Belle Glade, Florida, 2013. Erotic dancers writhe within the dim purple mild of nightclub. Aaron Hernandez thinks he spots cops on the bar and exits. As they drive away, a buddy reminds him: “I do know all of your secrets and techniques.” In a distant, wet place, Hernandez pulls out a gun, shoots the buddy and leaves him for useless.
Later, at an awards ceremony, Hernandez receives a name. “It is best to have made positive I used to be useless,” says the voice on the road. “I’m alive. I’m alive and I’m coming in your ass.”
These are the opening scenes of American Sports activities Story: Aaron Hernandez, a TV drama collection a couple of younger man’s fall from the zenith {of professional} American soccer with Tom Brady and the New England Patriots to the nadir of a homicide conviction and jail sentence.
Starring Josh Andrés Rivera, the present relates how Hernandez’s abusive father, hidden homosexuality, alcohol and drug addictions and continual traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a mind illness linked to repeated head trauma, led to him taking his personal life in jail on the age of 27.
The rise and fall of Hernandez can also be an indictment of a multibillion-dollar sport that has by no means been extra fashionable. This yr’s Tremendous Bowl averaged 123.4 million viewers to change into essentially the most watched stay TV programme because the 1969 moon touchdown. Nationwide Soccer League (NFL) video games reportedly made up 93 of the highest 100 broadcast programmes final yr.
Bob Hohler, a sports activities investigative reporter on the Boston Globe who was a guide on the collection, says through Zoom: “We rejoice the sport. All people loves the sport, the violence, nevertheless it comes at an enormous value.
“The NFL has paid out greater than $1bn to gamers; 1,500 gamers have extreme Alzheimer’s, ALS, they’ve died of CTE or they’ve died of these illnesses. These gamers have two- to three-year careers on common. They [the NFL] chew them up and spit them out and so they’re commodities. And Aaron was a commodity.”
In 2018 Hohler labored on a six-part collection known as Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Soccer, Inc with the Globe’s investigative unit Highlight, made well-known by the 2015 movie of the identical identify about the workforce’s revelation of a decades-long cover-up of systemic youngster intercourse abuse on the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Boston.
The collection was changed into a separate podcast, which FX purchased to make American Sports activities Story: Aaron Hernandez. That is the primary instalment of a sports activities anthology collection spun off from producer Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story franchise, which had dramatised the OJ Simpson trial and President Invoice Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.
Hernandez was born in 1989 in Bristol, Connecticut, a metropolis often known as the headquarters of the ESPN sports activities community. He was the second son of Dennis Hernandez, a janitor and former highschool soccer star who performed for the College of Connecticut, and Terri Valentine Hernandez, a faculty secretary.
Hernandez’s brother, Jonathan, informed the Globe that their father, Dennis, was abusive and sometimes severely beat his youngsters. Jonathan additionally stated Aaron later disclosed that he had been sexually molested as a younger boy. Considered one of Hernandez’s legal professionals corroborated this declare.
In 2006, Hernandez’s father died from issues from a surgical procedure. Hernandez was a 16-year-old pupil at Bristol Central highschool on the time. The loss shattered his world. He later admitted that he turned to medicine after his father’s dying.
Hohler feedback: “He anchored him in a approach that saved him on the right track, as brutal as he was. We’ve seen a protracted historical past of oldsters, fathers doing that with their children and the injury they do by doing that however they hold them on the right track and so they get them by means of these nice careers. Then the sons discover out, ‘Jeez, I’ve acquired all these points due to my dad,’ however they’re wealthy and well-known.
“However in his case, all of it unravelled after his father went away. His mom’s acquired drug points, she’s concerned in sports activities playing; he’s residence doing homework as a center schooler and the FBI fees into his residence to raid the house and arrest his mom. This witch’s brew of points goes round in his head and then you definitely get into all of the medicine and the alcohol and it spirals from there.”
However Hernandez had a uncommon mixture of dimension and velocity. He was named Connecticut’s soccer participant of the yr as a highschool senior. City Meyer, who was soccer coach on the College of Florida, put stress on the principal of Hernandez’s highschool to let him depart early – regardless of the very fact he had already proven indicators of emotional and behavioural issues.
Andrew Ryan, an investigative reporter who was a member of the Highlight workforce that labored on the undertaking, says: “One of many issues that stood out to me is how he was conditioned from a really early age to imagine that penalties didn’t apply to him. He was plucked out of highschool early and he was not an ideal pupil. He wasn’t academically ready for faculty however he additionally wasn’t emotionally ready for faculty.
“However City Meyer went to Bristol, Connecticut, met with Aaron’s mom, met along with his highschool principal and principally stated we’d like him there six months early as a result of we’d like him to play spring soccer. We acquired his transcripts, we acquired his admissions packet to the College of Florida, and it’s clear that he wasn’t prepared.
“When he acquired down there he was truly taking remedial lessons at an area junior school – principally taking highschool lessons. Besides the distinction is that now he’s on this large campus and he’s an enormous man on campus.”
Hernandez was nonetheless solely 17 when he began on the the College of Florida in September 2007. Throughout his first couple of months he acquired into bother, throwing a punch in a bar. As a substitute of dealing with accountability he was saved by the workforce’s unofficial lawyer, Huntley Johnson, who made the matter go away.
Ryan continues: “That’s the best way that it labored over and over, not only for Aaron Hernandez, however for lots of people who play at these high-powered, big-money establishments. Regular penalties don’t apply.
“One of many issues that we tried to do on this was have a look at moments the place any person might have stepped in and stated, ‘We’re going to cease this,’ or one way or the other doubtlessly prevented the best way that this violently spiralled uncontrolled.
“Somebody like his highschool principal who we interviewed truly expressed quite a lot of remorse, saying, ‘I want I didn’t succumb to the stress;’ I want I might have stated, ‘No, he’s not prepared, we’re not going to let him graduate early.’ That’s the place Soccer Inc is available in as a result of it’s a enterprise that’s not about these children. It’s about cash. And cash brings stress.”
Hernandez helped the Florida Gators defeat the Oklahoma Sooners to earn the college’s second Bowl Championship Sequence championship in three years. He additionally earned the John Mackey award bestowed on school soccer’s most excellent tight finish. After the season, he skipped his senior yr and entered the 2010 NFL draft.
Hernandez, drafted within the fourth spherical, signed a four-year contract with the New England Patriots regardless of considerations over previous conduct. At 20 he was the youngest participant on the energetic roster within the NFL. American Sports activities Story depicts him hiding his homosexuality at school and past due to his fears it will smash his soccer profession.
There was no brazenly homosexual participant within the NFL on the time, Hohler notes. “There was fairly intense homophobia in quite a lot of these locker rooms, even amongst his greatest mates. His greatest mates, the Pouncey brothers, have been full homophobes.
“His behaviour within the locker room was sort of outrageous as he tried to attempt to stroll that line between trying like a troublesome man who’s pleased with his heterosexuality however on the identical time making an attempt to cover the opposite aspect. And jail is just about no totally different than a locker room in that sense.”
The Highlight workforce obtained and listened to just about 300 cellphone calls that Hernandez constituted of jail over six months. Ryan provides: “One of many fascinating issues once we would pay attention to those jail calls was we’d hear Aaron Hernandez code change, relying on who he was speaking to.
“When he was speaking to one of many Pouncey twins, he would undertake this hypermasculine, robust man vernacular. Then when it was another person – his fiancee, one other man from Bristol that he was very pleasant with – there was a very totally different tone in his voice and it was as if he was talking a distinct language.”
Hernandez shortly established himself as a star participant, forming a dynamic partnership with fellow tight finish Rob Gronkowski. Below coach Invoice Belichick, the Patriots went undefeated by means of the common season, although they misplaced to the New York Giants within the Tremendous Bowl. Hernandez was rewarded with a five-year, $40m contract extension. On the sector he was performing; off it, he was more and more unpredictable and reckless.
Ryan says: “The Patriots’ proprietor, Robert Kraft, stated we have been all duped, however I believe what our reporting confirmed was that there have been a number of purple flags and clear indicators that issues weren’t properly with this man, that his behaviour within the locker room went far past raunchy locker room antics to downright weird.”
Amongst the Globe’s findings was that the Patriots helped Hernandez hire a second home, primarily a flophouse the place his mates would collect however which was saved secret from his fiancee.
Ryan goes on: “One of many gamers we interviewed had talked about when he first acquired to the workforce that his locker was subsequent to Hernandez. Proper when he acquired there, one other participant grabbed him and stated, ‘Hey, I’m simply going to warn you simply keep away as a result of principally issues usually are not properly with this man.’ If it’s recognized at that stage, it raises the query of why one thing wasn’t accomplished and the reply in all probability there may be as a result of he was a great soccer participant.”
On Hernandez’s birthday, 6 November, his daughter, Avielle Janelle Hernandez, was born. He additionally acquired engaged to his girlfriend of 5 years, Shayanna Jenkins, that month and the younger household moved right into a $1.3m residence in North Attleborough, Massachusetts. However the phantasm of stability was quickly punctured.
In February 2013, Alexander Bradley was shot within the face in Florida however survived. He filed a lawsuit alleging that Hernandez shot him and left him for useless after they argued at a strip membership – an incident dramatised within the opening scene of the FX collection.
Hohler says: “This man comes again from the useless and is now haunting him at each flip. Each step he takes, he sees this man over his shoulder, ready to both kill him or out him. He recordsdata go well with in opposition to him. He’s stalking him in a approach that Aaron by no means anticipated or was in a position to cope with.”
Then, in June, the physique of Odin Lloyd, a semi-professional soccer participant who was courting the sister of Hernandez’s fiancee, was discovered a couple of mile from Hernandez’s mansion. His lifetime of impunity was about to finish.
Ryan feedback: “Initially it was clear that Hernandez was a suspect. One time he drove to Gillette Stadium, the place the Patriots play. What at all times struck me is that he was making an attempt to take refuge and search safety in a spot that he’d at all times gotten safety, which is in soccer. They usually turned him away as a result of at that time it was clear he was going to be arrested for homicide and there was nothing they might do.”
Hernandez and Lloyd had gone out to a membership one night time, Ryan explains. “Afterwards Aaron took him to a abandoned space, not too removed from the place he lived, and in the end shot him. He was convicted of taking pictures him execution-style.
“It was not a really well-planned factor. I believe Lloyd had keys to a rental automotive in his pocket that Aaron had rented. It didn’t take lengthy for police to stroll the path of proof again to Aaron Hernandez’s home. My interpretation has at all times been that he was so reckless and so uncontrolled that he was spiralling and, sadly, Lloyd was principally an harmless sufferer who acquired caught up and acquired pulled into this.”
Hernandez was arrested on a homicide cost and brought from his residence in handcuffs. The Patriots launched him hours later. In 2015, Hernandez stood trial and pleaded not responsible. He was convicted of first-degree homicide, which carries a compulsory sentence of life imprisonment.
Hernandez tailored to life behind bars. Within the cellphone calls, he might be heard talking tenderly to his daughter and requesting the Harry Potter books he cherished studying. Ryan says: “He talked about how cosy his cell was, about how neat he preferred to maintain his cell, about he would make his mattress day by day and have this little pillow and he had his clothesline. At one level, he had what he was describing as a pet mouse.
“He would generally sound like just a little child who appeared to love the routine, just like the construction, and the stress was gone. The stress of soccer, the stress of his lifetime of violence and crime and being hunted by Alexander Bradley. He sounded weirdly, oddly at peace.”
The case led to additional investigations into Hernandez’s involvement in different violent incidents. He was additionally indicted for a 2012 double murder in Boston however was acquitted of these fees on 14 April 2017. 5 days later he was discovered hanging by a mattress sheet in his jail cell and died in hospital.
After his dying it was revealed that Hernandez suffered the worst recorded case of CTE, a mind illness linked to repeated concussions, that scientists had ever seen in anybody of his age. His mind confirmed extreme injury, notably in areas affecting judgment, behaviour and impulse management. In one in every of his jail calls, he stated: “You understand I’ve no reminiscence. You understand my reminiscence’s cooked.”
It was one essential issue amongst a number of in Hernandez’s fall from grace. Ryan displays: “He preferred to smoke quite a lot of marijuana, however he was utilizing a lot, a lot more durable medicine and simply spiralling. You layer these medicine into what we then realized after his dying concerning the situation of his mind.
“You layer on that he’s any person who by no means confronted penalties due to his expertise. You layer on different issues about his upbringing, struggling along with his sexuality, all these items, it simply sort of turns into this potent cocktail and who is aware of precisely what was the last word motivation.”
Skilled sport gives the promise of fame and fortune to younger males from locations the place choices are sometimes restricted. It gives a approach out. However the life and dying of Aaron Hernandez is a brutal reminder that American soccer is an exemplar of American capitalism: survival of the fittest.
Hohler says: “It’s constructed on violence. They offered violence for 4 many years – the helmets being smashed up and the blokes getting annihilated on performs. Now they’re evolving extra into high-scoring video games and the passing recreation and the acrobatic kind performs and so they’re decreasing the violence as a lot as they’ll.
“However it’s nonetheless a really harsh and chilly enterprise the place these gamers are commodities and so they’re chips on the desk and so they simply discard them as quickly as they discover the subsequent higher chip. It’s a brutal sport. It’s a brutal recreation. Persons are fascinated by it. It’s evolving in several methods.”
Within the US, you’ll be able to name or textual content the Nationwide Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or textual content HOME to 741741 to attach with a disaster counselor. Within the UK, the youth suicide charity Papyrus might be contacted on 0800 068 4141 or electronic mail pat@papyrus-uk.org, and within the UK and Eire Samaritans might be contacted on freephone 116 123, or electronic mail jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the disaster help service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Different worldwide helplines might be discovered at befrienders.org
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