The troubles brewing back home in Bristol had shown up in Aaron’s face almost at the moment of his arrival at Gillette Stadium.
Just a few days after the draft, Hernandez was trying to watch film and growing frustrated as he tried, and failed, to figure out how to use the machinery. When wide receiver Wes Welker walked past the film room, Hernandez asked for his help.
“Figure it out yourself, rookie,” Welker said, jokingly.
That was all that it had taken to set Aaron off. “Fuck you, Welker!” Aaron shouted. “I’ll fuck you up!”
The incident did not do wonders for Aaron’s reputation. “That’s kind of what he was like,” Ian Rapoport, the sports journalist, remembers. “He was pretty edgy. Guys liked him, but he was edgy and liable to snap on the dime just like that. His temper was so incredibly strong.”
But if Aaron had gotten off on the wrong foot, the Patriots’ head coach, Bill Belichick, was not the kind of guy who would hold it against him. Belichick’s friends in Foxborough called him “asshole”—and the coach considered this to be an improvement over other terms of endearment he’d earned: Punk. Jerk. Beli-cheat. When Belichick had worked for Bill Parcells in New York, Parcells had nicknamed him “Doom and Gloom.”
Everyone agreed that Bill Belichick knew how to win football games. But not everyone felt that they had to like him.
The coach had gotten off to a bad start with the Patriots. The only losing season Belichick had as their head coach had been his first leading the team, in 2000. He had ended that season 5–11—a dismal showing that he managed to turn around the next year on his way to winning the Patriots their first Super Bowl.
They won it again two years later, and yet again the year after that, racking up three Super Bowl victories in four years.
But in 2007—a year in which they lost the Super Bowl—the Patriots were given the largest fine in NFL history: $500,000 for ignoring a new rule about where cameras could be placed during games, and filming Jets’ signals from their own sidelines.
“Spygate” was the first black mark on Belichick’s record.
Aaron Hernandez would become the second.
When Aaron Hernandez got to Foxborough, the team that Belichick had built was at the top of the NFL. Tom Brady, who had taken over for Aaron’s old hero, Drew Bledsoe, was still one of the NFL’s dominant quarterbacks—even though, at thirty-three, he was already old by NFL standards. (By way of contrast, Hernandez had just become the youngest active player in the league.) Belichick pushed his players, who were among the best who had ever played the game, to their limits. He pushed himself just as hard, working twenty-two hour days on occasion. The coach controlled every aspect of his players’ performance, right down to the exits they used to leave at the end of their workouts. All of them had to pass by his door, which was always open.
But even a coach as controlling as Belichick was could not control everything. And, as Belichick would learn, Aaron Hernandez presented a special set of challenges. Aaron was mercurial, immature, full of himself, but also fragile in ways that made his actions impossible to predict.
“In the locker room, he was sweet and charming,” Rapoport says. “Sweet is a weird way to describe a man, but that’s what he was—a sweet, endearing guy when he wanted to be. But the other part of it was that, emotionally, he was a wreck. It was not abnormal for him to burst into tears when he made a bad mistake. If he got humiliated in the meeting room, sometimes, he would cry. That’s not really normal behavior.”
Over time, Rapoport and Hernandez developed a connection. “In the locker room, I would hang out by his locker a lot,” the reporter recalls. “He was always accessible. Never a great interview, because he was careful about what he said, but he and I got along. At one point, I shot a video for him—something his cousin was doing. He told me some stuff. We exchanged information, and he said, ‘Look, you’re my guy in the locker room. If I’m ever going to talk to anyone it’s going to be you.’ I said, ‘Cool, man. I respect you, too.’ And he said, ‘But I just want to tell you, because I’m big on trust, if you ever fuck me over I’ll kill you.’
“I kind of laughed, but he was not joking. I looked at a reporter buddy of mine who was standing there, eavesdropping. He gave me this weird look.
“I said, ‘All right, all right. I’ll see you later, man.’ But later on, when Aaron got picked up, I got a text from that other reporter: ‘Remember that day in the locker room? I guess he was serious.’
“I was like, ‘Yep. Yes, he was.’”