America at Large:Chercez la femme: First it was Tony Romo, now it's Tom Brady. What is it with these NFL quarterbacks and their celebrity girlfriends? If nothing else, they seem to be keeping the US's freelance photographers in business, writes George Kimball
Romo, in just his second year as the Dallas Cowboys' starter, led his team to an NFC-best 13-3 record this year, and midway through the season was rewarded with a six-year, €45 million contract extension.
Shortly thereafter his name was linked to the pop singer Jessica Simpson on the pages of the supermarket tabloids. Confirmation came a few weeks later when Simpson showed up as Tony's guest for a December game in Philadelphia, one which proved to be Romo's worst of the season. After watching his quarterback throw three interceptions and fumble twice in the 10-6 loss, Dallas wide receiver Terrell Owens suggested that Jessica absent herself from any further personal appearances.
"She is not a fan favourite, in this locker room or in Texas Stadium," said T.O.
Tony's team-mates promptly dubbed Simpson "Yoko Romo". The Cowboys went on to win their division, thereby earning themselves a first-round play-off bye. While most of his team-mates remained in Dallas, Romo and Jessica jetted off to Mexico, and were in short order joined in Los Cabos by a posse of paparazzi, who spent several days snapping photos of them rubbing suntan oil on one another's posteriors.
So naturally the favoured Cowboys lost at home to the New York Giants in the January 13th divisional play-off game. Yoko Romo apparently heeded Owens's advice and stayed home, but the next morning the New York Post claimed credit for having playfully hired a Jessica lookalike and planted her directly behind the Cowboys' bench in the hope of distracting the Dallas quarterback.
In addition to courting photogenic women, Brady and Romo share something else in common. Each was a late-drafted back-up quarterback backing up Drew Bledsoe when he got his big chance - Brady in 2002 when Bledsoe, then with the Patriots, suffered severe internal injuries in a game against the New York Jets, Romo when Dallas's then-coach Bill Parcells ran out of patience with Bledsoe in a 2006 game against the Eagles - and neither ever relinquished the job.
Brady's 2007 season has been so electrifying - he threw an NFL record 50 touchdown passes in leading New England to the NFL's first perfect (16-0) season in 36 years, and was named the league's Most Valuable Player - that his own love life largely flew under the radar, which was probably just as well. Two weeks before the season started his former fiancée, the Irish-American actress Bridget Moynihan, gave birth to his child. Although Brady did fly to California to witness the birth of his son, he had by then taken up with a new consort, the Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen, whose pay check is said to be even higher than that of an NFL quarterback.
This unlikely pairing represented old news in New England, and Tom and Gisele might have spent the past few days unnoticed had the New York Giants not had their third straight play-off road win on an overtime field goal by Scottish kicker Laurence Tynes that beat Green Bay 23-20 on Sunday evening. Suddenly the Giants, who went into the play-offs seeded fifth among the six NFC teams surviving from the regular season, were headed to Super Bowl XLII as the NFC champions.
Thus it was that when Brady, bearing a bouquet of flowers, arrived at Gisele Bündchen's Greenwich Village townhouse the day after the Patriots' 21-12 win over the Chargers, he was ambushed by a hornet's nest of photographers who had staked out the premises.
If there is one thing the taciturn New England coach Bill Belichick despises more than publicity, it is potentially alerting an opponent to an injury to one of his players. When it developed that Brady had played in the Super Bowl with an undisclosed shoulder injury four years ago, Belichick was dressed down by the NFL office for having failed to note the malady on the official "injury report" the league issues in advance of each game to discourage gamblers from gathering what otherwise might constitute inside information.
For each of the 126 games the Patriots have played since, the New England injury report has included "QB Tom Brady (shoulder), probable." As Brady strolled up Gisele's street on Monday, it didn't take long for the paparazzi to discern they might be looking at a scoop. Brady, who had appeared to be limping in the second half of the AFC championship game, was wearing a walking boot-cast on his right leg.
When the next morning's Post hit the street it has a front-page head proclaiming "Flowery Tom a posy patsie" - probably because no editor was clever enough to come up with "My right foot" - and video of Brady's cast was soon posted on the worldwide web.
You could almost hear Belichick gnashing his teeth all the way from Foxboro, though when the photographers trailed Tom and Gisele to an East Village nightspot that evening, Brady appeared to have shed the boot. Although Belichick forbids his players to discuss injuries, Brady did concede in his regular appearance on a Boston radio station that he was "a little nicked up" coming out of the San Diego game, but that he would "have to be on a stretcher" not to play in the biggest game of them all.
"I'm not missing this one," Brady told radio hosts John Dennis and Gerry Callahan. "I'll be ready for the Super Bowl."
The Patriots don't have to submit an injury report until next Wednesday, by which time they will already be in Glendale, but citing "a league source", the Boston Herald reported Brady's injury to be a "high-ankle sprain".
New York being New York, you might have expected the tabloids to feast on the Brady story for several more days, and they probably would have but for another man's misfortune. The shutterbugs were still camped out in front of Gisele's Manhattan building Tuesday afternoon when word came that the actor Heath Ledger had overdosed on sleeping pills less than half a mile away. The paparazzi hastily abandoned their stakeout, and by the time they opened their papers yesterday morning, New Yorkers discovered that pictures of the cops trundling out Ledger's body had replaced those of Tom Brady's foot.
Bill Belichick undoubtedly breathed a sigh of relief.
