by Ian O'Connor
Eli Manning was not as good as his big brother Peyton; not even close. But in these situations he was the more dangerous player. Belichick had told his defensive players on the bench that the Giants’ two best receivers, Hakeem Nicks and Victor Cruz, needed to be contained, and that the key to winning was forcing Manning to throw to his less appealing targets. “Make ’em go to [Mario] Manningham,” he implored them. “Make ’em go to [Bear] Pascoe.”
On the first snap of his final drive, pinned at his own 12 with 3:46 left and the Patriots holding a 17–15 lead, Manning followed Belichick’s preferred plan and put a ball down the New England sideline for Manningham, who was covered by Sterling Moore and Patrick Chung. Somehow, someway, Manningham made a full-extension, over-the-shoulder catch while tapping down his right foot and then his left directly in front of Belichick before Chung knocked him out of bounds. The Patriots’ coach challenged the call, if only because he had no choice. The review confirmed that the 38-yard catch was good, leaving New England with that sickening feeling of déjà vu all over again. Dressed in a checkered gray suit, David Tyree, the retired master of the helmet catch, was looking on from the Giants’ sideline.
Manning picked away at the New England secondary, and the Giants advanced the ball to the New England 6 before Belichick took his second timeout with 64 seconds to play. He knew that Tynes would make the chip-shot field goal, and he needed to give Brady enough time to answer whatever points were scored. Belichick had only one call to make on second down, and it hurt him to the core to have to make it. Knowing he was violating every tenet of the Patriot Way, he told his defense to allow the Giants to score a touchdown on the next snap. The players had to repeat the order to themselves in the huddle just to make sure that they heard it right, and perhaps to give a teammate or two time to make an executive decision that overruled Belichick’s.
“Gotta let them score. Gotta let them score,” linebacker Jerod Mayo said.
“Gotta let them score,” Vince Wilfork repeated.
Manning handed the ball to Ahmad Bradshaw, watched the New England defense swing open like a pair of ballroom doors, and started shouting at his running back, “Don’t score. Don’t score.” Bradshaw tried to hit the brakes at the one-yard line. He lowered himself into a sitting position, but his momentum got the better of him as he turned toward his quarterback and fell gently into the end zone.
Belichick still had 57 seconds and one timeout to play with after the ensuing touchback, but now he needed a touchdown to win. Brady’s first two passes were dropped by the reliable Branch (off a deflection) and Hernandez, adding to New England’s long list of costly errors. On his very first snap of the game, Brady had been flagged for intentional grounding in the end zone, resulting in a safety. A Brandon Spikes recovery of a Victor Cruz fumble in the first quarter had been wiped out by a 12-men-on-the-field penalty two plays before a Cruz touchdown. The Patriots failed to recover two other Giants fumbles, and the hobbled Gronkowski failed to break up a jump ball in the fourth quarter that was intercepted by linebacker Chase Blackburn, who was giving away three inches in height. Welker later delivered the fatal drop.
The Patriots were always forcing other teams into mistakes and missed opportunities; the Giants were the one opponent who did the same to them. On third down, Brady was sacked by Justin Tuck and burned New England’s last timeout with 36 seconds to go. Tuck had driven the quarterback’s already injured left shoulder into the turf in the middle of the third quarter, and Brady—who had a run of 16 straight completions before the sack—wasn’t the same player after that. But on fourth and 16, the quarterback summoned his greatness one last time. He escaped from pressure and fired a strike to Branch for a 19-yard gain and a temporary reprieve. Brady found Hernandez for another first down before spiking the ball with 19 seconds left. Back-to-back incompletions left the quarterback with five seconds left in the season, the ball on the New England 49, and one play to separate the winners from the losers, who would be quickly shepherded off the field by functionaries trying to set up the on-field coronation.
Fittingly, Brady’s final two instructions were directed at his tight ends. “Run to the goalpost,” he told Gronkowski before Gronk lined up in the slot to the right. “Run to the goalpost and catch it,” he told Hernandez before the former Florida star split wide to the right. Brady took the snap and started dancing with light feet, as if he were Aaron Rodgers, just to buy his receivers enough time to get to the end zone. On the sideline, Belichick watched as his season came down to this desperation Hail Mary. Brady darted back, then forward, then back again, then forward again as Pierre-Paul finally broke free from New England’s right tackle, Sebastian Vollmer, and closed in on him.
From his own 41, Brady launched the ball high just before contact, and it was a perfectly placed 65-yard pass—of course it was. Hernandez had beaten Gronkowski to the end zone, and as the ball descended toward the cursive Patriots logo, Hernandez gathered himself on the r and jumped with the small army of Giants defenders around him as his fellow tight end waited nearby. Coaches at all levels of the game practice what is called the “tip drill,” sharpening a player’s reaction to a tipped or deflected ball. Hernandez couldn’t catch Brady’s pass with the crowd around him in midair, but he did his job by contributing to the tip and keeping the ball alive.
A tremendous athlete for his size, Gronkowski might’ve been quick enough on two healthy feet to respond to the deflection and make a diving catch that would be remembered and celebrated forever. But his high ankle sprain and the heavy tape wrapped around it made him a step slow in this high-stakes tip drill, and his dive for the ball was fruitless. The season ended with Gronkowski and Hernandez on their backs in a Lucas Oil Stadium end zone, with Welker next to them on his hands and knees, his helmet buried again in the turf.
Criticized for his premature exit in Super Bowl XLII, Belichick headed straight for Coughlin and all but lunged into his arms, wrapping the winning coach in a meaningful hug. Ernie Accorsi, the Giants’ GM emeritus and the executive who had hired Belichick in Cleveland, would later tell another Giants official, “Maybe this will keep me out of heaven, but I feel awfully good that we made a couple of choices years ago [in Coughlin and Manning] that gave him two defeats that I know bother him. And you don’t overcome those. You don’t forget them.”
This one wasn’t as crushing to New England as the first Super Bowl defeat, but it still hurt. A lot. “We just came up a couple plays short,” Belichick said afterward.
New England had dedicated its season to the memory of Robert Kraft’s wife, Myra, who died of cancer in July. To a man, the Patriots adored her. They wore a patch with her initials, MHK, on their jerseys, and after his touchdown pass to Hernandez, Brady tapped his patch and pointed skyward. Some players thought they’d let down their owner, but Kraft would hear none of that. He was proud of his team and gracious enough in defeat, for a second time, to wait with his son Jonathan for the Giants’ owners to step down from the champions’ stage so he could congratulate them. John Mara was moved by the gesture after both Super Bowls, because he remembered not wanting to see or talk to anyone after the 2000 Giants were beaten by Baltimore for the Vince Lombardi Trophy. “There’s nothing worse than losing that game,” Mara said.
As part of his recovery, Belichick decided to get away from football and play in the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, where he was teamed with tour pro Ricky Barnes, whose father, Bruce, punted for the Patriots in the 1970s. Barnes was impressed by how quickly the coach processed information on yardage and wind, picked a club, and fired away, and by how much he improved every day. “When he shows up, he’s a 20 handicap,” the pro said. “And when he leaves on Sunday or Monday, he’s like a 12.”
Belichick hadn’t picked up a club since July, and yet he helped his two-man team finish in third place at 33 under, only two strokes behind the winners. Barnes kept the football questions to a minimum, and during the event, most players and fans knew enough not to ask Belichick about
his second Super Bowl loss in five seasons. But Tiger Woods’s caddie, Joe LaCava, a rabid Giants fan from Connecticut, couldn’t resist getting in a shot on the driving range. LaCava spotted Belichick hitting balls next to Phil Mickelson and saw his opening. He walked up to Mickelson’s caddie, Jim “Bones” Mackay, with a devilish grin on his face.
“How about my G-Men kicking the Patriots’ asses again in the Super Bowl?” LaCava said out loud. “How great was that?” Mackay said that LaCava definitely saw Belichick and definitely wanted the coach to hear it.
Belichick’s reaction? He had none. Tired of being a runner-up, the coach just kept his head down and kept pounding balls into the sky. Belichick knew what Ben Hogan knew: The secret was in the dirt.
On August 23, 2012, a prominent agent was sitting in a resort restaurant in the Tampa area with a starting member of the New England Patriots when he noticed a man covered in tattoos on the other side of the window.
“Who the fuck is that psychopath?” the agent asked the New England starter. He pointed toward the tatted-up man, who was reading a Patriots playbook in a hot tub on an extremely hot and humid day. “He looks like he’s in a steam room,” the agent continued. “He’s drenched from head to toe in sweat.”
“Oh, that’s Aaron Hernandez,” the starter answered.
“What?” the agent said. “Could I steal him?”
“He’s OK,” the starter said. “He’s just weird.”
“What do you mean, ‘weird’?”
“That’s the most different guy I’ve ever been around. One day he’s supercool and normal, and the next day he’s acting like a thug, a gangster. He’s got headphones on, and he doesn’t talk to anybody, and he wants to sit at his locker and ignore the world.”
Believing marijuana was the tight end’s biggest problem at Florida, the agent had always thought the Patriots were geniuses for drafting Hernandez in the fourth round. He had a lot of clients who had told him that weed got them through the brutal demands of an NFL season. As long as Hernandez avoided suspension and kept using his multidimensional talents to New England’s advantage, who cared if he liked weed as much as he liked football?
In the hot tub, on the surface, Hernandez didn’t seem to have a care in the world. He was a few days away from wrapping up a contract extension worth a potential $40 million over five years, including $16 million in guaranteed money and a $12.5 million signing bonus, which was $4.5 million more than the bonus Rob Gronkowski had received in his six-year, $54 million extension, completed in June. The Patriots were no longer hedging their bets with Hernandez. Belichick thought so much of the young tight end that he decided to pay him instead of Wes Welker. The Patriots were convinced that their gamble had paid off even before Hernandez used the occasion of the team’s annual Kickoff Gala to reveal that he was donating $50,000 to the Myra Kraft Giving Back Fund.
Robert Kraft called Hernandez “a first-class guy” and a super player. “Basically [he’s] saying he wants me around here for the next seven years, he wants me to be a part of the family,” Hernandez said of the owner. “So I’m a part of the Patriots family, and he wanted me to be set up for life. He didn’t have to give me the amount he gave me. But he felt I deserved that and he trusts me to make the right decisions . . . All I can do is play my hardest for them and make the right decisions. And live like a Patriot.”
Hernandez even maintained that the experience of playing in the Belichick culture had changed him as a human being. “You can’t come here and act reckless and do your own stuff,” he said. “I was one of the persons that I came here, I might have acted the way I wanted to act. But you get changed by Bill Belichick’s way. You get changed by the Patriots Way.”
Across his first two seasons, Hernandez had impressed some of his teammates and coaches with his passion for the game. Donté Stallworth, a ten-year veteran, was a teammate of Hernandez’s for portions of the 2012 season. “To me,” the receiver said, “he was on his way to being in the Hall of Fame. I’ve never seen someone so enthusiastic about practice and training. Who’s enthusiastic about training? Nobody—but he was. He was one of the first to show up and the last to leave.”
One Patriots scout said Hernandez was like a hyper little kid at practice who couldn’t wait to get the running, catching, and hitting started. Chris Simms, son of the former Giants quarterback Phil Simms and a Patriots coaching assistant in 2012, said Hernandez had earned widespread respect by logging Belichick and Brady hours at the office. “Aaron was one of the most loved guys in that organization,” Simms said. “He was definitely one of my favorite guys on that team, too, and I know it sounds weird saying it. He was a real football player, this kid. He was into being great. He worked in the off-season when nobody was there. When nobody was looking, he was still going to get his work in. We lose the AFC Championship Game and three days later Aaron is in there watching film and working out.
“The coaches loved Aaron Hernandez,” Simms continued. “That’s not to say anything bad about the coaches; Aaron was very charismatic. You could cut up with him in the locker room, and he could talk crap to you, and you’d both laugh. He was extremely talented, he was 245 pounds, and he was quicker than [Julian] Edelman and [Wes] Welker. He could have been an all-time great.”
But Hernandez did show signs of immaturity—and even a bit of misplaced hostility—at the team facility. The Globe’s Shalise Manza Young reported that within days of being drafted, Hernandez had told Welker, “I’ll fuck you up” after the slot receiver refused to help the rookie figure out the equipment in the film room. Hernandez once called over Herald beat writer Ian Rapoport and said, “Hey, I just want you to know, you’re my guy. If you need anything, let me know; I will help you out if I can. But I just want you to know, if you fuck me over, I’ll kill you.” Rapoport laughed it off.
Reporters laughed when Hernandez jokingly answered questions while chewing on a mouthful of food, and team officials weren’t overly offended when the tight end neglected to show up for a couple of community service events he’d signed up for. Some in the organization noticed that Hernandez didn’t seem to have many friends on the team and often left the building alone, but they thought he was a goofy, moody kid who needed time to grow up. Others started to realize that beneath his desire to become a great football player, Hernandez was driven by some darker force.
One Patriots staffer who had regular contact with the tight end thought he might’ve been suffering from bipolar disorder. “He had a charismatic smile ear to ear for seven days,” the staffer said, “and on the eighth day he’d come in and, damn, he won’t even look you in the eye. He’s got a mean face on his head. It looks like, for lack of a better phrase, that he wants to kill someone.”
Hernandez was back into the drug scene with his Bristol crew, and one Patriots source said that over time it became clear to people throughout the organization. “That element of his life kept creeping back in,” the source said. “Everyone was aware of it. It was definitely a concern in the building.”
Belichick did talk to his Patriots about avoiding off-field trouble, something he’d been doing for years. John Hufnagel, his quarterbacks coach in 2003, recalled being impressed at how often his boss preached to his players the need to represent their team and community in a positive way. “Bill coached them on how to be football players, but also how to be good citizens,” Hufnagel said. “He made them aware of the potholes out there. When someone screwed up in the press, he’d bring it to their attention and say, ‘Hey, is this how we want to be portrayed?’ He made sure you fully understood where you were at and that you’re a public person, and never forget that.”
Only Aaron Hernandez was not going to be moved by any such lectures on civic responsibility. The new contract just gave him more money to spend on marijuana, angel dust, and whatever gun he thought he needed to protect himself while running with his circle of small-time criminals. Slowly, surely, Hernandez’s life away from the team facility was unraveling. Police showed up more tha
n once at a California apartment he shared with his fiancée, Shayanna Jenkins, in response to domestic disturbances that did not lead to an arrest.
In July 2012, Hernandez was involved in a dustup in a Boston nightclub with one of two Cape Verdean immigrants who were then gunned down outside the club. On May 18, 2013, Hernandez was reportedly involved in a confrontation with a taunting New York Jets fan outside a Providence club where, at around the same time, police saw an unidentified man placing a gun under a car. On June 13, 2013, a drug dealer and Hernandez friend named Alexander Bradley filed a lawsuit against the New England tight end, accusing him of shooting him in the face and costing him his right eye in February while the two were traveling in a car after an argument at a strip joint in Miami Gardens, Florida.
Were the Patriots and Belichick aware of the full extent of this behavior? They were clearly aware of some of it. Feeling that he was in danger, Hernandez had flown to the draft combine in Indianapolis ten days after he allegedly shot Bradley in the face, for the purpose of meeting with Belichick and requesting a trade. Belichick was not about to honor that request. A Patriots staffer named Kevin Anderson did later help Hernandez get a place in Franklin, Massachusetts, about ten miles from Gillette Stadium and eleven miles from his North Attleborough mansion; people close to the team saw it as a place for the tight end to lay low. Hernandez had a friend from Bristol, Ernest Wallace, move into the apartment.
Before Hernandez left Indianapolis, he again flashed the explosive side of his personality in the company of Globe beat writer Greg Bedard, who had been chatting with the Patriot in a bar before he looked outside and saw the tight end urinating on a running taxi, to the dismay of its driver. Bedard approached Hernandez and advised him to use the bar’s restroom, and Hernandez didn’t respond. The writer gently touched the player’s elbow and said, “Aaron, come on, this is stupid,” prompting Hernandez to wheel on him, jump in his face, curse him out, and shout, “I’m not a child. You’re not my dad.” Bedard told him he was acting like a child and returned to his friends. Hernandez walked back into the bar in short order and, assuming the role of Good Aaron again, reengaged Bedard and others in easy conversation.