Phil Hellmuth Turns Down Wife Swap Offer

Phil Hellmuth is one of the few poker celebrities able to garner attention away from the green felt, and this week the 13-times WSOP bracelet winner was offered the opportunity to appear on the ABC television show Celebrity Wife Swap.
In the hit reality television program, two families from different social backgrounds and lifestyles swap wives for two weeks before then meeting up to discuss their different experiences. In the celebrity version of the show, past participants have included musicians Coolio and Mark McGrath, actors Andy Dick and Lorenzo Lamas, and wrestlers Ric Flair and Roddy Piper.
Phil Hellmuth would have then been the first poker professional to have taken part in the show, and would have received a fee of around $100,000, as well as a huge amount of publicity. The outgoing Hellmuth would also have had the chance to introduce poker fans to a more chilled version than the one they  have gotten used to over the years, and as the 50 year-old pro explained to PokerNews:
“It’s pretty cool to get that offer. I would love to do it. That kind of stuff is fun for me, and I feel like it’s a chance for the world to see me, to see the real me. I think too often people think I’m a jerk. If they see me on that show over two weeks – never lose my temper, never swear, a lot of patience – I think they would say wow, this is the Phil that we’ve never seen before, but this is the real Phil.”
Unfortunately, while Hellmuth was excited at the prospect of appearing on television, his Stanford psychologist wife Katherine (photo) was not. As Hellmuth, explains:
“Unfortunately my wife is a psychiatrist at a pretty famous institution, and she hates press. She doesn’t like it when they show her on the World Series of Poker coverage … It’s unfortunate for me that she just really has no interest. My wife is beautiful, she’s in fantastic shape, I drool over her every day. She’s brilliant, she’s stable, she’s very logical, and so I think she would do just phenomenally well on the show. People would love her and say great things about her.”
Phil Hellmuth married Katherine Sanborn in 1990 and the couple are known to have a good, loving relationship, and now have two sons, Philip III and Nicholas.