The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (4 page)

“Part of Aaron's problem is, he never got no street sense; Dennis sheltered them from that life with all his might,” says Gary Fortier. “He was the perfect dad: he went to every scrimmage, and got 'em up at dawn to work out,” says Brandon Beam, an insurance agent in Southington who played against Aaron in practice each day as a cornerback for Bristol Central. A middle-class, mixed-race kid (mom Italian; dad Puerto Rican), Aaron had little trouble fitting into suburban Bristol. “He didn't speak Spanish and had no tattoos,” says Jordan Carello, a Bristol football teammate who recently worked at the Doubletree hotel in town. “He was so focused on his body that he barely partied, maybe snuck a little weed here and there. But we all did that, 'cause our parents were always home. If we wanted to drink on weekends, we had to run out to someone's car.”

His high school friends describe Aaron as an overgrown goof who was always trolling for laughs. “The guy would do anything to crack us up,” says Beam. “Stuff his lunch in his mouth in a single bite, or take a booger that was hanging out and eat that shit.” That was Hernandez: physically older than everyone else, but socially about five years younger. Friends say DJ was fiercely protective of his happy-go-lucky lug of a kid brother and taught him what hard work really looked like. They'd be out running suicides in the dead of summer, and rising early to do squats in the basement. “Aaron was driven by DJ, who was like his second dad,” says Beam. “He really wanted to make Dennis happy.”

It was a very different story with his mother, Terri. “She was good about schoolwork and that sort of stuff,” says a friend of the family, “but she brought drama into that house—starting with the bust for taking bets.” In 2001, when Aaron was 12, Terri was arrested in a statewide sting for booking bets on sports. The matter was handled quietly and she did no time, but she cast shame on the boys and dug a rift with Aaron that deepened over the next several years. Friends say Terri had begun cheating on Dennis with a physically abusive coke dealer named Jeffrey Cummings, who was married to Dennis's niece, Tanya Cummings.

Terri's relationship with Cummings, whose nickname is Meathead, was a bottomless source of grief for the sons. There was an ugly spectacle in the stands at a UConn game, says a family friend. Terri, on hand to watch DJ play, was angrily confronted by her niece and slapped in the face. The aftermath, says the friend, “hurt Aaron bad and broke his heart.”

He might have held it together, or handled the fallout better, if Dennis had been around to see him through it. But in January 2006, Dennis checked himself in for a hernia repair at a local hospital. Something happened on the table, though, and he contracted an infection; two days later, he was dead. He was 49, in otherwise splendid health, and beloved by virtually everyone in town. His funeral, at the Church of St. Matthew, was like an affair of state: 1,500 mourners packed the biggest church in Bristol, and hundreds more waited to view the body. DJ was inconsolable, sobbing over the casket, but Aaron, 16 and shocked beyond tears, sat stone-faced. Friends tried to console him or draw him out; instead, he locked down, going mum. “He'd open up the tiniest bit, then say nothing for weeks, like it was a sign of weakness to be sad,” says Beam. “His brother was at college, and the only other person he would really talk to was the one who was taken away.”

Heartsick and furious, Aaron seemed to implode. “He would rebel,” Terri told
USA Today
in an interview three years later. “He wasn't the same kid, the way he spoke to me. The shock of losing his dad, there was so much anger.” Small wonder there: she moved Cummings into the house she shared with Aaron, and married him when his divorce from Tanya was final.

To no one's great surprise, cops soon fielded phone calls that Cummings was abusing Terri. “We responded to that address on more than one occasion,” says Detective Lieutenant Kevin Morrell of the Bristol PD. In June 2010, Cummings got drunk one night and flew into a rage. Grabbing a knife from the kitchen, he slashed Terri's face and body before she fled to her neighbors next door. Cops arrested Cummings in the yard and charged him with assault and sent him to prison for two years. Terri divorced him that year, but took him back, say friends, when he was released in 2012. At last report, they had split for good; she currently lives alone on Greystone Avenue, though she hasn't been seen there much since Lloyd's murder. It bears noting that she's the rare-bird NFL mother whose son didn't buy her a big house when he got drafted.

With Cummings around, Aaron began getting scarce, spending a lot of time with family across town, in a roughneck stretch called Lake Avenue. This was the Bristol version of downward mobility, a hop from the hot plate to the fire. His father's brother-in-law, Uncle Tito, had a house up the block from the projects, where he lived with his grown daughter Tanya—the woman Cummings had ditched to be with Terri. Aaron and Tanya, first cousins bonded by loss, drew close very quickly, friends say. (He has the name of her son—Jano—tattooed on his chest, and has supported them both financially since college.) Among the dubious people hanging around the house were goons like Ernest Wallace and T. L. Singleton, an older-but-not-wiser drug dealer who'd been in and out of prison since the '90s. Singleton would wind up marrying Tanya and siring a child with her after Cummings left. Along with fringe hustlers like Carlos Ortiz, the angel-dust tweaker, they filled the heart-size hole Dennis left, bolstering Aaron with bromides about family love and vowing that they'd always have his back—which is another way of saying they sunk their claws in. Their motives couldn't have been plainer if they'd hung them in neon: here was a kid with can't-miss skills, a malleable man-child who'd be rich one day and fly them out of the hood in his G-5. All they had to do was get him high and gas his head, inflame his sense of grievance at life's unfairness.

 

From middle school, Hernandez had his sights set on UConn, and committed there as a star at Bristol Central. It had been Dennis's dream to see his boys play there together, having quit the school himself after a couple of years and gone home with his tail between his legs. But then Dennis died, making a jumble of things, and the world came courting his younger son. Enter the University of Florida and the messiah, Urban Meyer, who persuaded Hernandez to renege on UConn and come to Gainesville. It seemed a gift from on high: a championship program in a Bible Belt town with a deeply pious coach and devout assistants. Meyer had a rep for reforming players who'd had trouble elsewhere with the law. And he tried, God knows, to convert Hernandez; did everything short of an exorcism. “But there's only so much you can do in three years,” says John Hevesy, Hernandez's position coach with the Gators and now a coach at Mississippi State. “Bristol had him for 17 before he came to us. In the end, I guess, that trumped what we put in.”

Hernandez left home in January 2007, taking early graduation to enroll at Florida and be eligible for spring football. But he was miserable and overmatched his first year there and told friends on the phone he wanted to quit. Meyer brought him in for face-to-face meetings, reading Scripture in his office each morning. He assigned Mike and Maurkice Pouncey, twin All-American linemen, to babysit Hernandez, and detailed Tim Tebow, the truest of believers, to be his life instructor. But even Tebow couldn't save him from himself once Hernandez got a few beers in his system. The pair went out that April to a bar near campus, where the underage Hernandez had an argument with a waiter and punched him in the head as he walked away. Michael Taphorn suffered a ruptured eardrum, but didn't press charges on Hernandez, telling the cops he was talking to Florida coaches, according to a police report. The matter seems to have been settled quietly out of court, which was fine with Gainesville cops and the DA. They treated the punch-out as a juvie offense, giving Hernandez a deferred prosecution on the hush.

“We didn't hear that story till much, much later—the police didn't file a report,” says a local reporter who was covering the team. As a sophomore, Hernandez was benched for the season opener, meaning he'd likely failed drug tests over the summer. But Meyer denied it, saying he “wasn't ready to play,” again giving cover for bad behavior. “Meyer kept us at such a distance,” says the reporter, “or flat-out lied, that we couldn't verify a pot suspension.”

Hernandez would fail other drug tests, according to reports, and should have faced bans for up to half a season, per school regulations. Instead, he didn't miss a single snap, though he was seen hanging out with a crew of thugs at a local bar. One of them was Bristol pal Ernest Wallace, who came down to Florida, says a friend, to be “Aaron's muscle.”

“I never saw him with them, but misery attracts misery: there's vultures waiting to swoop,” says Coach Hevesy, who did everything he could to protect Hernandez. He brought him home for meals twice a week, took him deep-sea fishing, and treated him like the oldest of his three kids. “He played video games with my son, and my daughter wore his jersey to sleep. But whenever he left campus, he'd come back different. That's when the problems happened.”

Those problems didn't hinder his development, however. He was the rare college freshman who outworked upperclassmen, training by himself even before the gym opened, doing kick-flips off the wall of his dorm. As a sophomore, he became a starter and Tebow's third-down outlet, leading the team in catches in the national championship win in 2008, the school's second title in three years. “You see his athleticism and explosiveness, and as an athlete, it's incredible,” said Tebow. By 20, Hernandez was a first-team All-American and winner of the 2009 John Mackey Award as the country's top tight end. He could have written his own ticket if he'd kept his nose clean: been a high-first-rounder in the 2010 NFL draft and pulled an eight-figure bonus to sign. Instead, he cemented his don't-touch rep by getting embroiled in a shooting outside a bar. “He was out with the Pounceys and [ex-Gator safety] Reggie Nelson, and some guys tried to snatch a chain off one of the Pounceys,” says the local reporter. “The guys drive off, then stop at a light, and someone gets out of a car and shoots into their car through the passenger window. One victim described the shooter as possibly Hispanic or Hawaiian, with lots of tattoos on his arms.” The Pounceys were questioned as witnesses to the crime, but Hernandez invoked his right to counsel and never gave a statement, most odd since he was also called as a witness. No charges have ever been filed, and the case is still open. Again, he walked away unscathed: he wasn't even named in the police report. In hindsight, it might have been the worst thing for him. He seems to have concluded, with an abundance of probable cause, that he was untouchable.

 

In April 2010, a few months before the NFL draft, Hernandez sat down and composed a letter, or had his agent at Athletes First do so for him. (The firm is a top-tier NFL shop, repping Ray Lewis, Aaron Rodgers, and Clay Matthews, among others.) It was a Hail Mary pass to 32 teams, asking them to spike their bad reports and pick a dope-smoking, hair-trigger hothead. “My coaches have told you that nobody worked harder than me,” he wrote. “The only X-factor is concerns about my use of recreational drugs. To address that, I am putting my money where my mouth is” by offering to take eight drug tests during the season and to return a portion of his paycheck if found dirty. This was both delusional and an empty vow: the players' union would block even one extra test and any attempt to pay back guaranteed money. After seeing his predraft psychological report, where he received the lowest possible score, 1 out of 10, in the category of “social maturity” and which also noted that he enjoyed “living on the edge of acceptable behavior,” a handful of teams pulled him off their boards and 25 others let him sink like a stone on draft day, April 24. Only one team took the bait, burning a midround pick on a guy with “character issues”: the stoop-to-conquer Patriots of Bill Belichick.

Time was, the Pats were the Tiffany franchise, a team of such sterling moral repute that they cut a player right after they drafted him, having learned he had a history of assaulting women. But Belichick, the winner of three Super Bowl titles and grand wizard of the greatest show on turf, had decided long before he got to New England that such niceties were beneath him. Over a decade, he'd been aggregating power unto himself, becoming the Chief Decider on personnel matters. He signed so many players bearing red flags they could have marched in Moscow's May Day parade (Randy Moss, Donte Stallworth, et al.), and began drafting kids with hectic pasts, assuming the team's vets would police them. Some of this was arrogance, some of it need: when you're picking from the bottom of the deck each spring, you're apt to shave some corners to land talent.

Hence, Hernandez, who'd make the Pro Bowl one season later on an NFL-minimum salary. Such was his immediate impact, in fact, that the Patriots rewrote the book on tight-end play. In 2011, the tandem of Hernandez and Rob Gronkowski blew away the league marks for most combined yards, catches, and touchdowns at the position, pushing the records far out of reach. It was a wrinkle opponents hadn't seen before and were helpless to defend: two hybrid tight ends who could overpower safeties and outrun any linebacker in coverage. Belichick signed both to big extensions years before their rookie deals expired, giving Hernandez $40 million and Gronkowski $54 million, while stiffing Wes Welker, the slot receiver.

Like most of Belichick's recent gestures, this would come back to burn him—he'd lose Gronkowski and Hernandez to injuries. But the seeds of the fiasco were sown years earlier, when Belichick replaced the Pats' security chief with a tech-smart Brit named Mark Briggs. The NFL and its teams spend millions each year employing a web of former cops and ex-FBI agents to keep an eye on players and their posses. For decades, the Patriots relied on a homegrown crew of retired state troopers to do surveillance. Whenever a player popped up where he didn't belong—a strip joint in Southie or a weed spot in Brockton—Frank Mendes, the team security chief from 1990 to 2003 and a former state trooper himself, would get a call from his cop or statie friends, whether they were on payroll or not. “I'd have known within a half-hour if Hernandez had gotten in trouble with police,” he says, “and told Belichick and he'd do whatever.” But when Belichick hired Briggs, who'd managed security at London's Wembley Stadium and had limited street associates in the States, the tips from cops and troopers dried up. “The Patriots aren't receptive to those kind of calls,” says a law enforcement official who knows the team and dislikes Briggs. “It's not a friendly environment to call over.”