Who Is Kurt Warner's Wife? All About Brenda Warner

Brenda Warner is Kurt Warner's No. 1 cheerleader.

Kurt has had a successful career both on and off the field — going from a free agent to being twice crowned the NFL's Most Valuable Player. He also won his first Super Bowl ring after leading the St. Louis Rams to victory in 2000. In 2010, Kurt competed on season 11 of Dancing with the Stars and credited his wife for helping him achieve his dreams.

"One of the things I'm grateful for is that Brenda gave up her passions to allow me to chase mine," Kurt told PEOPLE in December 2021. "She had to put her career and her dreams on hold."

In the 2021 biopic American Underdog, which documents their love story, Kurt and Brenda are depicted by Zachary Levi and Anna Paquin. The couple have been married since 1997 and share seven children, two of whom Kurt adopted from Brenda's previous marriage.

As their children have gotten older, the Warners shared with PEOPLE that they are looking forward to more alone time as a couple.

"One crazy thing about our journey is that we've never been alone together from the day we met," Kurt said. "But we're close to being empty nesters, so we're looking forward to when we get to be together — and just be us."

So, who is Kurt Warner's wife? Here's everything to know about Brenda Warner and her relationship with the former quarterback.

She met Kurt while line dancing

Born in Parkersburg, West Virginia, Brenda grew up on a farm in Iowa and later met Kurt while line dancing at a country western bar in northern Iowa in the early '90s. She was four years his senior, and the then-21-year-old Kurt was a student at the University of Northern Iowa, where he played quarterback and harbored dreams of playing in the NFL.

Brenda told PEOPLE in 2021 that she wasn't looking for love at the time — she had recently gotten divorced — and had only started line dancing because her mom, who enjoyed line dancing herself, encouraged her to get out of the house.

"Timing, fate, whatever you want to say, that dance ends with us partnered up," Kurt added. "I asked her to keep dancing, and that's really how this whole thing started, a chance meeting when she didn't want to go out, I didn't want to, and somebody forced us to go out, and all of this came from it."

She has two children from a previous marriage

Before meeting Kurt, Brenda was married to a fellow Marine, with whom she had two children: Zachary and Jesse Jo.

In 1989, when Zachary was 4 months old, her then-husband accidentally dropped their son in the bathtub, leaving him blind and with a serious brain injury. Brenda took a hardship discharge from the Marines to care for Zachary.

"The world we live in, accidents happen," Brenda told Risen in 2018. "God's going to give me the strength to raise this boy. Now? I actually feel like I did get a miracle. It just didn't look like the same miracle I had asked for, that Zack would be completely healed. But my son is a living miracle. He's changing lives, like I want all my kids to do. He's making a difference in this world, even if he's living with disabilities."

Brenda and her first husband eventually divorced.