Belle Glade, Florida, 2013. Erotic dancers writhe in the dim red light of nightclub. Aaron Hernandez thinks he spots cops at the bar and exits. As they drive away, a friend reminds him: “I know all your secrets.” In a remote, rainy place, Hernandez pulls out a gun, shoots the friend and leaves him for dead.
Later, at an awards ceremony, Hernandez receives a call. “You should have made sure I was dead,” says the voice on the line. “I’m alive. I’m alive and I’m coming for your ass.”
These are the opening scenes of American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez, a TV drama series about a young man’s fall from the zenith of professional American football with Tom Brady and the New England Patriots to the nadir of a murder conviction and prison sentence.
Starring Josh Andrés Rivera, the show relates how Hernandez’s abusive father, hidden homosexuality, alcohol and drug addictions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a brain disease linked to repeated head trauma, led to him taking his own life in prison at the age of 27.
The rise and fall of Hernandez is also an indictment of a multibillion-dollar sport that has never been more popular. This year’s Super Bowl averaged 123.4 million viewers to become the most watched live TV programme since the 1969 moon landing. National Football League (NFL) games reportedly made up 93 of the top 100 broadcast programmes last year.
Bob Hohler, a sports investigative reporter at the Boston Globe who was a consultant on the series, says via Zoom: “We celebrate the game. Everybody loves the game, the violence, but it comes at a huge cost.
“The NFL has paid out more than $1bn to players; 1,500 players have severe Alzheimer’s, ALS, they’ve died of CTE or they have died of those diseases. These players have two- to three-year careers on average. They [the NFL] chew them up and spit them out and they’re commodities. And Aaron was a commodity.”
In 2018 Hohler worked on a six-part series called Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football, Inc with the Globe’s investigative unit Spotlight, made famous by the 2015 film of the same name about the team’s revelation of a decades-long cover-up of systemic child sex abuse at the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Boston.
The series was turned into a separate podcast, which FX bought to make American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez. This is the first instalment of a sports anthology series spun off from producer Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story franchise, which had dramatised the OJ Simpson trial and President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.
Hernandez was born in 1989 in Bristol, Connecticut, a city known as the headquarters of the ESPN sports network. He was the second son of Dennis Hernandez, a janitor and former high school football star who played for the University of Connecticut, and Terri Valentine Hernandez, a school secretary.
Hernandez’s brother, Jonathan, told the Globe that their father, Dennis, was abusive and often severely beat his children. Jonathan also said Aaron later disclosed that he had been sexually molested as a young boy. One of Hernandez’s lawyers corroborated this claim.
In 2006, Hernandez’s father died from complications from a surgery. Hernandez was a 16-year-old student at Bristol Central high school at the time. The loss shattered his world. He later admitted that he turned to drugs after his father’s death.
Hohler comments: “He anchored him in a way that kept him on course, as brutal as he was. We’ve seen a long history of parents, fathers doing that with their kids and the damage they do by doing that but they keep them on course and they get them through these great careers. Then the sons find out, ‘Jeez, I’ve got all these issues because of my dad,’ but they’re rich and famous.
“But in his case, it all unravelled after his father went away. His mother’s got drug issues, she’s involved in sports gambling; he’s home doing homework as a middle schooler and the FBI charges into his home to raid the home and arrest his mother. This witch’s brew of issues is going around in his head and then you get into all the drugs and the alcohol and it spirals from there.”
But Hernandez had a rare combination of size and speed. He was named Connecticut’s football player of the year as a high school senior. Urban Meyer, who was football coach at the University of Florida, put pressure on the principal of Hernandez’s high school to let him leave early – despite the fact he had already shown signs of emotional and behavioural problems.
Andrew Ryan, an investigative reporter who was a member of the Spotlight team that worked on the project, says: “One of the things that stood out to me is how he was conditioned from a very early age to believe that consequences did not apply to him. He was plucked out of high school early and he was not a great student. He wasn’t academically prepared for college but he also wasn’t emotionally prepared for college.
“But Urban Meyer went to Bristol, Connecticut, met with Aaron’s mother, met with his high school principal and basically said we need him there six months early because we need him to play spring football. We got his transcripts, we got his admissions packet to the University of Florida, and it’s clear that he wasn’t ready.
“When he got down there he was actually taking remedial classes at a local junior college – basically taking high school classes. Except the difference is that now he’s on this massive campus and he’s a big man on campus.”
Hernandez was still only 17 when he started at the the University of Florida in September 2007. During his first couple of months he got into trouble, throwing a punch in a bar. Instead of facing accountability he was saved by the team’s unofficial lawyer, Huntley Johnson, who made the matter go away.
Ryan continues: “That’s the way that it worked over and over again, not just for Aaron Hernandez, but for a lot of people who play at these high-powered, big-money institutions. Normal consequences don’t apply.
“One of the things that we tried to do in this was look at moments where somebody could have stepped in and said, ‘We’re going to stop this,’ or somehow potentially prevented the way that this violently spiralled out of control.
“Someone like his high school principal who we interviewed actually expressed a lot of regret, saying, ‘I wish I didn’t succumb to the pressure;’ I wish I would have said, ‘No, he’s not ready, we’re not going to let him graduate early.’ That’s where Football Inc comes in because it’s a business that’s not about these kids. It’s about money. And money brings pressure.”
Hernandez helped the Florida Gators defeat the Oklahoma Sooners to earn the school’s second Bowl Championship Series championship in three years. He also earned the John Mackey award bestowed on college football’s most outstanding tight end. After the season, he skipped his senior year and entered the 2010 NFL draft.
Hernandez, drafted in the fourth round, signed a four-year contract with the New England Patriots despite concerns over past conduct. At 20 he was the youngest player on the active roster in the NFL. American Sports Story depicts him hiding his homosexuality at college and beyond because of his fears it would ruin his football career.
There was no openly gay player in the NFL at the time, Hohler notes. “There was pretty intense homophobia in a lot of those locker rooms, even among his best friends. His best friends, the Pouncey brothers, were complete homophobes.
“His behaviour in the locker room was kind of outrageous as he tried to try to walk that line between looking like a tough guy who’s proud of his heterosexuality but at the same time trying to hide the other side. And prison is pretty much no different than a locker room in that sense.”
The Spotlight team obtained and listened to nearly 300 phone calls that Hernandez made from jail over six months. Ryan adds: “One of the fascinating things when we would listen to these jail calls was we would hear Aaron Hernandez code switch, depending on who he was talking to.
“When he was talking to one of the Pouncey twins, he would adopt this hypermasculine, tough guy vernacular. Then when it was someone else – his fiancee, another guy from Bristol that he was very friendly with – there was a totally different tone in his voice and it was as if he was speaking a different language.”
Hernandez quickly established himself as a star player, forming a dynamic partnership with fellow tight end Rob Gronkowski. Under coach Bill Belichick, the Patriots went undefeated through the regular season, though they lost to the New York Giants in the Super Bowl. Hernandez was rewarded with a five-year, $40m contract extension. On the field he was performing; off it, he was increasingly unpredictable and reckless.
Ryan says: “The Patriots’ owner, Robert Kraft, said we were all duped, but I think what our reporting showed was that there were lots of red flags and clear signs that things were not well with this man, that his behaviour in the locker room went far beyond raunchy locker room antics to downright bizarre.”
Among the Globe’s findings was that the Patriots helped Hernandez rent a second house, essentially a flophouse where his friends would gather but which was kept secret from his fiancee.
Ryan goes on: “One of the players we interviewed had mentioned when he first got to the team that his locker was next to Hernandez. Right when he got there, another player grabbed him and said, ‘Hey, I’m just going to warn you just stay away because basically things are not well with this guy.’ If it’s known at that level, it raises the question of why something wasn’t done and the answer probably there is because he was a good football player.”
On Hernandez’s birthday, 6 November, his daughter, Avielle Janelle Hernandez, was born. He also got engaged to his girlfriend of five years, Shayanna Jenkins, that month and the young family moved into a $1.3m home in North Attleborough, Massachusetts. But the illusion of stability was soon punctured.
In February 2013, Alexander Bradley was shot in the face in Florida but survived. He filed a lawsuit alleging that Hernandez shot him and left him for dead after they argued at a strip club – an incident dramatised in the opening scene of the FX series.
Hohler says: “This guy comes back from the dead and is now haunting him at every turn. Every step he takes, he sees this guy over his shoulder, waiting to either kill him or out him. He files suit against him. He’s stalking him in a way that Aaron never expected or was able to deal with.”
Then, in June, the body of Odin Lloyd, a semi-professional football player who was dating the sister of Hernandez’s fiancee, was found about a mile from Hernandez’s mansion. His life of impunity was about to end.
Ryan comments: “Initially it was clear that Hernandez was a suspect. One time he drove to Gillette Stadium, where the Patriots play. What always struck me is that he was trying to take refuge and seek protection in a place that he’d always gotten protection, which is in football. And they turned him away because at that point it was clear he was going to be arrested for murder and there was nothing they could do.”
Hernandez and Lloyd had gone out to a club one night, Ryan explains. “Afterwards Aaron took him to a deserted area, not too far from where he lived, and ultimately shot him. He was convicted of shooting him execution-style.
“It was not a very well-planned thing. I think Lloyd had keys to a rental car in his pocket that Aaron had rented. It did not take long for police to walk the trail of evidence back to Aaron Hernandez’s house. My interpretation has always been that he was so reckless and so out of control that he was spiralling and, unfortunately, Lloyd was basically an innocent victim who got caught up and got pulled into this.”
Hernandez was arrested on a murder charge and taken from his home in handcuffs. The Patriots released him hours later. In 2015, Hernandez stood trial and pleaded not guilty. He was convicted of first-degree murder, which carries a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment.
Hernandez adapted to life behind bars. In the phone calls, he can be heard speaking tenderly to his daughter and requesting the Harry Potter books he loved reading. Ryan says: “He talked about how cosy his cell was, about how neat he liked to keep his cell, about he would make his bed every day and have this little pillow and he had his clothesline. At one point, he had what he was describing as a pet mouse.
“He would sometimes sound like a little kid who seemed to like the routine, like the structure, and the pressure was gone. The pressure of football, the pressure of his life of violence and crime and being hunted by Alexander Bradley. He sounded weirdly, oddly at peace.”
The case led to further investigations into Hernandez’s involvement in other violent incidents. He was also indicted for a 2012 double homicide in Boston but was acquitted of those charges on 14 April 2017. Five days later he was found hanging by a bed sheet in his prison cell and died in hospital.
After his death it was revealed that Hernandez suffered the worst recorded case of CTE, a brain disease linked to repeated concussions, that scientists had ever seen in anyone of his age. His brain showed severe damage, particularly in areas affecting judgment, behaviour and impulse control. In one of his prison calls, he said: “You know I have no memory. You know my memory’s cooked.”
It was one important factor among several in Hernandez’s fall from grace. Ryan reflects: “He liked to smoke a lot of marijuana, but he was using much, much harder drugs and just spiralling. You layer those drugs into what we then learned after his death about the condition of his brain.
“You layer on that he’s somebody who never faced consequences because of his talent. You layer on other things about his upbringing, struggling with his sexuality, all this stuff, it just kind of becomes this potent cocktail and who knows exactly what was the ultimate motivation.”
Professional sport offers the promise of fame and fortune to young men from places where options are often limited. It offers a way out. But the life and death of Aaron Hernandez is a brutal reminder that American football is an exemplar of American capitalism: survival of the fittest.
Hohler says: “It’s built on violence. They sold violence for four decades – the helmets being smashed up and the guys getting annihilated on plays. Now they’re evolving more into high-scoring games and the passing game and the acrobatic type plays and they’re reducing the violence as much as they can.
“But it’s still a very harsh and cold business where these players are commodities and they’re chips on the table and they just discard them as soon as they find the next better chip. It’s a brutal sport. It’s a brutal game. People are fascinated by it. It’s evolving in different ways.”
• In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK, the youth suicide charity Papyrus can be contacted on 0800 068 4141 or email pat@papyrus-uk.org, and in the UK and Ireland Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez is available on Hulu in the US and Disney+ in Australia, with a UK date to be announced
