Tebow jumped and made the toss.
The ball hit Hernandez square between the eight and the one on his jersey. For two games running, he’d scored the first Gator touchdown on passes from Tebow. Now, in the end zone, Aaron let the ball drop at his feet, spread his arms out like Christ on the cross, and felt the crowd roar all around him.
By the end of the season, the Gators were back in the number-one slot in the college rankings, having lost just one game (to Ole Miss)—by one point—in the season.
It had been a stellar showing for the team—and, especially, for Aaron Hernandez. The sophomore tight end was the talk of the town.
On January 8, 2009, the Gators traveled to Miami Gardens for the BCS National Championship Game against the second-ranked Oklahoma Sooners. Almost 80,000 fans jammed the stands of Dolphin Stadium—this was beyond capacity, and nearly twice the number of fans that would scream for Madonna, at the same stadium, later that year. The fifty million people watching at home set a record for a college game, and in eighty-two movie theaters in thirty cities across the nation, thousands of people paid to watch a 3D broadcast.
Tim Tebow, who been writing “Phil 4:13” (“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me”) in his eye black during the season, had switched to “John 3:16” for this game:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
During the game, more than ninety million people Googled the verse, which also trended to #1 on Twitter and Facebook.
“John 3:16” made an even greater impression on Aaron Hernandez. Years later, when he was alone in his prison cell, it would come back to him in a way that continues to haunt his friends and loved ones.
The game got off to a slow start. By halftime, the score was still 7-7. Then, in the locker room, Tebow gave his teammates a motivational speech that Bear Bryant himself would have been proud of.
“Get in here!” he said. “Get in here right now! Thirty minutes! For the rest of your life!...I promise you one thing. We’re going to hit somebody and we’re going to move the ball down the field and score a touchdown. I guarantee you that.”
Consciously or not, Tebow was quoting—and mangling—James Van Der Beek’s speech in the 1999 film Varsity Blues. But the quarterback’s delivery was everything, and his teammates responded in kind.
“Look at me!” Tebow shouted. “Look at me! We got thirty minutes for the rest of our lives. Thirty minutes for the rest of our lives! Let’s go!”
In the second half, Tebow made good on his promise. By the end of the game, he’d completed eighteen of thirty passes for 231 yards and two touchdowns.
Playing on a sore ankle, wide receiver Percy Harvin managed 121 yards and scored a touchdown.
Aaron Hernandez caught five passes for fifty-seven yards—another impressive showing.
The final score, 24-14, won the Gators their second National Championship in three years.
All in all, Aaron had finished the season with thirty-four receptions, 381 yards, and five touchdowns.
Eight days later, Terri Hernandez married Aaron’s cousin Tanya’s ex-husband, Jeffrey Cummings, in Las Vegas.
It appears that Aaron did not attend the ceremony.
Chapter 24
In the 2009 season, Hernandez led the Gators in receptions, with sixty-eight for 850 yards and five touchdowns—two of them in the same game, against rival Florida State. In December, he won the Mackey Award, given annually to the best collegiate tight end, along with the All-American and All-Southeastern Conference first-team picks.
After the Gators won the 2010 Sugar Bowl that January, there seemed to be no question that Aaron Hernandez had earned a spot as a first-round pick for the NFL. He seemed to have every reason to skip senior year and enter the upcoming draft. But Aaron also knew that there were questions about his behavior and his drug use—questions that he would have to address at the league’s upcoming Scouting Combine in Indiana.
To prepare, Aaron spent several weeks on the West Coast, where Brian Murphy, the founder of Athletes First—the sports agency Aaron had signed with—oversaw his training for the NFL Combine and Pro Day.
“He flew out to California, with his brother, and lived here for two and a half months,” Murphy says. “That’s what we do with all our recruits. These days, we spend about $75,000, $100,000 on each person. We have our own training facility. They train there. They work out with our tight end coaches. We give them a physical therapist, a soft tissue specialist, a mental health specialist. We teach them the ins and outs of the NFL.
“We got to spend every day with Aaron. We talked about his past. We talked about where he grew up. We talked about his dad. We talked about his mom. We talked about everything. I really got to know him well.
“The idea is to get these players ready for the draft and ready for life. You’re not in Florida anymore. You can’t be late for meetings. You can’t play by your own rules. And Aaron tried his hardest.”
In February 2010, Aaron joined Tim Tebow, Maurkice Pouncey, Brandon Spikes, and six other Gators who had flown to the Combine in Indianapolis.
Aaron had torn a muscle in his back and stood on the sidelines as dozens of scouts, assistants, and coaches watched his teammates drill and work out. The prospects were tested for their speed, strength, and stamina, for their intelligence—even for the flexibility of their joints.
By the end of the testing, few of Aaron’s teammates had impressed the scouts.
More than one scout voiced his doubts about Tebow, worrying about the quarterback’s accuracy and release speed. But if the scouts were skeptical about Florida’s star QB, they were fascinated by Aaron Hernandez.
“He weighed in, got measured, did the body test,” Brian Murphy said. “Most importantly, he did all of the interviews. He had an inordinate amount of interviews with the teams. There’s some physical testing he did not do. But the reality with Aaron was, no one in the NFL cared about watching him physically work out. Everyone knew he was a freak of nature. They didn’t want to waste time. They didn’t care. They wanted to spend time with him. They wanted to interview him in those fifteen-minute slots. Everyone wanted to see what he was like in person.”
For all of his charm, Aaron did not do well in the interviews. The NFL scouts seemed to see right through his mask.
“Self-esteem is quite low,” one would note. “Not well-adjusted emotionally, not happy, moods unpredictable, not stable, doesn’t take much to set him off, but not an especially jumpy guy.”
“It was pretty well known that he had failed some drug tests at Florida, and there were questions about his maturity that come along with that,” another scout told Boston Globe reporter Shalise Manza Young. “You worried about the people he hung out with.”
“The year before he came out, I was at their Pro Day, and I remember seeing the Pounceys, and then him,” an AFC college director told NFL Network reporter Albert Breer. “It was very clear that they were the leaders, that they were the influential guys, and he was behind them, a tagalong, a follower in that sense. He was always following them. And they were trying to bring him along.”
The Pouncey twins had a bad reputation among the scouts. And Hernandez was already known for his drug use, and for his knack for getting himself out of scrapes.
“They couldn’t pin a lot of stuff on him,” another AFC college scouting director told Breer. “But people at the school would tell you, ‘Every time there’s an issue, he’s around it.’ He was a con guy. Very believable. Spoke well. A lot of things inside of you hoped you’d turn him around, but people that I talked to said they didn’t trust him, that he’d burn you.”