Posted on 02/21/2007 4:32:22 AM PST by Chi-townChief
Tom Brady, Mr. All-American, says he's ''excited.'' You bet.
Informed that actress and ex-girlfriend Bridget Moynahan is three months pregnant and he is the impregnator, the three-time Super Bowl champion quarterback and purest man in the world -- or rather, his agent, Tom Yee -- said, ''Tom and his family are excited about the pregnancy.''
Wow.
They're not excited about the mother or a possible marriage or any kind of meaningful union between copulators.
They're excited about the fact their son/brother/relative has active sperm.
Maybe the Brady family also is excited about the late-night talk-show jokes that are brewing as I type this.
Maybe they're excited about Brady's current squeeze, pouty-lipped Brazilian lingerie model Gisele Bundchen, who could become the nanny for the baby, if not the actual stepmother.
Not that Moynahan is giving this child up.
She made no secret of the fact she wanted a baby when she and Brady were hooking up, excuse me, dating.
''I've been on this career thing for so long, and you look at all your friends who are finally getting married and having kids,'' she told Boston Common magazine last fall. ''I believe in balance in life, so I think I can do it all.''
No dad doesn't cut it Never mind the oxymoronic essence of that last statement, the part Moynahan is missing is that pesky part about family. Having a baby is one thing. Having a baby without a legitimate father is another, entirely.
For years that province -- of children born out of wedlock or raised without a married birth father -- has been perceived as the province of the poor and the minority.
Read, at its most vexing, black.
To a degree, this is fact.
Without getting into the sociological and economic elements that create such a trend, know that about 16 percent of white kids grow up without fathers but a stunning 51 percent of black children do.
Brady, 29, named one of People magazine's ''50 Most Beautiful People'' in 2002, is not the marrying kind. At least not now.
Hope that doesn't shock you, Bridget and Gisele.
But the shocking part to the world is that here is Tom Brady of the New England Patriots with those twinkling blue eyes and Cleaver-family upbringing -- Charles Pierce's recent biography, Moving the Chains: Tom Brady and the Pursuit of Everything, all but anoints the young man -- and he's just out there sowing seed like every other irresponsible rascal.
We'll leave it to Madison Avenue to decide whether Brady's action will affect his endorsement deals -- with Nike, Visa, Sirius, among others -- that bring him an estimated $9 million a year beyond his large Patriots contract.
The troubling part is not the gossip and all the rest of the giggle-inducing tawdriness of this little scene.
It is that babies in our modern American world have become items and baubles, things to have or not have, depending on the whim, mood, naivete, intoxication level, desperation and silliness of the two people involved.
That Britney Spears is the mother of two children, with her shaved head and utter instability, is about all we need to know of the children-as-accessories mental state.
Moynahan said, via her publicist Christine Papadopoulous (this is how rich celebs communicate, you know), that she is ''healthy and excited.''
Of course, no mention was made as to whether the fetus was equally as thrilled.
It was back on Dec. 14 that Brady and Moynahan announced, through a (what else?) statement, that they had parted ways ''several weeks'' earlier.
It's easy to joke about Doing a little language and math work, I see that several means more than two but not many, so the pair must have broken up sometime around, say, mid to late November. This being late February means Tom Terrific gave three-months-pregnant Bridget a last-fling going-away present.
One could laugh at all this.
Just as one could laugh at fellow superstar -- and equally white and All-American -- quarterback Matt Leinart, who impregnated a fellow student in his last year at USC and never had much interest in her, beyond the obvious.
But the devaluation of children is the real issue, the carelessness with which they too often are brought into the world.
And the current thought espoused by many that little boys don't really need dads in their lives at all -- that loving women and maybe a thoughtful male coach at the rec center will suffice -- is pure nonsense.
As syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts wrote recently, there is this pernicious idea among certain headstrong females and careless males ''that the father is unnecessary, that so long as there's some uncle around to show the boy how to hit the mark in the toilet, everything is hunky-dory.''
It's not.
Witness our jails and our poverty lines. Witness our schools.
Tom Brady has shown that the real issue is not race or wealth at all, but personal responsibility.
If I were a member of black America, I wouldn't exactly be laughing at Brady's sexual mistake.
But I'd be hard-pressed not to smirk.
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Bears fans are just goofy.
With Britney (her mother was too stupid to know how to spell Brittany) spears in rehab, why isn't that alone enought to take custody of those poor childrn?
(Trust me - I already know the answer in this "mother can do no wrong' and "father can do no right' legal system we have)
The United States has become a place where entertainers and professional athletes are mistaken for people of importance.
Robert A. Heinlein
I guess it's just a coincidence that the Pats and Colts beat the Bears this year.
What this dope does not get is that this was basically a man trap. Their 3 year relationship was over, and all of a sudden she's preagnant, now he has to take care of a child he did not want.
Seems to me that he would know how to prevent this from happening.
See my tagline. I have disdain and contempt for most "celebrities" for reasons such as this.
Must remember to never stand too close to Rick Telander as his breath obviously smells like BS.
But what do stats about black babies have to do with the QB & his pregnant ex-girlfriend?
I suppose he could have kept it in his pants, but that might be too much to ask of any jock.
Alley cats are alley cats. It is sad to see such talent with the morals of alley cats.
This guy is right on the money.
Brady is irresponsible, as is his former girlfriend, and some little kid gets to pay for it. There is tons of research that kids do best with their own dads & moms raising them.
Pretty good and too many politicians fit the term jester!
"What this dope does not get is that this was basically a man trap. Their 3 year relationship was over, and all of a sudden she's preagnant, now he has to take care of a child he did not want."
If this was a man trap, it lasted for three years, most likely not a celibate three years. It's been said that a stiff (can I say it here?) has no conscience. I should like to add to that that the man behind it can, and should, have a conscience.
It takes two to tango, and this pair has only contributed to my sense that Robert Ringer was right in his mid 1980's book - "How You Can Find Happiness During the Collapse of Western Civilization." It is collapsing all around us.
That is what I don't understand either. If he was just bringing attention to the issue of athletes having babies out of wedlock, why bring race into the equation. Plenty of professional athletes have babies out of wedlock. Lebron James had a child with his high school sweetheart out of wedlock.
Put down your bucket full of stones rev. Let's find out for sure if the girl is expecting and if so, is Brady the father.
If she is expecting at least the baby is going to be born and not aborted.
(Trust me - I already know the answer in this "mother can do no wrong' and "father can do no right' legal system we have)
You hit the nail on the head. While at LSU it was basically a competition on what woman could get with the athletes on campus, especially football or if their prospects of going pro were really good. It didn't matter the race of the athlete these women on campus were like vultures when it came to these guys. One girl was in 4 year relationship with a guy that went in the first round of the NFL draft a few years back, as soon as she sensed he was losing interest all of sudden she was pregnant.
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