What The Hell Is Going On In San Antonio? There Are 8 Billion People On Earth And Gregg Popovich Just Married His Assistant Coach’s Ex-Wife

Dante9/25/2026 2:45 PM

TMZ- NBA legend Gregg Popovich definitely knows ball, but does he know bro code? The former San Antonio Spurs head coach is remarried ... to his assistant coach's ex ... TMZ Sports has learned.
According to a marriage license obtained by TMZ Sports ... Popovich has tied the knot with Mary Barth Budenholzer, formerly known as Mrs. Mike Budenholzer ... who worked very closely with Coach Pop to win 5 NBA Championship rings for the Spurs.

The newlyweds exchanged wedding rings September 16 in Texas ... according to the marriage license filed in Bexar County, TX.
Mike coached under Gregg (NBA fans just call him Pop) as an assistant for the Spurs for almost 20 years -- from 1996 to 2013 -- before leaving to become head coach of the Atlanta Hawks.

Full disclosure- Greenie already blogged this, and it's a real barn-burner so if you need something to fall asleep to tonight, check it out here-

Somehow, someway, Greenie found a way to congratulate this dirtbag for marrying, what I have to assume to be, the ex wife of one of his good friends of nearly 20 years. I mean how else do you explain Popovich keeping this guy around for 17 years as his assistant coach? They had to have gotten along extremely well, and worked well together. Or maybe Popovich had a thing for his wife the whole time and was just playing the long game?

I don't know.

What I also don't know is,what in the fuck is going on down in San Antonio?

When you've got Gregg Popovich- aka Mr. Culture himself- marrying the ex-wife of his longtime assistant coach Mike Budenholzer, I have no choice other than to slam on the brakes and assess the situation.

Giphy Images.

There are EIGHT BILLION PEOPLE ON EARTH. Eight billion!

We live in a time when I can pull my phone out of my pocket in Chicago and within 30 seconds be talking to somebody in London, Miami, Tokyo, Buenos Aires or a village in the Italian Alps. Conversely, our grandparents basically had a dating pool consisting of their high school, their church and whoever lived within six blocks of them.

You had 19 options back then. Total. And if three of them were your cousins, then you had 16.

Today your dating pool is THE ENTIRE FUCKING PLANET. And somehow Gregg Popovich looks around this enormous globe and says- You know who I think I'm going to try to fuck? My assistant coach's ex-wife.

Giphy Images.

This is where we need to have a larger conversation about people shitting where they eat. I've never understood it. And I never will understand it.

Your buddy's wife? A coworker's wife? Teammate's wife? Your employee's wife? Your producer? Why? There are so many goddamn people out there.

Especially, such as is the case with Popovich, when you've spent half your life preaching about character, accountability, professionalism and the sacred fucking institution known as- "Spurs Culture."

Which brings us to the funniest part of this entire story. Because this isn't even particularly unusual around the San Antonio Spurs. Does anybody remember Tony Parker?

Mourad Allili. Shutterstock Images.

Because Eva Longoria certainly does.

Kate Green. Getty Images.

Pietro S. D'Aprano. Getty Images.

Neilson Barnard/amfAR. Getty Images.

George Pimentel. Getty Images.

ETIENNE LAURENT. Getty Images.

TheStewartofNY. Getty Images.

Back in 2010, Longoria filed for divorce from Parker amid reports that she discovered messages between Parker and Erin Barry, who happened to be the wife of Parker's former Spurs teammate Brent Barry.

ABC News reported at the time that Longoria had discovered messages on Parker's phone involving Barry's wife. Other reporting characterized the relationship as an emotional affair. LOL. Yah. Another one of those classic NBA superstar "emotional affairs".

Imagine being married to fucking Eva Longoria, and somehow you still ended up shopping inside the Spurs employee-and-family directory?

What are we doing?

And imagine being Brent Barry. Nicest fucking dude ever. Crazy dunker for a white guy. You're playing professional basketball, traveling around the country with your teammates night in and night out. You're going into battle together every night. You're basically family. And your teammate leaves the arena every night to go back to the hotel and talk to your wife/girlfriend on the phone all night? And for anybody who knows anything about cheaters, and/or atheletes, there's no way other guys on the team didn't know about this. Barry was 100% the last to find out. Which is fucked for a multitude of other reasons. And it all happened under Popovich’s nose. Which means he was either in the know, or oblivious to what was going on with his players. Bad look either way.

(Sidebar- while we're talking about Gregg Popovich, can I get one more thing off my chest? Because Pop is universally treated like one of the great basketball geniuses who ever lived. And obviously, the résumé is the résumé. Five championships. Incredible longevity. One of the most successful coaches ever. Sure thing, but I will also go to my grave believing Gregg Popovich helped introduce one of the absolute worst developments in modern professional sports, and something that has doomed the NBA ever since- LOAD MANAGEMENT. No, obviously Popovich did not literally invent the concept of resting a basketball player. Teams had rested guys before him, especially late in seasons when playoff positioning was settled. But Pop and the Spurs helped turn strategically sitting perfectly healthy superstars into an actual organizational philosophy. And once everybody saw San Antonio getting away with it and extending the careers of Duncan, Parker and Ginobili while winning championships, guess what happened? Everybody copied them. The most infamous moment came in 2012 when Pop sent Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili and Danny Green HOME before a nationally televised game against LeBron James and the defending champion Miami Heat. David Stern was famously so pissed off that the league fined the Spurs $250,000 and explicitly said they'd done a disservice to the fans. And for once, David Stern was fucking right. Because what started as Gregg Popovich being smarter than everybody else eventually became one of the shittiest trends in the NBA. People save up hundreds or thousands of dollars to take their kids to see Steph Curry or LeBron James or whatever superstar comes through town once or twice a year, and suddenly you've got to check Twitter at 5 p.m. to find out whether the guy you bought the tickets to see has decided that night is a scheduled spa day. That's fucked. Sports are entertainment and the entire fucking business is predicated on the fact that people buy tickets, watch television, buy jerseys and care about seeing the best players in the world actually PLAY BASKETBALL. And somehow the league spent years pretending the customer was unreasonable for expecting healthy basketball players to play basketball. That philosophy has infected the league ever since. So yes, Gregg Popovich is technically one of the most accomplished coaches in NBA history. But every time somebody starts waxing poetic about his genius and how much he "changed basketball," I always think, yeah, he changed it all right, and not for the better.)

So yah, back to the Spurs being an incestuous fuck shack. What kind of organization is this?

And before Spurs fans get angry and tell me I'm unfairly throwing shit at the wall or lumping everything together, allow me to remind everybody and tell you don't even make me bring up the Josh Primo situation.

The Spurs have always been presented as the monastery of professional sports. We all know the drill- they are no drama or bullshit. Everybody behaves and sacrifices. Nobody cares who gets the credit. Pop drinks expensive wine and gives reporters one-word answers while everybody talks about how much smarter he is than the rest of humanity.

But now I'm starting to wonder if you needed to wear a name tag to Spurs Christmas parties that said-

HELLO, MY NAME IS __

PLEASE DO NOT FUCK MY SPOUSE

And San Antonio itself makes this even funnier to me because I've been there several times. Nice place! Great people! The famous river walk, fucking fire Mexican food. The Alamo. Families walking around everywhere taking pics. Everybody says hi to you and is friendly.

But from the sounds of it, you'd think the Spurs played in 1970s Key West the way these stories keep popping up. What the hell is happening down there? Is there something in the water? Does the Spurs employee handbook have a section called "Interoffice Relationships" and underneath it just says- Do whatever you want. We'll figure it out.

And again, maybe Pop and Mary Budenholzer have a wonderful relationship. And maybe they fell in love years and years after both of their previous marriages ended and everybody involved is perfectly happy for them. What the fuck do I know? If so, congratulations.

But if one of my closest professional friends of almost two decades started fucking an d eventually married my ex-wife, I don't care if we've been divorced for ten years. Fuck that. I'm still sitting there for at least five minutes staring into space like- "this motherfucker?"

There are certain names that should simply be removed from your dating pool.

- Best friend's ex-wife.

- Your brother's ex-wife.

- A guy who stood next to you for 17 years while you won four NBA championships's ex-wife.

Those feel like pretty easy ones to me. ANd again, there are eight billion people on this spinning marble. Go and download Hinge. Or take a trip to Whole Foods. Or join a fucking book club. Move to Italy and eat, pray, love for crying out loud. Go and learn Portuguese and start dating in Brazil.

But for the love of God don't scroll through your contacts list in your phone searching for the names of who was there for you the most after your first wife passed away, and develop a thing for her.

p.s.- any time this subject comes up, I'm reminded that an unbelievable number of people still don't know the Shania Twain story. And it might be the greatest wife-swap-that-wasn't-technically-a-wife-swap story of all time. Shania Twain was married to legendary producer Robert "Mutt" Lange. Shania had a close friend and assistant named Marie-Anne Thiébaud. Marie-Anne was married to Frédéric Thiébaud. Then Lange allegedly had an affair with Marie-Anne. So Shania Twain and Frédéric Thiébaud- the two spouses who got fucked over- leaned on each other while dealing with their respective marriages collapsing. And then THEY fell in love and got married. Shania and Frédéric have now been married since 2011. So essentially- Shania's husband passed her up for her friend's wife. And Shania eventually took that woman's husband. Bonkers.