Terry Bradshaw has been a married man as many as four times, with his first wife Melissa Babish – famed for winning Miss Teenage America – not finding her love for him reciprocated

Terry Bradshaw’s first marriage was doomed from the beginning – because he’d tried to call off the wedding two days before.

Nowadays the 76-year-old is a certified NFL icon and broadcast legend on FOX. But rewind over five decades and he was just finding his feet in both American football and life.

Not long after being selected as the first pick of the 1970 Draft by the Pittsburgh Steelers, Bradshaw became romantically engaged with Melissa Babish, who’d earned fame as the winner of the Miss Teenage America beauty pageant.

They tied the knot in ’72 but divorced only 18 months later, which may have come as a surprise at the time but makes perfect sense in light of Bradshaw’s later revelation. Explaining why their relationship didn’t work in a 1980 interview with Playboy, he said: “I was very lonely, and thought I loved her.

“[I] didn’t love her. I tried to break the wedding up two days before, but it hurt her and she was crying and bellyaching and I said, ‘well, maybe’. But it was a bad thing to do. I messed her life up and mine.”

Elaborating on the reasons why, he went on to add: “Immaturity was one thing. It was lack of good judgment, it was poor timing, it was wrong.”

Melissa Babish, seen here with Miss Teenage America host Dick Clark, was Bradshaw’s first wife (Image: CBS via Getty Images)
Bradshaw’s tumultous first marriage coincided with his early struggles in the NFL. He found it difficult to translate his unrivaled collegiate form at Louisiana Tech University to the senior stage.

He admitted it had an impact on his game. “I do remember being very depressed after my third season,” he recalled. “I was very lonely. I remember I was staying at my parents’ house and I was real irritable, my brother was picking on me and I grabbed him by the throat and threw him down. I was just furious and I didn’t know why.”

That lull didn’t last for long, with the Steelers winning four out of the six Super Bowls between 1975 and 1980. Bradshaw played a particularly influential role in the latter two, being named MVP of XIII and XIV.

Off the gridiron, he’d found love with ice skater JoJo Starbuck. They divorced after seven years in ’83 before he married family attorney Charla Hopkins later that year.

Bradshaw split from her before the turn of the century and is now happily wed to wife Tammy. After meeting her in 1999, they said ‘I do’ in a 2014 ceremony in Hawaii.