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Sports Star Relationships With Uncomfortable Age Gaps

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Some of sports’ biggest names found love with women decades younger than themselves.

From Derek Jeter’s model wife to Robert Kraft’s headline-grabbing romance, a handful of athletes and team owners have made news not for their stats but for their partners’ birth certificates. Nicki Swift’s rundown of “Sports Star Relationships With Uncomfortable Age Gaps” traces ten couples where the calendar became as talked-about as the courtship itself. Some of these pairings ended marriages; others followed years of very public dating.

• Derek Jeter married model Hannah Davis in July 2016 with a 16-year age gap, and Davis has described the Yankees legend as an “old soul.”
• Robert Kraft, born in 1941, made headlines in 2012 dating actress Ricki Noel Lander, born in 1979 — a 38-year difference, the widest of the group.
• Tiki Barber divorced his pregnant wife of 11 years, Ginny Cha, in 2010 to pursue 23-year-old former NBC intern Traci Lynn Johnson, marrying her in 2012 with a 12-year gap between them.

The Marriages Built On Big Gaps

Derek Jeter’s romance with Hannah Davis produced one of baseball’s more scrutinized weddings, a July 2016 ceremony that came with a 16-year age difference — Jeter born in 1974, Davis in 1990. Michael Jordan followed a similar pattern, marrying model Yvette Prieto in 2013 with a 15-year gap between the two, Jordan born in 1963 and Prieto in 1978. Steve Nash, the two-time NBA MVP, married Lilla Frederick in 2016; she’s 16 years younger than him. Hines Ward, the former Steelers wide receiver, married Lindsey Georgalas-Ward in 2014 with a 15-year difference separating them.

Tennis great Björn Borg took a similar path after a turbulent run of prior romances, marrying Patricia Östfeldt in 2002. She’s 13 years his junior, and Borg has spoken about the relationship as the calm after a stormy stretch in his personal life — the kind of settling-down story that echoes what’s been reported about other celebrities finding stability with younger partners after messier chapters.

Age Gaps Fueling Divorce Rates

Not every pairing on this list started clean. Julius Erving — Dr. J to NBA fans — left his first wife, Turquoise, after fathering a child in 2003 with Dorys Madden, who is roughly 30 years younger than him; the two eventually married in 2008. Tiki Barber’s split was even more jarring: he divorced Ginny Cha, his wife of 11 years, while she was pregnant, in order to date 23-year-old Traci Lynn Johnson, a former NBC intern. The couple, 12 years apart, married in 2012 after the fallout from the divorce dominated sports-gossip coverage.

Robert Kraft was 71 dating a 33-year-old actress — a 38-year gap that made the Patriots owner’s love life bigger news than his team’s offseason moves.

Height, Rings, And An Arby’s Setup

Wladimir Klitschko’s relationship with actress Hayden Panettiere started in 2009, led to an engagement in 2013, and produced a daughter in 2014 — all despite a 13-year age gap and an 18-inch height difference between the heavyweight boxer and the actress. Kurt Angle’s story has its own quirky origin: the Olympic wrestler and WWE star met Giovanna Yannotti through a friend’s introduction at an Arby’s, and the two married in 2012 with an 18-year gap between them, the largest age difference among the couples who actually tied the knot.

Robert Kraft’s situation stands apart because it never became a marriage story — it became a tabloid story. The Patriots owner, born in 1941, started dating actress Ricki Noel Lander, born in 1979, and the coverage in 2012 focused almost entirely on the math: 71 and 33, a 38-year spread that dwarfed every other pairing Nicki Swift highlighted.

What ties all ten together isn’t scandal so much as timing — several of these relationships followed divorces, retirements, or, in Klitschko’s case, the peak of a heavyweight title reign, when a star athlete’s public life suddenly had room for a very different kind of headline than the one his stat sheet usually generated.