Tom Brady will always be the MVP of his family with Gisele Bündchen.
One day after his Tampa Bay Buccaneers lost to the Los Angeles Rams in the NFC Divisional playoff game on Jan. 23, the 44-year-old quarterback appeared on the SiriusXM podcast Let's Go! With Tom Brady, Larry Fitzgerald and Jim Gray and reflected on his future with the NFL.
While Brady said he's in no rush to make a final decision, he did note that he was going to take some time to decompress. "It's been six straight months of football, every day consumed by, you know, day in and day out football," he told Jim Gray. "And I think now it's just some time to spend some time with my family and spend some time with, you know, my kids…"
Speaking of kids, his 9-year-old daughter Vivian, whom Brady called his "little angel," then sweetly crashed the interview, giving listeners a brief "hello." In addition to Vivian, Brady and his 41-year-old supermodel wife Bündchen have a 12-year-old son named Benjamin. The athlete is also dad to 14-year-old son John (a.k.a. Jack), whose mom is Brady's ex actress Bridget Moynahan and whom Bündchen lovingly refers to as her "bonus child."
And even after more than two decades in the game (not to mention seven Super Bowl wins and three NFL MVP honors), Brady noted that football isn't everything.
"I think as I've gotten older, I think the best part is, football is extremely important in my life, and it means a lot to me, and I care a lot about what we're trying to accomplish as a team, and I care a lot about my teammates," he said. "And the biggest difference now that I'm older is I have kids now too, you know, and I care about them a lot as well."
Brady went on to call his children and Bündchen his "biggest supporters."
"You know, it pains her to see me get hit out there," he continued, "and, you know, she deserves what she needs from me as a husband and my kids deserve what they need from me as a dad. And, you know, I'm gonna spend some time with them and give them what they need, 'cause they've really been giving me what I need the last six months to do what I love to do."
As he put it, "It's what relationships are all about. It's not always what I want. It's what we want as a family. And, you know, I'm gonna spend a lot of time with them and then, you know, figure out in the future what's next."
Brady said the decision on whether he'll continue to play will also come down to whether he feels like he still has "the ability to commit to what the team really needs," noting his teammates don't "deserve anything less than my best." And while he said "there's a long time between now and the start of next football season" and that he's still figuring things out, he reminded listeners "we never know what's gonna happen in the future."
"We really don't. I mean, Kobe Bryant, a friend of ours, God rest his soul, you think you're gonna live forever, we're not. We think we're gonna play forever, we're not," he said while remembering the late Lakers legend. "What can we do? We can enjoy the moments that we have."
And that's a mentality Brady plans to maintain whether he's on or off the field.
"As difficult as it was to lose the game yesterday, I was glad I played in it and I was glad I was a part of it," he continued, later adding, "Playing football I get so much joy from. I love it. But not playing football, there's a lot of joy in that for me also now, too, with my kids getting older and seeing them develop and grow. So all these things need to be considered and they will be."