‘Just like that, she was done’: Six revelations about Tom Brady’s split with Gisele Bundchen from his new biography – The Boston Globe

The biography, which was released Tuesday, spans Brady’s life and offers new insight into the final months of the couple’s marriage, revealing Brady’s apparent struggle to reconcile his football career with his family life.

The tension between Brady’s career and his marriage had been building for years. After winning his fifth Super Bowl with the Patriots in 2017, in a stunning second-half comeback against the Atlanta Falcons, Bundchen wondered if this was the right time for him to retire, Anderson wrote.

When the couple met a decade earlier, Brady told her he wanted to play 10 more years and win at least one more Super Bowl, Anderson wrote. Instead, he had helped the Patriots win two more, bringing his total to five, more than any other quarterback in league history.

“Wouldn’t this be the ideal time to finally put down the football and begin a new, more family-focused life with Gisele and the children?” Anderson wrote. “To Gisele, her husband’s football career couldn’t end in a more storybook, legendary fashion.”

When Bundchen and their kids were on the field for the celebration, she “wondered aloud if now would be the perfect time to retire?” he wrote. Brady hugged his wife but “acted as if he didn’t hear the question,” he wrote.

Brady and the Patriots won their sixth Super Bowl in February 2019, defeating the Los Angeles Rams. He returned for one more season with the Patriots before entering free agency and signing in 2020 with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Brady promptly led the Bucs to Super Bowl LV, where they defeated Kansas City. After the game, Gisele asked her husband, “What more do you have to prove?” Brady said at the time.

But Brady kept going. He returned for a second season with the Bucs in 2021 and announced his retirement at the end of the season in February 2022, carefully avoiding the word retirement.

In his announcement, Brady called Bundchen his “biggest supporter” and said it “pains her to see me get hit out there.”

“She deserves what she needs from me as a husband and my kids deserve what they need from me as a dad,” Brady said at the time.

Forty days later, Brady announced he was coming back to the Bucs at age 45. Brady’s decision, Anderson wrote, came after “forty days and forty nights of wandering through the life-without-football wasteland.”

He wrote that Bundchen, “according to friends, felt as forgotten as a promise that had been scribbled on a napkin and tossed into the wind.”

Anderson wrote that his change of heart intensified ongoing problems in Brady’s marriage, and by training camp, Brady seemed to be questioning the decision, too.

When Buccaneers center Ryan Jensen, one of Brady’s closest friends, suffered a season-ending knee injury during a practice, a team staffer told Anderson it appeared to trigger something in Brady.

“It was pretty clear he was asking himself, ‘Why the [expletive] did I come back?’” the staffer told Anderson, who did not identify the employee by name. “I think that’s when he realized he’d made a horrible decision.”

After the Jensen injury, Brady abruptly left Tampa Bay’s training camp for 11 days, sparking intense media speculation.

At the time, the team offered little explanation beyond describing it as a personal matter.

“Only a few at One Buc Place knew he was traveling to a private resort in the Bahamas to make one final, desperate attempt to keep his family together,” Anderson wrote.

“Tom didn’t know what the heck was going on,” an unnamed Bucs assistant coach told Anderson. “And we didn’t know if he was ever coming back or not.”

The couple’s attempt to reconcile didn’t work out.

Former Buccaneers quarterback coach Clyde Christensen told Anderson that Brady “was an empty shell of who he was when he got back.”

“There was no joy,” Christensen said.

Two months later, in October, Brady and Bundchen announced their divorce.

The turmoil in Brady’s personal life appeared to affect him physically, too, according to the book.

Before he went to the Bahamas to meet with Bundchen, Brady had arrived at training camp nearly 20 pounds lighter than usual, according to Anderson, stirring concern among coaches accustomed to Brady being famously meticulous about his conditioning.

“It was very clear that the reason for the weight loss was the stress from personal issues he was dealing with,” Bruce Arians, the Bucs’ former head coach, told Anderson.

“His cheekbones had freaking cheekbones,” an unidentified Bucs coach told Anderson. His personal problems “were clearly impacting his physical well-being.”

In 2018, years before their divorce, Bundchen wrote a “serious, handwritten letter” to Brady explaining that their marriage wasn’t working for her, Anderson wrote.

She wanted more of his time and attention, more help with their children, and more space for her own career, according to Anderson.

“Her husband may not have felt acknowledged at his work,” Anderson wrote, “but she too often didn’t feel acknowledged in her own home. Things needed to change.”

The letter’s message, the author wrote, “pressed Brady into a deep, uncomfortable assessment of his character and motivations.”

The couple went to marriage counseling and Brady kept the letter in a drawer, occasionally rereading it as a reminder “that he needed to tend to his marriage with the same tenacity he tended to his job,” Anderson wrote.

Anderson also briefly explores a surprising theory that Bundchen’s apparent interest in astrology may have contributed to the separation, though he attributes the information to a single unnamed source close to Brady.

The source said Bundchen had examined the couple’s compatibility during Brady’s 2022 training camp and determined they were no longer a match.

Bundchen and Brady had been FaceTiming during the day between team meetings, the source said, “and she seemed happy.”

“Then one day, Gisele, who is really into astrology, basically looked into the stars and told Tom, ‘We’re not compatible,’” the source said, according to Anderson. “And just like that, she was done.”

Nick Stoico can be reached at nick.stoico@globe.com.