brady told Sirius XM. “She told me that last night three times. And I said, ‘Too bad, babe, I’m having too much fun right now.’ You know, I feel like I can still do it. If you love what you do and you’re capable of doing it, then I might be so bored if I wasn’t going out there knowing that I could still do it. So I’m going to work hard to be ready to go, and I still plan on playing for a long time.”

Brady isn’t the only one in their household intent on continuing to work.

“I think I’m the farthest I’ve ever been from retiring,” Bündchen, the world’s highest-paid model, told DeGeneres. “I’ve never worked so hard in my life actually. I think I’ll retire only the day I die because I love working, I love creating. I think that’s why we’re here, to just keep creating and expanding and learning.”

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