SALT LAKE CITY — In the entire history of sports, there might be no more intriguing, tragic and enigmatic character than Aaron Hernandez, the New England Patriots’ gifted tight end who led a double life — one under the bright lights of the TV cameras and stadiums, the other under cover of darkness outside of bars and parking lots.
We know how it ended, but how he got there is much more uncertain and therein lies the mystery. He risked a life of riches, privilege and fame to surrender to the strange, senseless pull of the thug life. Ultimately, he murdered at least one man, execution style, and maimed another. He wound up in prison, where he killed himself.
The Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigative team — featured in the excellent 2015 movie “Spotlight” — made Hernandez the subject of a recent project. The result is a powerful six-part series of articles and podcasts.
The reporting provides more detail into the brain damage that Hernandez suffered from football collisions, as well as revelations of an abusive father, a conflicting sexual identity, his father’s death and rejection of his home life afterward. No single factor can account for Hernandez’s choices or behavior. His brother D.J. endured the same abuse and played the same game, but had no such trouble.
The thread that runs through the report is the role the machinations of football played in Hernandez’s demise — the coaches, lawyers, school officials and legal authorities who facilitated Hernandez along the way, all for the sake of the mighty game (and the hundreds of millions of dollars it generates).
One of those coaches is Urban Meyer. This has not been a good year for the coach, who was suspended by Ohio State for three games this season for retaining an assistant coach who was accused of abusing his wife.
Meyer is familiar to Utah fans. He used a two-year stop at Utah — during which he won 22 of 24 games — to land at Florida in 2005. A year later, he showed up at Hernandez’s high school in Connecticut not only to convince him to come to Florida but to come early.
It’s become a common practice in college football to convince kids to leave high school six months before graduation so they can compete in spring football and start learning the playbook. Never mind that in Hernandez’s case, he was 17 years old and wouldn’t turn 18 until November of the following year, or that he was ill-prepared for college academically or emotionally.
Dennis Siegmann, the principal of Bristol Central High, told the Globe that Meyer visited the school and met with him in his office. Meyer told him that he wanted Hernandez to leave high school six months early. “It was the first time I had heard that they were doing this at the college level,” says Siegmann. “He was the one who said we need to get him down here for spring ball. And I said, ‘Well, how are we doing that?’ And he said, ‘Well, he has to graduate,’ and I said, ‘Well, I don’t know if we can do that.’”
Siegmann thought Hernandez was too young and troubled. Meyer and one of his assistants convinced him — and Hernandez’s equally concerned mother — otherwise. “In hindsight, I would probably say no way can I do this,” says Siegmann. “… For me as a principal, that was a big concern … They (the two Florida coaches) were pushing pretty hard. Every kid wants to hear you can play in the NFL. To push that on a 17-year-old — he said, ‘Yeah, I want to do that’ … It was daunting on Aaron.”
Siegmann regrets the Florida coaches got their way. “If I had to do it over again,” he told the Globe, “I would have fought tooth and nail not to let that kid graduate at mid-year. But it’s hindsight. … We never got to see the full growth of Aaron Hernandez at high school and would that have changed anything?”
Meyer said he couldn’t remember meeting with Hernandez’s principal and said he wouldn’t encourage kids to leave high school early (Meyer claimed similar memory issues during this year’s investigation of his troubled assistant coach). And yet Hernandez was one of eight recruits who left high school six months early to join Meyer’s team in January 2007.
Only two would earn degrees from Florida; six would play in the NFL. Hernandez needed special help with reading and writing and required remedial classes at a community college. His courses at Florida included bowling, theater appreciation, and “plants, gardening and you.”
Three months after arriving at Florida, Hernandez sucker-punched a bar manager in the left ear when the latter confronted him about an unpaid bar tab. Hernandez admitted it. The Globe reported that Hernandez called Meyer in the middle of the night. At first, the bar manager wanted to press charges, but later changed his mind.
This was routine stuff for Meyer and the football program. As has been widely reported for years, during Meyer’s six years at Florida more than 30 of his players were arrested, and this doesn’t count those who committed crimes but were never actually arrested, as was the case with Hernandez. Florida had a lawyer named Huntley Johnson who specialized in helping Florida players extricate themselves from legal issues (he even had a poster in his office on which Meyer had written, “Thanks for being part of the team.”)
Hernandez was still 17 when he found trouble again. He got into a confrontation in a bar that led to a fight in the parking lot. Later, the men whom Hernandez had confronted that night were stopped at a traffic light when a man on foot approached the car and shot one of the occupants in the head. A witness picked Hernandez as the shooter out of a photo lineup.
It took four hours for Meyer to respond to a police request to interview some of his players while they reportedly consulted a lawyer. The witness who identified Hernandez as the gunman, recanted. No one was ever charged with the crime. The victim had to learn to walk and talk again. His mother accused Florida coaches of being more concerned with protecting players than finding out who would shoot a man in the head.
So began a long, troubled descent for Hernandez. He later admitted to indulging in drugs frequently, but he sat out only one game (and it was only assumed by reporters that it was a failed drug test). As a junior he became an All-American and won the John Mackey Award as the nation’s top tight end. He left school early again — three years after he left high school early — to declare for the NFL draft, but word was out among NFL scouts that Hernandez was trouble.
He was given the lowest possible score for social maturity by NFL teams. Five tight ends were chosen ahead of him in the draft and he wasn’t taken until the fourth round by the New England Patriots. Many have postulated that being selected by the Patriots — based just two hours from his hometown and his old bad influences — facilitated his demise, but that claim ignores the fact he found plenty of trouble in Florida.
In one of the more poignant moments of the Globe’s report, Meyer is asked if he would do anything different with Hernandez if he could rewind the clock. He reportedly paused more than 20 seconds before responding. “I really don’t know,” he begins. “I saw a distressed person when he came to our place. We tried to surround him with quality people when he came here and we monitored him closely … so I’m trying to think. We want our guys to be successful and we try to help them. That’s a tough question.”