Gisele Jinx?

I’m not sure of the provenance of the image attached to this post, but it sure conveys a Churchillian sense of triumph—a premature feeling that might have turned into rancid disappointment and anger inside the very famous young woman flashing this sign.

For the faithful in New England, the New York Giants’ come-from-behind win in the Super Bowl must have felt like (with apologies to Yogi Berra) Deja Blue All Over Again.

But the outburst by losing quarterback Tom Brady’s celebrity wife, Gisele Bundchen, rubbed salt in the wound. Fox Sports’ Bill Reiter went so far as to suggest that it might spell the end of “The Patriots’ Way.” That, for those of us previously unfamiliar with the term, is the code of omerta imposed by coach Bill Belichick that had succeeded, for much of the past decade, in keeping within the family the inevitable tensions occurring when testosterone-turbocharged young men, striving past every ache and pain and Monday-Morning-Quarterbacking session by fans, fall short in the quest for perfection on any given Sunday.

And wouldn’t you know it, no sooner had Mrs. Brady unleashed The Rant Heard Round the World against a taunting male Giant fan, when the Pats’ Ron Gronkowski—he of the most-talked-about bad ankle in New England since Curt Schilling’s much-hyped bloody sock—was videotaped at an aftergame party, moving as if his throbbing body part had miraculously recovered.

The Patriots' Yoko Ono?
It was a massive breach of the latter-day athletic Spartan code: instead of coming home with his shield (or helmet, in this case) or on it, the record-setting tight end was ready to dance on his, surely making a few fans wonder if he could have moved just as fast to catch Brady’s last-second Hail Mary heave into the end zone. It was a Patriot re-enactment of The Fall: first the sin, then the end of the innocence, all following a woman leading a man astray.

The whole sequence had many Patriot fans speculating if it all might have been part of a “Gisele Jinx.” Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy succinctly summarized the developing consensus: “The notion of Gisele Bundchen as Yoko Ono will gather steam now that Brady’s wife has inserted herself into his professional business.”

What a fascinating turn of events—particularly for a woman who has, from all appearances, led a charmed life as the Uber-Supermodel.

The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women
A friend related, not so long ago, that he had developed a small, unexpected, but fascinating subset of his very busy legal practice: representing models. The practice of discovering and marketing beautiful young women, it appears, can be singularly ugly, with some agents ready to take gross financial advantage of these naïve youngsters.

My friend is far too modest to draw the inevitable conclusion, but there is obviously, in this environment, a burning need for an honest, competent, all-around good guy such as himself to act as legal eagle. (I can’t imagine that my friend, if he had junior male attorneys at his firm, would have a terribly difficult time convincing them to perform for such clients work that would normally be considered the worst kind of drudgery.)

I gather that my friend’s practice includes at least a couple of young women who prance down the catwalk, but I don’t know if any of them have yet ascended to the rarefied level of The Supermodel: the Christies, Cindys, Naomis, Elles, Tyras, and Heidis of the world, the ones who can say: “Go ahead, hate me because I’m beautiful! I’m crying all the way to the bank!” Such women have long convinced me that the term “pouting supermodel” is redundant.

Now comes Gisele. Perhaps her profane outburst that her hubby couldn’t be expected to throw and catch at the same time was simply, as Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Gay contends, a matter of a loving wife standing up for her man in an understandable, if inappropriate, way.

But who could doubt that this was a blow to the Patriots’ esprit de corps, an incident so grievous that it made the appearance of a previously unknown “New Belichick” (one given to smiling, if you can believe it) as evanescent as “The New Newt” in the GOP primaries.

Another one of my friends (and he knows who he is!) has sometimes expressed delight that Brady’s wife has a twin out there, presumably unattached. But outbursts such as Ms. Bundchen’s post-Super Bowl rant make one question the desirability of possessing such eye candy, for reasons going beyond what Jack Nicholson memorably told Michelle Pfeiffer in Wolf : “The problem is, aside from all that beauty, you're not very interesting.“

I’m not talking simply about the fact that, even after she stops walking down the runway and consumes her first Twinkie in two decades, there’s a good chance that Gisele will be netting more money than Tom. (On one side: income from apparel lines, diet/exercise books, reality shows in which she could deliver tough love to aspiring Pouty Supermodels; on his side, a pension which will be lucky to exceed his mounting medical expenses. Do the math.)

I don’t even have just in mind the elemental fight every morning for Mirror Time. From Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe to David Justice and Halle Berry, the longevity of unions between professional athletes and their glamorous spouses does not seem terribly long.

The Difficult Mixture of Football and Supermodels
There is also the issue of why a supermodel would even want to follow closely a game such as football. Football involving tackling is not, after all, unlike soccer, volleyball, softball (a cousin of baseball), or basketball, an activity in which a female is likely to participate at a young age. If you’re a supermodel with a loved one in the game, watching him chased (and, sometimes, upended) by 300-pound mastodons at unbelievable speeds is likely to seem like a Sunday horror show. As for all that complicated play-calling—well, what could be interesting about that?

Even after hours of hanging out with, say, Hannah Storm or Erin Andrews—both of whom might be able to translate the game into fairly understandable terms—professional football is simply not likely to be fully understood or liked by Gisele.

And that lack of understanding might go to the heart of why she missed some fairly elementary things, such as:

* If her husband’s receivers were so bad, then how come they caught a Super Bowl record 16 consecutive passes of his at one point?
* Why had her husband put the Patriots in such a vulnerable position with his safety on the Pats' first possession, as well as with his subpar fourth quarter (6 of 15, 64 yards, an interception)?

* She couldn’t have had Wes Welker in mind with her tirade, could she? Because if so, her husband was at least halfway at fault by throwing so poorly on the play.

* Instead of taking umbrage against the Giants heckler who claimed that Eli Manning owned her husband, why couldn’t she point out, with perfect reason, that her husband faced the Giants’ defense, not its offense—then ask, with equally perfect reason, how her heckler might have fared if he had Justin Tuck chasing him all day?

* Instead of questioning her own team’s wide receivers, she might inquired about the wisdom of Belichick’s plan in guarding against the Giants’ wide receivers—specifically, whether the odds of Mario Manningham staying in-bounds on a crucial play would begin to work in the latter’s favor.

Instead, Brady’s Mrs. has made matters unnecessarily awkward for herself and her husband. No matter how much the two of them might offer abashed apologies, from now on, there’s going to be quite a contingent of Patriot wives who, instead of helping Gisele flip the burgers at the next summer Brady barbeque, would much rather flip her the bird.

No, the sense that Gisele is Yoko, or Delilah depriving her husband of his powers at critical moments, can’t be entirely sustained. There are equally, perhaps even more, plausible explanations for why the Patriots dynasty has, as the Giants’ Brandon Jacobs stated with relish, been “decapitated.”

First, perhaps this is all divine punishment for Spygate—a use of videotaping against an opponent so egregious that the NFL imposed a heavy fine.The Patriots have not only not won a Super Bowl since then, but lost in the most agonizing fashion: first, when they were minutes away from concluding a perfect season, and second, when they were on the brink of avenging themselves for that earlier loss. Somehow, the term “genius,” once tossed around regularly about Belichick, sticks a bit more in the throat these days.

The Curse of Bridget Moynahan?
Second, might this be less Gisele’s Jinx than the Curse of Bridget Moynahan? The star of Blue Bloods, Sex and the City and Coyote Ugly has declined to criticize her ex-boyfriend, even after a) he dumped her, taking up with Gisele shortly afterward, and b) he left her pregnant, and even, for a short time before the birth of his first child, seemed distinctly unhappy about impending fatherhood.
But Moynahan's ex-beau, more than anyone, should know better than to read a public silence as ready acceptance of reality. After all, Brady, as someone of Irish descent, should understand that Moynahan can summon all sorts of forces beyond the ken of mortal man. She can pray to the saint for whom she is named, for instance, asking her to take her ex-boyfriend down a peg.

Or she can look in a far less benign direction. Something in the ancient Irish way of life lends itself to impenetrable mists, or calls on the supernatural. (With their groundbreaking tales of vampires, Sheridan LeFanu and Bram Stoker didn’t write from a vacuum, you know.)

If I were the Patriots, I would deeply worry about this curse of a woman scorned. Consider Kate Hudson, who last went out with Alex Rodriguez during the 2009 World Series, and split with him shortly afterward, supposedly over his incurable narcissism. The Yankees not only haven’t come close to winning since, but Kate's Curse seems to be a metastizing force. (How else to explain Brian Cashman's current case of lunacy?)

As he considers what Gisele Hath Wrought, Brady has experienced firsthand the meaning of these lyrics from Peter Allen’s “Don’t Wish Too Hard”:

“How I wished for you and now you’re here
Now I wish that I could disappear and go away.”