For all the trouble that Hernandez would get into up in New England, Aaron’s teammates on the Gators would always remember him fondly.
“Let me tell you right now, there’s not one person in this world who didn’t like Hernandez,” Ahmad Black says. “We called him ‘Chico,’ and everybody loved Chico. Everybody in Gainesville. Everybody in the division. Everybody.”
Black, who went on to play for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, came to Gainesville at the same time as Hernandez. Like Aaron’s high school friends, he remembers Hernandez as a class clown—someone who’d make funny faces to trip his friends up in public speaking, or pop Ziploc bags in the back of the class to make his professors jump.
“Seven people from my high school, Lakeland High School, came here at the same time,” Black explains. “Me, Chris Rainey, Paul Wilson, John Brown, Steven Wilks, and the Pouncey twins, all in one year. “Me, Wilson, and the Pounceys came early, Hernandez came early as well, along with Joe Haden and Cam Newton. Those are the guys that you tend to hang out with. And that was a hell of a class. We arrived right after our team had won the 2006 National Championship. We got to go to the White House and met Bush.
“The Pouncey twins moved in with Hernandez on campus. I moved in with Markihe Anderson. But my best friends on the team were the Pouncey twins. I was always over there. Hernandez was always there. Hernandez went back home to Lakeland with us a couple of times.
“Then our tight end, Cornelius Ingram, got injured.
“Ingram tore his ACL at camp, going into the 2008 season. Hernandez played some significant minutes freshman year, but he wasn’t the starter. When Ingram got injured, Aaron picked up right where Ingram had left off and probably was even better. He grew up very fast. We saw a lot of great plays out of him. He was like two totally different people, off the field and on the field.
“Off the field everybody was always together, always joking, having fun. To this day, ninety percent of the guys I talk to are from that team. But that’s one of the things that gave us an advantage over other teams. We trusted that the man next to us would get his job done. And we never let anybody down. Hernandez was a significant part of our championship runs. Big plays. But Aaron always did big plays. Miami, Tennessee, in that 2008 season. He was the best tight end in the country—and he went hard.
“We had to go hard. Those of us on defense had to be better than the offense. The offense stressed that they had to be better than us. Ultimately that made us a better team.
“But Hernandez was also in there with Percy Harvin. We had Louis Murphy, Riley Cooper, David Nelson, Brandon Frazier, and Harvin at wide receiver. All those guys are NFL players today. We had Tebow at quarterback. We had one Pouncey on the O-line. We had another Pouncey at the O-line. We had Chris Rainey in the backfield. We had Jeff Demps, the fastest eighteen-year-old in the world—in the world—at running back. All those guys are first-round, second-round picks. We had studs all over the field. Who wouldn’t want to bring it to the offense? We had to show our best stuff.
“But Aaron’s thing with me was, he’d say something weird that made zero sense. He’d come up to me and say, ‘If the hamburger eats the ketchup and climbs the tree, who’s going to come to the ocean?’
“He would just bust out laughing. I’d think of the most random thing to say to him. Then he would say something back. Everybody loved Chico. We laughed together. We went to the White House together, again, after winning the 2009 National Championship. We met Obama. We ate together. Hamburgers. Pizza. Whatever we wanted. It’s catching up to me now, but back then we burned it off super-fast. And Chico was always the life of the party.”
Others who knew Aaron in Gainesville would speak about him in similar terms. After a rocky start as a freshman, Aaron became a ferociously driven football player. As a member of Florida’s student body, he was quick to make jokes, polite and deferential when he had to be, and disruptive when it served his purpose.
“He had a beautiful smile on his face,” Urban Meyer recalls. “Later in his career, it seemed to change.”
Even in Florida, it came down to this: Aaron loved to be the center of attention. But he was also impressionable and eager to please, and when the people around him made questionable decisions, he tended to go along.
“Here’s the thing about being around violence,” a person who encountered Aaron up in New England would say. “One time is bad luck. Two times, you have bad habits. Three times, you’re a goon. Violence is only around you so often by mistake. After a while, you are who you hang out with. And Hernandez did not have the best taste in friends.”