The Dancing with the Stars season 34 finale airs tonight, and influencer Alix Earle and her partner Val Chmerkovskiy will be competing for the Mirrorball Trophy.
Supporting her will be her boyfriend, football player Braxton Berrios, who will likely be watching from afar. “He’s stuck in football world right now, so unfortunately, he won’t be able to come,” Earle said of Berrios ahead of the first show of the season. That reasoning has likely held up for subsequent weeks; Berrios has yet to be spotted in the ballroom.
Here, what to know about Alix Earle’s boyfriend.
He’s from North Carolina.
His mom, Lee Smothers, worked for a pharmaceutical research company, and his dad, Rico Berrios, worked for a Dallas-based furniture manufacturer. They divorced in 2002.
His dad, Rico, recalls his son wanting to practice football at all hours in all weather. He said, “My neighbor would come out of his house and yell, ‘Rico, you’re crazy! You’re going to kill this kid’ — but his wife would say, ‘No, he’s not killing him. That boy is going to play in the NFL one day.’”
Braxton has an older brother, Austin.
He went to University of Miami.
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Berrios in 2016.
He was a finance and entrepreneurship major, and played for the school’s football team. “Anything I try to do, anything I write my name on, I try to do it to the best of my ability. That’s really all that was,” Berrios said after the draft. “It wasn’t that I was so smart or not even that I value academics over or even the same as football. I think that’s a key part of life. They can take away football and all those things, and they can’t take away your mind and the brain and the knowledge you have. But, it’s just a culmination of work and just trying to do everything that was put in front of me to the best of my ability.”
He was drafted by the Patriots.
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Berrios when he was on the New England Patriots.
He was part of the team’s 2018-2019 squad, and though he never played he was awarded a Super Bowl ring after the Patriots won Super Bowl LIII.
Berrios has played for the Jets, Dolphins, and now the Texans.
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Berrios #17 of the Houston Texans.
“My dad, stepmom and all my brothers live outside Dallas,” Berrios said after he was traded. “For most of the last 10 years, I’ve been visiting Texas multiple times a year. It’s going to be a lot of fun being in the same state as them again, and any place family is, there’s a sense of home.”
Emily Burack (she/her) is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, celebrities, the royals, and a wide range of other topics. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma, a Jewish culture site. Follow her @emburack on Twitter and Instagram.
