Aaron was a quadruple-threat athlete. He ran track, and was the best player on the school’s basketball team. He had speed, dexterity, good reach, great hands. When he played baseball, he was the pitcher. On the basketball court, his dunks were legendary. And on the football field, he ducked, dodged, and stutter-stepped like a basketball star.
At 6′1″ and 245 pounds, Aaron already had the body of an NFL player. Big and fast, he was the kind of tight end who’d always be the offense’s primary option.
He was the best athlete that Bristol Central had ever produced.
“Bristol Central had become the powerhouse of the state,” says Armando Candelaria, who was coaching high school football nearby in New Britain. “And Aaron Hernandez was the big name in Connecticut football. New Britain is a bigger city than Bristol. Our rivalry goes back to 2001, when Aaron’s brother, DJ, was on Bristol Central’s team. Our rivalry went from there to Aaron’s own rise in football. In 2005, I remember game planning for Aaron. Planning just for him.
“He was like something you’d see on ESPN’s 30 for 30 series. A man among boys, even as a junior. When we played him the second game of his junior year, he caught four balls for a hundred and eighty yards—on a losing effort. In college, he could have played tight end or defensive end—it didn’t matter. You knew who the best player was when he walked onto the field. He was. Definitely.
“I was the defensive coordinator, the secondary coach. It was my responsibility to stop Aaron. But he was very, very hard to block. He’d run away from the whole game. There was nothing you could do about it. From the coaching point of view, his numbers were unbelievable. As a senior, on both sides of the ball, he was dominating. His junior year as a tight end put him on the map. He would give you two hundred yards receiving as a tight end. I remember one game: DJ was a senior. Aaron was a freshman, but he didn’t look like a fourteen-year-old kid. He ran a shallow cross, coming across the middle, and turned it up against seniors. To do that at fourteen against varsity kids speaks volumes.
“In his junior year, we started calling him ‘The Big Guy.’ We started to play a tough man underneath him—whoever got at his feet—and then we’d have a man eight yards on top of him, in case he got free of the first guy. Double coverage the whole time. That was easier said than done because my staff and I did not anticipate how physical he was. He was a lot faster in person than he was on film, and he would get free from the first defender and get open in front of the second defender. That made the game plan difficult during his junior year. We still got the win, but he made it known that you weren’t going to double him.
“Everyone talked about his size. No one talked about his feet. He had really good basketball feet. His athleticism and speed took over. His footwork and balance. When you saw it live you understood, the kid was a born athlete.”
“The thing that stood out to me,” says Ian Rapoport, who covered football for the Boston Herald, “was the first time I saw a guy fall down. He was the first football player who played like a basketball player, making defensive backs fall down. The kind of player who made the press box go, ‘Wow!’ An incredible, freakish athlete, with unbelievable versatility and talent. The first time I saw him, I thought, This guy’s got game. He could start and stop on a dime. It was amazing.”
Chapter 2
Aaron knew that the Lancers’ coach would double-team him at every turn, just as every other opposing coach had all season long.
“From a coaching perspective, the philosophy had to be to figure a way to take Aaron out of the game plan,” says Sal Cintorino, who ran the football program at Newington High School and went on to coach Bristol Central. “That was what everyone tried to do. We’d try to put two guys on him, try to influence Matt Coyne, who was their quarterback at the time, to go in a different direction. But Coyne had so much confidence in Aaron. He didn’t care who covered him. He’d throw right into the coverage. Somehow, Aaron would come away with the football.”
Given how well Aaron had been playing, Bristol Central should have steamrolled the Lancers straight back to their side of town. But, just after kickoff, dark clouds full of rain, slush, and snow filled the sky.
Although it was just a few degrees above freezing, the cold did not bother Hernandez. He had played beautifully in the cold in last year’s Battle, making seven catches for 112 yards, scoring a touchdown, leading the Rams to a thirteen-point victory. More troubling was the fact that the Rams were a passing team—and, Aaron knew, passing teams did not do well on rainy, windy football fields.
The Lancers took a 7-0 early lead in the game, moving fifty-five yards on eleven plays. In the second quarter, the Rams’ coach, Doug Pina, adjusted for the rain and moved Aaron into the backfield. Hernandez did not disappoint. He ran straight up the middle, plowing straight through the other team’s players. He made a short but explosive touchdown run that opened up a 14-7 lead. But stripped of their passing game, playing in the mud, the Rams struggled to maintain their advantage.
“It was a bad day,” Pina recalls. “The field was a mess. Our quarterback was having a lot of trouble throwing.”
“It was the coldest I’d ever been,” one of Aaron’s teammates remembers. “I remember being out there, just stepping in puddles when I was on the field. Down in the line your hands would sink into the mud.”
“The downpour was torrential,” says Cintorino. “The rain was sideways.”
Aaron’s teammates on the sidelines wondered if Bristol’s Parks Department had let the game go forward because the department employee who had made that call was biased toward Bristol Eastern.
“Physically, the Lancers were bigger, and the conditions would have given them an advantage there,” a player on Aaron’s team says.
“Paul Philippon, the head coach at Bristol Eastern, was adamant about playing that game,” Cintorino remembers. “Everyone else was like, ‘It’s a terrible game in this weather!’ But Phillipon said, ‘We’re playing this game.’ The reason was, Central was not going to be able to throw the ball. The weather was that bad. And if you couldn’t throw, you had to figure out some other way to get the football to Aaron.”
Aaron battled through freezing rain in the third quarter. The Rams held the Lancers to seven points. But midway through the fourth quarter, the Lancers capitalized on the advantage the weather had given them. Rallying, they ended the game in a tie at fourteen.
Given the Rams’ reputation, that tie—one of only two in the decades-long history of the Battle—felt more like a loss. (“Probably the biggest upset anyone could think of,” Cintorino says.) It knocked Bristol Central out of contention for the upcoming state championship, ending Bristol Central’s season as well as Aaron’s high school career.
But if Aaron was disappointed, he did not show it that day. As a high school player, he was known for his composure.
“Mature before his time,” Cintorino recalls. “A lot of kids at seventeen would have been very angry after a loss like that. But in the football arena, where I saw him, he was very mild, very humble, and very mature. He carried himself in a way you’d appreciate.”
What changed?
Blows sustained on the football field were already altering the structure of Aaron’s still-developing brain.
Celebrity status, drug use, and criminal associations would help to make Hernandez unstable, paranoid, and dangerous.
But some of those who knew Aaron in Bristol suggest that, even then, his humility was a put-on. The only real change, they say, had to do with Aaron’s ability—or his desire—to hide his true character.
Chapter 3
The formation of Aaron Hernandez’s mask began at home, in a cottage on Greystone Avenue.