Episode 634: Aaron Hernandez Part I - Worst Case Scenario

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There's no place to escape to this is the last podcast on the left.

That's when the cannibalism started.

Aaron Hernandez sucking on dicks, even though he says he's not gay.

Who does he slay?

That's awful.

terrible.

It's like me and Edward.

I worked so hard on this.

He worked so hard on me.

He and I were talking before.

You know, like the gay thing, like, it's kind of hack to, like, go like right into it.

And it's like,

super, and it's like, really like.

Yeah, we're like, yeah, you know, and.

Who does he slay?

And you're like, you know, it's like so like insensitive to people.

And like, you know, and it's really like something like, you know, like outing somebody is like a super big deal.

Like, dude,

let's not talk about it until like the second episode or something like that.

And then it's just like fucking

boom.

Man, why'd you try to do it?

Did he get you a job on that morning show that outed him?

Hey, buddy, why'd you try to make love to my butt?

Welcome to Last Podcast on the Laugh.

Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Marcus Parks.

I'm here with

Beatles cover master, the weird owl of his generation.

Henry Browski.

I swallowed an oat.

I'm sorry.

Yeah, he, I'm sorry, guys.

Marcus is gonna die today.

He's upping his diet.

He had a single oat.

I was trying to make sure before we started to eat, so I had a power bar and there was an oat in it, and the oat is now caught where my voice comes out of.

I was ready to fucking Heimlick his ass, dude.

He had to stop me.

It was pretty great.

Yeah, you just came.

I was getting in.

I was like, you got to hear the word.

You know, once you can say a word, then you're not dying.

You know know who's super good at the Heimlich?

Okay.

Aaron Hernandez.

Henry Wadowski.

I don't think he ever saved a life.

That's not in my research.

If it is to be, it is up to me.

And we have the extraordinarily hardworking Ed Larson with us as well.

Ed, how you doing?

I'm doing good.

I'm doing good.

This was emotional for me.

Yeah.

I learned a lot about myself while

I was doing this.

And hopefully over the next

week or two, it's going to keep going.

But man,

the story is very tragic.

It's extremely tragic.

And it actually made me cry at one point.

And so

I could have brain damage.

You never know.

Yeah, you don't know.

Who knows?

I actually think that you don't seem to have.

Like, you don't show weird aggressions and you don't like flip out in that way.

You're very calm.

Before weed, I got into lots of fights.

But now you got weed.

I do got weed, but it didn't help Aaron Hernandez.

Let's get into it.

Well, that's the thing is that today we are going to be starting a new series that's led by Mr.

Ed Larson.

Yeah,

hut, poop 42.

Pooh 42 is like, hut, hot, hut, yeah, we got to balance everything out after the fucking three weeks of Vampire the Masquerade.

Yeah,

this is our strengthening of the network.

Yeah, we're going from three weeks of Vampire the Masquerade to football.

Wrong subject.

Yes, sir.

Aaron Hernandez, of course, convicted murderer and football star.

Let's get into the story.

All right.

Aaron Hernandez was the worst-case scenario for the NFL and the New England Patriots.

He only played three seasons of NFL football, but was on track to be one of the all-time greats at his position, and many would argue a future Hall of Famer.

But this would never come to be because on June 17th, 2013, he murdered Odin Lloyd in a dirt lot behind his house in North Attleboro, Massachusetts.

Why'd he do that?

We'll get into it.

I would say, still somewhat of a mystery.

Why'd we do that?

Only convicted for the murder of Odin Lloyd, it is assumed he killed a total of three men and possibly shot three more, including two in the head that survived, and ultimately took his own life in his prison cell in 2017.

Thank God he wasn't a quarterback.

I've heard some people have.

If he was a quarterback, he never would have made it to the NFL because if you shoot two guys in the head?

See, he's a receiver, Henry.

He's used to getting it.

Oh, I've heard that.

Don't make that hacky fucking joke.

It's too late.

It's too late already.

It's already out of the bug.

It's already out.

I've heard some people call Aaron Hernandez a serial killer, but after my brief history on this show and the knowledge I've gained, I would disagree.

I don't think Aaron Hernandez murdered people because he liked it.

I think he was a feeble-minded, wannabe gangster who was raised in the violent machismo culture of football and made some bad friends who egged him on as he made poor decision after poor decision.

I agree.

That while also most likely being a closeted homosexual man and posthumously diagnosed with CTE, chronic, traumatic, and sepalopathy, a progressive degenerative brain disease affecting people who had suffered repeated concussions through repetitive head impacts.

All these things combined is why I refer to him as the worst case scenario.

So over the next couple weeks, we're going to examine Aaron Hernandez's short life and what led a man who was about to make $40 million over five years become a murderer.

And even worse than that, a New England patriot.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Fuck the Patriots.

Fuck the fuck the Patriots.

Fuck the Patriots, man.

No, like, he also, like, it feels like I saw a lot of, in all of the documentary footage I was watching, about this idea of that he came from this high pressure environment and that's a part of what pushed him.

But I feel like a lot of people are under high pressure and don't kill people randomly.

Absolutely.

I think a lot of people have CTE.

I think a lot and they don't become murderers.

But I think that when you're already an incredibly violent person,

it you know, gives it a little loom.

Bob Sawy.

Yeah.

Yeah, it definitely pushed it.

Yeah, I mean, it is true.

Like the

environment that Aaron Hernandez grew up in plays out literally a million times every day in America when it comes to like high school football and it comes to the sort of pressure that parents put on kids when they're younger.

But Aaron Hernandez, like as Ed said, it's a worst case scenario.

It's all of these things coming together.

You remove even one of these elements and it's possible he would not have become a murderer.

He would have just been a...

violent person.

But all of these things together, it's a perfect storm.

Yeah, there's lots of sliding doors moments in this where, just like Marcus said, you take out any of those scenarios.

I don't think he kills these people.

Yeah.

So, personally, I wanted to take on this story for last podcast on a left because his story was a tipping point for me falling out of love with football.

Ed Larson, as the world knows, is a weed-smoking hamaholic that worships the pristine hands of Dan Marino and the Miami Dolphins.

We know that.

But the truth is that I've since gotten older.

I've realized that the personal trauma football has caused me as a player, sports bar employee, and as a Dolphins fan.

And as I research Aaron Hernandez's young life, there's way too many similarities to my own childhood.

I also had an overbearing, borderline, abusive, football-obsessed father, football coaches that taught me to hit with my head first, and sold drugs with low-level gangsters.

That's awesome.

So far, so good.

I don't think that I have CTE, and most people who played football never develop it.

But it is estimated that one-third of NFL players suffer from the disease.

I think partially it's because of what we had a little sidebar conversation once about how that, and during our high school years, they were way more focused on the neck.

Yes.

Oh, they wanted to save the neck and they wanted to, that was like the whole thing.

So it might have inadvertently protected your head.

Well, they would teach me to hit with my face mask first.

Yeah.

And to knock out.

other players.

Yeah.

They would tell me to hit their helmet with my face mask.

Yeah, Yeah, the whole point, and I was taught the same thing: is like, definitely never go with your head like straight down because that was what they were always afraid of because that was

jacktatum.

Yeah, yeah.

And so, what they taught you is to hit the other guy with your face mask and go up because what you're trying to do is you're trying to knock the other guy off of his feet.

So, yeah, you are hitting your head into the other player over and over and over again.

Yeah, good old-fashioned football.

Now, like, nowadays are they're handing out purses at the front goddamn gate.

Why does fucking happen?

I'm the man here today.

I'm the man represented.

And the thing about Aaron Hernandez is like when you watch his

football, when you watch his tapes when he was a kid,

he, I have never in my life seen someone use their head so much when they're playing football.

And he gets hit three, four, five times before, and he still doesn't get knocked down.

He's like, that was what he was known for, which is fucking running through.

He big boy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But some of us are more fragile than others.

I just, you know, broke four bones.

Yes, I mostly commented upon football during the talent show.

I got hit so hard when I was in seventh grade, but our coach decided, like, let's put the junior high kids against the high school kids.

And one of the high school kids hit me so hard, and I was such a small kid, that I flew into the air and landed on my coccyx and broke it.

I broke my tailbone.

I was like, that's how hard I you must have been so fun to hit.

God, such a fun.

That's a funny memory that I don't have.

They really loved it.

And that was just, that was my second bone broken playing football.

The first was when the kid picked me up and spiked me and broke my collarbone.

It's interesting.

Let me get in there.

It's one thing I kept thinking about during all of this because, like I said, I don't think I have CTE.

Who the fuck knows?

I'm pretty sure my father did, by the way.

He had to stop playing football because he had too many concussions in the 60s.

Yeah, which means

like

elephants everywhere.

Yeah, yeah.

He had a literal dent in his forehead.

Jesus.

You know, and so, you know, and

I can remember certain hits.

Like, I just like, they're like in my head.

When Mavica hit me in practice, when I hit Jason Reed, like, there's certain things like I remember, like, I still see the stars from those exact hits.

And they may not knock me unconscious, but they were mini concussions, I'm sure.

Yeah.

And as far as CTE goes, unfortunately, there's no way to know for sure how many people have it because the only way to properly get diagnosed is to examine the brain after you've already passed away.

Of course, only a small fraction of football players that die have their brains examined for CTE.

So we may never know how serious this epidemic has become.

As of 2023, Dr.

Ann McKee, director of Boston University CTE Center and the foremost authority on the subject, has studied 376 former NFL players' brains donated to her center, and 345 of those brains were diagnosed with CTE.

That's a whopping 91.7%.

Obviously, the brains are usually from people or families that thought they were infected.

Yeah, you need some control brains in there.

Yeah, exactly.

When they did a different survey, before she started studying this, she studied over 300 brains, and only one of them was found

to have CTE.

and that person played college football, and no one else did.

Actually, I have a test.

If you want to show it, come come closer.

You just knock on the cranium like that, and if it sounds hollow, you got it, you fucking CTE-ridden maniac.

No,

you're about to explode.

So, as far as Dr.

Ann McKee's research goes, Aaron Hernandez was, in fact, one of the brains that she researched.

But we will dive deeper into CTE and the NFL's cover-up in our next episode.

Yeah, not just the NFL's cover-up, the WWE's cover-up.

I'm sure there's quite a bit going on in the NHL as well.

We're going to lose all of our contacts at the NHL.

Let's not do this.

Don't know.

I was supposed to be the jester at the new Raiders of the fucking wicked stadium.

But before we jump into Aaron Hernandez's origin, let's acknowledge our sources today.

The rise and fall of Aaron Hernandez, All-American Murder by James Patterson and Alex Abramovich with Mike Harveke.

Also, we took some info from the Boston Globe series Goliath by the Spotlight Team, Killer Inside, the Mind of Aaron Hernandez, the Netflix doc, and a little from The Truth About Aaron by Jonathan DJ Hernandez.

I took what I could from DJ Hernandez's book because he is himself a flawed individual who for sure has reasons to not tell the entire truth.

But he is the only one who was around in that home with Aaron growing up, so it could help fill in some of the blanks.

Sure.

Aaron Hernandez was born November 6, 1989 in Bristol, Connecticut, the home of ESPN, to Dennis and Terry Hernandez.

He was the youngest of two football-playing boys.

His brother DJ was three years older.

Dennis Hernandez was a local football hero nicknamed the king by pretty much everyone in town.

Dennis played college football at the University of Connecticut.

In 1977, two days after UConn lost their season-ending game in Dennis's junior year, a Plainview, Connecticut police officer was killed during a home invasion.

Detectives questioned Dennis.

He was never charged with anything, but the team cut ties with him and he never played football again.

Whether he had anything to do with the crime itself remains a mystery, but this fueled Dennis to be obsessed with both of his boys playing football for UConn.

How do these sports teams have so many connects to the football, to the fucking police?

Like, even just the idea of waiving this.

Cops love football.

They do.

It's what what they do.

But even a cop-murdering football star.

Well, I mean, he's not cop-murdering specifically.

It's rumored that he, like, it's thought that he may have helped some of the guys hide.

Like, after they

killed, after they were involved in the shooting, they may have gone to his house and be like, God fucking help me, bro.

And he helped them.

He's like, of course, when you come to the gang, you know, you know,

the king's ready to serve.

That kind of was his thing.

Everyone loved him.

Like, that is like, he was a terror at the house.

Good person in the streets.

The UConn mascot is a husky named Jonathan, which is what Dennis named his first son.

But he went by DJ for Dennis Jonathan.

I could imagine if someone in my family is like, your name is Raider Red.

Yeah.

We're a Texas Tech family.

You know, like, you know, my uncle played football for Texas Tech for, you know, when he was in college in the 80s, we're all huge Red Raider fans, you know, but yeah, to name someone like, hey, that's Raider Red McMeans.

This is our son, Grimace Hamburgler, Zabrowski.

The obsession didn't stop there, though.

They even bought a giant white Husky and named the dog Yukon.

That's cute.

That's a cool name.

That's a good name for a Husky.

Is it?

Yeah, UConn.

That's cute.

You know, like, because it kind of, you can, it's also like, you know, the Yukon, you know, up north and all that.

And Huskies are kind of Yukon-ish dogs.

Yes, but it's like weird to like naming your dog FSU.

It is.

No, it is.

It's weird.

Yeah.

But to Dennis, the boys had no choice but to play at UConn and they would fulfill his failed legacy.

I will say, I do wish my father had a legacy that I could fail.

Yeah, instead of being a security guard at Wackenhutt.

Well, you could have been a cop.

And god damn it, what I would have brought to the force.

God fucking damn it when I'm a real man in the force.

I'm like these two pussies in here.

This guy's getting out there laying down the law.

I'll speak on it until he tells me what he's done.

Well, I mean, Bristol,

I find it really interesting

how popular Dennis Hernandez was and the fact that they called him the king because Bristol, Connecticut, really was a football town,

which is, it's kind of rare in Connecticut.

You know, up this is the northeast.

It's not like a bit, but this is where ESPN was.

Yeah.

You know, and this is also like, it's a former industrial town that had fallen into disrepair.

So like football was kind of the only thing they had left.

It was sort of like a Texas, like what you think of as like Texas football.

This was in Bristol, Connecticut.

And with Dennis Hernandez, like it's really interesting because they called him the king, but his job, he was a janitor.

Yeah.

He was not like, it wasn't like he was a local, he wasn't like Buddy Garrity in Friday Night Lights where he like owns the local used car franchise.

No, he was just an old-fashioned, peaked in high school kind of guy.

He was, yeah.

And he was a lot of fun.

You know, he loved to party, did drugs, you know, he helped like people place their sports bets.

You know, he was like a no-cool guy.

Yeah, cool guy.

In DJ's book, he goes into detail about how physically abusive his father was to him and Aaron.

The abuse was so frequent and barbaric that he once threatened to call the cops on his father.

His dad replied, I'm going to beat you even harder, you and your brother.

They're going to have to pull me off of you when they knock on the door.

Jesus.

Yeah.

The Hernandez house was not a happy place, to say the least.

Dennis was arrested for trying to buy Coke from a cop.

And they always have the worst Coke.

Well,

it's so funny.

I literally, the next thing I wrote is no blame.

Cops always have the best Coke.

Now, did Didn't ask him, are you a cop?

Because if he has to tell you, he has to tell you.

No, he probably just is like, yeah.

And then he was like, all right, good.

Here's the money.

He used to give a money to cop.

His mother, Terry, was also arrested when an illegal sports gambling operation was busted in their basement.

Wow.

They divorced in 1991.

They remarried in 1996.

And in 1999, they filed for bankruptcy.

And according to Aaron, there was a lot to argue about in the house.

Yeah, it just seemed like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, but that's kind of romantic in a way.

Oh, I guess so.

But he did beat her up a lot.

Well, yeah, but I'm just saying.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, kiss us now.

Well, I mean, the divorce and remarrying, like, that's what I'm saying.

I think it's sexy.

It's a small-town thing.

Yeah, it is a small-town thing.

But, you know, in the documentaries, like again and again, like the thing that they really hammer down on is,

you know, when, you know, Aaron's father goes away, like, that's when Aaron sort of, you know, that's when everything falls apart for him.

But what about these five years when they were divorced, when his parents were divorced?

Like, was he living with his father during that time?

I don't know.

Yeah.

Like, cause that seems important.

I imagine, I think, but I'm pretty sure maybe he was living with his mother and his dad was just around all the time.

Gotcha.

He probably never even left the house.

They were just divorced.

It's one of those situations.

Aaron and DJ, they went to Central Bristol High School.

Aaron was immediately a great player as a freshman.

He started.

on the varsity team at 13 years old.

You're playing against 18-year-olds.

That's like a big, I know that's five years isn't a big deal, but that is the initial five years.

Oh, it's massive.

No, well, as I was saying earlier, when my collarbone or when my fucking tailbone got broken by another kid, that kid was 18 and I was 13.

Yeah.

But the thing is that I was 13 and like 5'5.

Aaron Hernandez was 13 and 6'2.

Yeah, he could dunk a basketball in the seventh grade.

Was he just gifted physically?

Yes.

Yeah, no, he was basically like they knew from a very young age he was going to be a pro athlete.

And that's the dream as a father.

Yeah, he really

got his exact wish with

Aaron.

DJ, he was the quarterback senior year, and they would link up regularly and were a great team.

At the end of Aaron's first year, DJ graduated and got accepted into UConn and eventually became their quarterback.

Aaron was a pretty good kid in high school.

The only trouble he got into was once he drunkenly jumped on a car and dented the hood, thus getting himself thrown out of the school dance.

He showed up to school the next day with a black eye and apologized.

It is assumed Dennis gave him some old school discipline, as his coach put it.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And like, this is all very important to like who Aaron Hernandez eventually became as a person.

All of this informs like the question of like, how does a guy fucking with a $40 million contract end up doing this?

This is all part of it.

Mean Daddy.

TV's number one drama, High Potential, returns with star Caitlin Olson as the crime-solving single mom with an IQ of 160.

Every week, Morgan uses her unconventional style and brilliance to crack LAPD's most perplexing cases.

It's the perfect blend of humor and mystery.

She's breaking the mold without breaking a nail.

High Potential premieres Tuesday at 10.9 Central on ABC and stream on Hulu.

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So with DJ off to Yukon, Aaron started to blossom as a varsity athlete.

He was fast, he had great hands, was nimble, and was as strong as anyone else on the field.

Plus, his work ethic through training and practice was unmatched.

By junior year, he was one of the best players in the country.

This is the time when Aaron started to figure out who he was.

He met his future fiancé, Shayana Jenkins, and found his one true love, that sweet, sweet weed.

Oh, yeah, fucker.

Aaron smoked a shit ton of of weed.

Yeah, he fucking did, son.

Arguably more than I did.

It was really bad for him.

Yeah.

It wasn't good for him.

He smoked before school, before games, after games, before practice.

I made my brain green.

It's me.

It's believed that the marijuana helped him deal with being closeted in a hostile home environment.

I'm what?

If you smoke enough weed, you could forget you're gay, apparently.

But you could also forget you're straight as well, so be careful out there.

That's what's happening to me.

I would actually argue that the more he smoked weed, the more he probably obsessed over being gay.

I imagine.

He was a very paranoid person.

Yeah.

Known for it.

It was the way lots of people described him.

Well, like, because his thing was he'd just kind of show the wiener, right?

And go like, it'd be the same if I wasn't having sex with.

Well, I mean, you're making him out to be an absolute moron.

He wasn't an absolute moron.

He wasn't?

No.

From everything I heard him speak, he doesn't sound like he's fucking Barack Obama.

He wasn't educated well.

Yeah.

He did not care about school.

But as far as football goes,

he was smarter than anybody.

That's what they said.

Yeah,

he was incredibly brilliant when it came to football.

And when it came to thinking about things like that, we'll get to that here in a little bit, the reasons why.

But

I would not say he was an absolute moron.

I think he was, he definitely had like a certain amount of intelligence.

It was just that football was the only thing that was given to him in life.

I get it.

All I do is fucking comedy and fuck.

He was basically told by everyone in his life, don't worry about school.

Of course, you're going to, you are a born football star.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Don't worry about it.

In fact, it's a waste of your time.

You, you shouldn't be studying.

You should be out there doing splut squats.

Yeah.

Once he got to college, they literally were like, your classes are getting in your way of football.

Take these like shitty classes.

Take bowling.

Take, you know, like poverty, poverty, you know, and stuff like that.

What you gotta do in?

Um, hey, man, he's a little bit of being poor.

His brother DJ remembered at first Aaron wanted to be a cheerleader because his cousins were cheerleaders, but his dad put an end to that real fast in what I imagine was in brutal fashion.

He also would change the way Aaron would stand and hold his hands because his father deemed it to be too feminine, but he used a different F-word, of course.

I will say, though, what's so girly about being a teapot?

You're not short and stout.

You're tall.

I just want to be helpful.

Well, and I think also like the way that he talked, it was also a way to hide his sexuality.

Oh, I totally understand that.

Yeah, because he wanted, like, he always,

he was that guy.

He's like, ha ha, baby, what do you want, baby?

Everyone loved him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He was very charming.

Yeah, and he always, and he always wanted to be seen as, like, tough.

And I think, and it really is like sometimes there are people who think it's like being smart is gay.

And by gay, I don't mean like stupid.

I mean like, you know, like if you're, I was called the F-word quite a bit growing up for

having

the tiniest bits of intelligence.

You mean it came from the major in creative writing in Texas Tech?

No way.

No way.

No way.

No, no, no way.

But I think.

I sure hope you want to kiss me because if not, I'm going to beat you to death.

But I think he just, he over, his, his is a story of overcompensation

again and again.

It also has to be stated that Aaron was sexually abused as a child, but it's not confirmed by anyone who did it to him or when it happened, just that it did, in fact, happen.

Does that, is that proof?

We know that somebody at least said that, right?

And both his mom and his brother said it happened and Aaron's lawyer.

My mom thinks everybody's molested.

Does she think you were molested?

Well, she'll just say, you know, I mean, oh, God.

We should look into it.

And then I flipped it on him and I started sucking his dick.

And I was like, you like this?

You want me to be your whore?

Obviously, Dennis Hernandez sucked as a human being, but I'm torn on whether Aaron would have killed people if his father had stuck around longer.

He was a strict homophobic football dad, and someone who had a strict homophobic football father, it did suck.

But Aaron may have.

And you weren't even gay.

Like, literally, like, like imagine being closeted and gay.

Oh my God, my first date, my father was so happy.

Because like when I said I wanted to do drama, he was so nervous.

And then it was just like, and then when I went out with a girl, he was like, oh my God, thank God.

I was like, well, you know, it doesn't matter.

But,

you know, Aaron may have benefited from a stricter father.

Certainly.

Constantly getting punched in the head as a child didn't help with the old CTE.

Nope.

And maybe not helpful as far as his career was concerned.

But Dennis was the only person who held him accountable for his actions for his entire life.

Aaron had a quote from his father tattooed on his body.

It read, if it is to be, it is up to me.

And it wasn't until Dennis passed away

did Aaron start to act out in social situations.

His mother was cheating, not so discreetly, on Dennis with a man named Jeff Cummings, and boy, oh boy, he earned that name.

Let's just say Aaron wasn't the only shooter in the house.

Come on.

I apologize.

But Cummings wasn't some random dude.

He was married to Dennis Hernandez's niece, Tanya.

That's Aaron and DJ's first cousin.

Just so good.

Just, God, man, you could be white trash anywhere, dude.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bristol's, what, 60,000 people somewhere around there.

So small enough to be small town.

Growing up from Queens, Connecticut was always like, that's fancy.

It's not.

That's where fancy people live.

And it's like, no.

No, there's like four fancy places, and the rest of it's actually quite dangerous.

I did not know that.

Yeah.

Yeah, very much.

It's like they've got ESPNs there, the WWE's there, and then the rest of it is just like bad drivers.

Yeah, it's like they're just TV stations.

It's not like they were like, they didn't, like, a corporation made them.

Yeah.

Like, it's not like Benjamin Franklin was born there.

He just made ESPN there.

It's not born there.

It wasn't a natural part of the fabric of the universe.

It's a company.

It's weird to headquarters.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know why ESPN is specifically in Bristol, but yeah, and WWE as well.

But yeah, sometimes corporations have Connecticut headquarters.

I say not so discreetly

because on September 25th, 2005, in the stands at a Yukon football game, Tanya confronted Terry in the stands and slapped her.

DJ on the field at the time happened to look in the stands at just the right time to see the whole thing go down.

Jerry Springer meets Friday Night Lights, meets lead poisoning.

Yeah.

Scandal.

A scandal.

A scandal.

Yeah, no, that is, I could not imagine anything more humiliating.

Oh, my God.

It's incredibly humiliating.

At the game.

Yes, but that was a Dennis' game, not Aaron's game.

So so him.

But even so, it tells you the volatility of this family.

Oh, my God.

Dude, they used to beat the shit out of each other all the fucking time.

Yeah.

You see, Dennis Hernandez, with his troubles from his youth far behind him, was a pillar of the community in Bristol.

He knew the whole town and was nicknamed the king by locals.

If he saw a flat tire, he was the first one there with a jack.

The whole town saw him as a hero, even if he was a fucking terror at home.

It's almost like he did that so he could be a terror at home and he did it with impunity.

Yeah, or that he was trying to do everything.

A lot of these guys also do this.

They do everything in their power to be nice to everyone around them because they think it makes up for the terror that they are at home.

It does not.

Also, around this time, Dennis's brother Dave was dying from cancer.

The whole town knew about it.

So then in January 2006, Dennis gets a hernia and goes in for surgery and ends up dying a couple days later from a bacterial infection.

When news spread in Bristol about Dennis's passing, everyone would correct them.

They would say, no, you mean Dave died?

No, Dave's like, I'm still here.

I still live.

You know, I spent my entire life dedicated to the medical sciences.

I have three patents in my name, and my fucking janitor brother gets called the king.

I'm fighting bravely against cancer

every day.

Nobody cares.

Oh, but Dennis has football, so he does his fun ball.

Just Connecticut allowed.

Kill me.

Do they allow assisted suicide?

Because I'm done with this.

Kill me.

I'll do it myself.

They booked the largest funeral home in Bristol.

Wow.

And it was not big enough to house the service for the king.

Jefferson's funeral home, the largest funeral home in Bristol.

Yeah, we're not the one.

Jason, we'll do four at once.

We got a shit ton of chance.

Try the salad bar.

I actually just learned from David Dusk Mountain this week about the idea of leased caskets.

Oh, yeah.

I didn't know you could lease a casket for a funeral, put you in the casket for the funeral, they then remove you and then bury you just like in a fucking...

Well, they cremate you.

But it's the idea of like, so we'll just reuse it.

Interesting.

I actually thought it was illegal.

I thought there was a whole episode of Six Feet Under where they talked about how it was illegal to

reuse a casket.

I'm sure they have to tell you.

They have to tell you.

Yeah, I think if they don't tell you, then it's illegal.

It's out there.

I mean, as someone who had to buy a couple caskets, a cheaper one's always nice.

Don't let Dust Mulch in here.

No, I know, I know.

I don't want to fuck this bottom line.

There was over an hour away for people to pay their respects.

Dennis was the most important person in Aaron's life, and he spent pretty much every moment outside of school with his father.

At the funeral, Aaron showed little to no emotion.

DJ was a mess.

The night after the funeral, Aaron had a basketball game and scored 30 points.

When he dunked, the crowd went insane.

The next night, he scored 31.

No emotion.

I'm the best at basketball now.

So now it's just

up to me.

I just love his

if he was taller, he probably could have been a professional basketball player, they say.

Because he was so good, but he was 6'2.

But it's also maybe because he was up against a bunch of kids that he was just physically so dominant.

Yeah.

Like I said, he had incredible, he could jump like a motherfucker.

Big ups.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So he could dunk at seventh in seventh grade, which is pretty much unheard of.

Yeah, but then, but the way that he could jump also made him an incredible receiver.

Oh, he's quite good.

But also good from getting his feet taken out from under him and landing on your head.

You'd almost call him a power receiver.

So.

I don't even want to tell you what his actual fucking position was called because it's

going to come to me with a fucking shit.

Oh, I already know.

Oh, I'm waiting.

Hacky ass

the hacky fucking mindsuit DJ, right?

They beat you, buddy.

They beat you to the joke many years ago.

Oh, don't you worry about it.

So now it's just Terry and Aaron at the house, and she's had a pretty public affair going on with Jeffrey Cummings, and Aaron ain't taking any of this shit, but he's on track to get out of there soon.

He should have killed that guy.

He thought about it.

Yeah.

He definitely fought him a couple times, I'm sure.

But he's on track to get out of there soon.

At this point, to his father's wishes, he's verbally committed to UConn, where his brother is the QB, and he's going to be the tight end.

It's storybook.

But during this time, Aaron, who who doesn't really like hanging out with his mom started buddying up with his cousin tanya jeffrey cummings ex-wife it's really weird yeah they had plenty of to talk together so this trauma bonded them for life tanya kind of seems like a like a like almost like a weird witch woman she she's intense tanya's very very intense very haunted but tanya is just she's One of those people like, well, you know what?

If I just let them drink here at my house, at least I know where they are.

I know where they are.

And so she just, she's the sort of woman that brings all the high school kids over to her house and hangs out with them.

Lets them deal drugs.

Yeah.

All that stuff.

It's like, well, as long as I, but really, she's just wanting to fucking hang out.

She's lonely.

She wants to be seen as cool by children.

Exactly.

So Jeff and Aaron, they even switched homes.

Jeff moved in with Terry and Aaron moved in with Tanya, his cousin that was 14 years older than him.

Tanya's house was the hangout for lots of unsavory people.

There was Uncle Tito and two two other gangbangers important to our story carlos ortiz and bo wallace this crew would end up being a bad influence on aaron ortiz and wallace would be with him when he murdered odin lloyd seven-ish years later in a recorded conversation with terry from prison later on aaron accused his mother of never giving him his adhd medication when he lived with her she said

she hit him in the head with a hammer and that was his medication she considered his adder all to be likened to cocaine, so she never let him take it.

It's almost like she

isn't a doctor and doesn't know what the medication does.

Well, this for me, the ADHD thing, this is the skeleton key to understanding Aaron Hernandez.

Because with somebody with, like, it sounds like he has severe ADHD, and you know, severe ADHD, as I know from experience, it causes emotional dysregulation, it causes anger problems, it causes oversensitivity, lack of impulse control, lack of impulse control.

And it also can make you extraordinarily good at one thing.

Because it's things ADHD is also like there are a lot of negative things to it, but there are also a lot of very positive things to it where you can lock into one thing and you can focus so hard on that one thing that you end up being incredible at it.

And for Aaron Hernandez, that was football.

He locked into football and he just had the mind for it because that's what his brain wanted.

It just football always gave his ADHD brain what he wanted.

He could hyper-focus on it, he could be incredible at it, but it also made him very emotionally dysregulated at all times.

Yeah, even in high school, he spent up to 60 hours a week on football.

Yeah, well, you know, and in the end, thank God it was football in terms of making money and not like watercoloring or something, because it wouldn't have made anybody anything.

You know, I think about who we would have murdered at the fucking art store: Bob Ross.

I'll give you a happy look.

Yeah, you wanted to.

But yeah, that emotional dysregulation, I think that paired with CTE is

really fucking dangerous.

And the oversensitivity as well, you know, we're going to see a lot of times with some of these attempted murders is they will, I think, I believe are completely linked.

to oversensitivity and also extreme drug use because extreme drug use, especially weed, not great for an ADHD brain.

Aaron's verbal commitment to UConn didn't stop college recruiters from going after Aaron anyway.

With no one guiding him, he gets wooed by the then-current national champions, the Florida Gators.

They invite him down to Gainesville, Florida.

It's awesome.

It's warm.

The stadium is cool as shit.

They throw his name on the Jumbotron.

He bought in 1,000%.

Aaron tells UConn, UConn, go fuck yourself.

I'm going to be a Gator.

Now, it's a, but UF is still a huge college football town, and it's cool.

But is it bigger than UConn?

Yeah.

Way bigger.

Way bigger.

Oh, fuck.

UConn's more of a basketball school.

But

they're in the Big East and shit.

And they do have football, but it's like, it's not even close.

Children's sports scares me.

I don't think children should be.

I don't think you should be allowed to make money off of sports until you're 21 years old.

Yeah.

Either way.

I'm happy to work gators into the story.

I believe that college college football players should be paid.

They are starting to get paid.

I think they deserve it personally because most of them never go on and they've devoted their entire life to this.

And there's money there, so why not pay the people fucking giving themselves CT?

But Eddie, I don't think you understand.

Then, how are they supposed to make all that money?

Yeah.

When they give it to these stupid kids, they're just going to blow it on fucking gum.

You know how kids are?

They're going to blow it on burritos.

They're not going to invest that money.

Now, I'm not trying to make this thing a sports history podcast.

In fact, I'm doing my best to not talk about football, the game, as much as possible in this story.

This matters for Aaron Hernandez.

Urban Meyer, the head coach at Florida at the time, knew getting Hernandez on his team would really help them stay champions.

But at 17 years old, reeling from the sudden death of his father, Urban knew he had to get Aaron down to Florida early.

So they worked it out that Aaron would graduate high school early, and then he would go to Florida that spring and skip his high school graduation.

He didn't graduate early because he was good at class.

No, they just let him go to Florida.

That's awesome.

And they pulled string.

Like they pulled a lot of strings to make that happen because I actually tried graduating early too to get the fuck out and it was difficult.

Even for me, who's like actually like a fucking student student.

You were good at school.

Yeah, I was good at school.

And there were so many hoops to jump through.

And the thing is with Aaron Hernandez, whatever Aaron Hernandez wants, he gets.

Yeah.

And like I say, it's nice to be able to skip all that grieving.

Yeah.

Well, this is something Urban Meyer actually was known for doing.

It was a tactic he would often use to make his teams great.

He'd get the kids in in January so they could study the playbook and practice with the team in spring, take summer classes, and be ready for football by the fall semester.

That's awesome.

Yes, sure.

Well, I mean, it's

a school.

Yeah.

It's a great tactic for fucking get for winning football games.

Man, they're just throwing these 17-year-old kids like into insane, insane situations.

You know what's funny?

I feel like when I was a younger man, I actually didn't understand pressure the way I understand it now.

Like when I was like 18, I was flung in front of, remember how many times I had to like go in front of like 2,000 kids and just riff and like, and I didn't even think about it for a second.

Me too.

I would host the pep rallies.

I would do an hour.

Yeah, and I would just like, if you told me I had to do that now, I'd have a panic attack.

Yeah, well, like now, then I could have just, I didn't think about the pressure of it.

Oh, shit, I did, man.

I mean, because I was also the same way.

Like, you know, performing was fine.

Like, I could go up and perform in front of people that was whatever.

But I, you know, I played football all throughout my, hell, my senior year.

You know, I was.

I played safety and I was pretty bad at it.

I was not good.

Both my brothers were incredible at football.

I come from a very, very small town where football is incredibly important.

Well, they've got big shoulders.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, yeah, they're very, they're much, they're big.

Charlie's a big boy.

Charlie's a very big boy, but Charlie works at it.

But, you know, I'm, I was put out in this position.

I was put back at safety.

And, you know, there was a lot of hope for me.

There was a lot of hope.

Like, there's another parks coming up.

Like, all these parks, like, parks are good at football, so he's going to come in and fucking Marcus once he gets in.

Once he gets feeded.

Hello, everyone.

It is I.

Everyone enjoyed the cure.

No, I was actually, I was actually pretty fucking good until I broke my leg my junior year.

And so I missed my entire junior year and then came back my senior year.

And I was behind.

I was in the wrong position.

I should have been at fucking running back instead of safety.

But since I was back there, every team that played against us knew that Parks is bad.

Parks is a shitty safety.

All you got to do is just keep throwing and he can't, you know, and we can beat.

So we went three and seven that year.

So I had to spend that entire year like sitting back there with these shitheads on the other side side of the fucking fence going come on parks get your shit together come on parks come on

come on parks it's just like a whole fucking town

and the next and the next day no dude it you suck you hear me be big and fat suck on a big you suck marcus you're a good football

it fucked me up oh yeah in ways that I'm still dealing with as a 42-year-old man.

Oh, I am.

Of like, you know, having like, you know, in the next day, he's like, fuck you doing parks.

You know, I'd be out at parties, like, parks, you got to fucking, you got to work it out, man.

You got to figure shit out.

See, thank you.

And it's just,

and like, the happiness of an entire town was placed on my shoulders.

I was so thankful to just utterly reject any of it.

I remember just so happy to just not feel that.

Thank God I didn't have parents that gave a shit about any of that.

Because as soon as I tried sports, and as soon as I realized that I had limitations, I was like, baee!

Again, I was like, oh, no, I'm not a negative feedback girly.

No, my parents were actually fine.

My parents were actually very good about that.

They supported me in the things that I was actually good at.

But when after that season and basketball, after football was over and basketball came around, I was like, I'm not dealing with that shit anymore.

I'm not playing.

I was a fucking pariah because

I didn't participate in basketball.

People just hated me because I sucked.

Yeah.

No, exactly.

People just hated me because I sucked.

I'm allowing another guy to take it.

Nope.

Dude, the same thing happened to me when I finally quit football for, for, you know, weed and theater.

Yeah.

They, uh, they treated me like shit for, for years, the coaches.

They were, and then they would, like, they would try to talk me into coming back.

And then one time I came back for a little bit.

And then they wouldn't even let me practice and shit.

So I was like, you know, what the fuck am I doing?

This is crazy.

And, you know, that I was all fucked up too.

Cause I, like, my dad, like.

If I had a bad game, I would get like punished.

Yeah.

You know, I would like get like grounded.

At least I didn't get, I didn't get it that bad.

I didn't get it.

My parents were cool with that.

They didn't, they didn't.

I started taking steroids.

It wasn't like steroid steroids.

I didn't know I was taking steroids.

It was, I bought it from GNC.

It was a thing called Androstein.

Oh, yeah, Androstein.

The spokesperson was Mark McGuire.

He was fine.

He was completely clean.

And I was popping those motherfuckers like crazy.

I would go nuts.

I would like eat grass.

I'd try to scare everyone.

You know, it was like fucking intense, you know?

And so that was the idea.

Yeah, and you didn't realize it.

And then when we found out it was steroids and they were taking it off the shelves, what do you think we did?

We went to GNC gnc and bought all of it yeah you know and so i was all fucked up on that for a while at 16.

so it's just and that was just like i said and i turned out pretty normal yeah you know like and so like that's the crazy shit no there there's a lot of sliding doors with this shit but yeah so there they're there are definitely ways in which this in which football really fucks up kids in this country and aaron hernandez is the the worst case scenario of how badly football can fuck up a kid yeah the university of florida um it's actually an amazing school to get an education at um and it should have been a perfect fit for Aaron.

But he didn't give no shits about no damn school.

Yep.

And why should he?

He's a guaranteed pro athlete.

Now, Gainesville, being a great town to go to college, is also a great town to party in.

And the only thing more important than education in this small town is the football team.

I'd argue you'd say it's the only important thing in that small town.

Maybe.

It's up there where the hospital is great.

Yeah, you got a lot, a lot of good doctors come out of here.

Chands.

Yes.

And they helped Aaron get away with murder.

Excuse the expression.

Truth is, he was known around campus as a fun, outgoing dude.

But in Coach Meyer's office, he was often in there wailing about how much he missed his father.

Meyer really put in the extra time with Aaron because Aaron needed it and he needed Aaron.

Even as a freshman, Aaron was quickly turning into an on-campus celebrity.

He was able to go into liquor stores and buy booze no problem at 17 years old.

He would frequent a popular bar called The Swamp, and this is exactly where he had his first violent brush-up.

First violent brush-up that was reported.

Yes, that was, yeah, exactly.

One night, he was hanging with Tim Tebow

and tennis player Sean Young when a waitress came over with two shots.

He took them no problem and went about his night.

But as they went to leave, bar manager Michael Taphorn presented him with a $12 bill.

And Aaron said something similar to, I play football.

We don't pay for shit.

That's right.

Tebow and other patrons try to diffuse the situation.

Let's pray on it, son.

Let's pray on it, dog.

Come on, let's pray Christ in the dog.

Come on, let's bring Christ in this dog.

Tim Tebow could fucking suck my dead one guy.

The worst.

He is the most annoying football player of all time.

How is he more annoying than Aaron Hernandez?

Legitimately, I think he's a worse person than Aaron Hernandez.

Tap Horn grabbed Hernandez, and then Hernandez sucker-punched him, rupturing Tap Horn's eardrum in the process.

And then he ran away, leaving his sneaker behind like a Cinderella in berserker mode.

Only my true princess will find my sneaker and bring it back to me.

Later, a university lawyer would convince the bar manager and owners not to press charges, offering them tickets and an apology from Hernandez.

That's as good as money.

They never got their apology, but occasionally Hernandez would creep by in his car making intimidating finger gun gestures towards the employees.

Oh, yes.

Well, I mean, it's not just, you know, them convincing him to not press charges.

You know, if this guy takes Aaron Hernandez out, if he takes their fucking, you know, star, if he takes the U of F star player out of circulation, his bar's done.

Oh, yeah.

No, they're fucked.

They're boycotting that bar.

He loses his entire livelihood.

That bar gets boycotted.

People stop going there and he's just fucking done because some shithead kid decided to punch him in his fucking fucking head.

Sports bars across the nation rely on football.

If football ever ended, the restaurant industry would take a giant hit.

And I think that's one of the reasons.

It's amazing.

Giant industry is built on top of a billion-dollar industry because of the because it's all feeding it.

It's very, very difficult.

Yeah.

Now,

this may not seem like a crazy crazy important incident, but this is really when Hernandez started to feel like he was untouchable.

There was another incident when Aaron was with teammate Ronnie Wilson at a nightclub called XS, when they got into an argument with another patron, and Wilson went to his car, got his AK-47 to scare a guy, which worked.

Yeah.

AK-37 maybe wouldn't have done the trick, but the 47, they're great for that.

Hey, I had an AK-47 when I was their age, too.

yeah no i always just like that's a that must be a florida thing wow oh yeah no ak-47s were kind of weirdly prevalent i bought mine on sale with my tax return nice well

in texas they were our drug dealers are much more like handgun guys oh they always made sure to have it on the table when you went by to buy weed yeah i remember that it was so much harder to keep the scale on the table with the ak you know it takes up so much room yeah no no my guy just had a glock you know and then he'd make you sit there and watch weeds with him while you stared at the gun

That's like, oh, we smoked out of the shotgun.

Nice.

Yeah, that was cool.

He called the, you were there for that, weren't you?

Nice.

He called the cops, and Wilson fired the gun into the air, which gave Wilson 100 hours community service, and he was able to rejoin the team after he finished that slap on the wrist.

Urban Meyer would start to take shit around town for his players acting out.

He was an advocate for second, third, and fourth chances, which worked back when he coached Utah.

But this season in Florida, his loosey-goosey discipline made the Gators the most arrested team of all time.

Florida State, number two.

Wow, great.

Later in a 2015 ESPN investigation, it was noted that University of Florida football and basketball players avoided criminal charges two-thirds of the time they were arrested.

My God.

Well, I mean, and that's the thing with Aaron Hernandez is that it's not just the people in his immediate life that let him get away with with everything.

He has existed in a system that lets people like him get away with anything and everything since he was about 14 years old.

As long as he keeps putting up numbers, yeah,

as long as he keeps playing,

as long as he still scores touchdowns,

he's going to believe that he's going to get out of whatever happens to him.

Yeah, man.

It's fucked up.

You know, I really do think I hate football.

Yeah, it's really changed.

It really has.

I'm working on it, though.

I'm still trying to figure out how I feel.

We'll see how I feel after this.

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Coach Meyer,

determined determined to keep Hernandez on the right path, he put Tim Tebow in charge of him.

Tebow, a known evangelical, was notoriously one of the most religious players of all time.

Failed!

And he was, he fucking failed.

NFL, he was awful.

Yeah, he really did shit the bet.

Isn't he playing for like Romania now?

He's a commentator now.

Ah.

He would kneel and pray anytime he scored a touchdown, and it became so nationally known that he would do that, it became a trend called Tebowing.

Tebow would often write Bible verses on his eye black as well.

John 3.16 was his favorite.

And it goes like this.

For God so loved the world.

Actually, Henry, you want to take the Bible quote?

But God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not be perished, but have eternal life.

John 3.16 would be written in blood on Hernandez's prison cell and in ink on his forehead when he would commit suicide years later.

Yikes!

Yeah,

that's uh that's a yiker.

Honestly, that's a long

kind of phrase for him.

No, he just

wrote John 3:16.

If you write that, you don't have to write the other, the rest of the phrase.

Yeah, that's the whole thing.

You just write John 3:16.

Are you bad at the Bible?

God's all not the world.

He gave us one.

I know it, Tom.

Well, Tebow, annoying Jesus freak that he is, was a tenacious player.

He would often finish games injured.

In high school, he made a game-winning 29-yard run on a broken leg to win the game, and at Florida, he threw a game-winning TD to Hernandez with a separated shoulder.

I like my players not getting hurt.

Then you don't like any players because they all play like this.

No!

Then on Sundays, he literally would be a preacher at church.

So Meyer made Tebow Hernandez's neighbor in Gainesville and roommate when he was on the road.

It was kind of working.

Oh my God.

Fucking just him just all day.

I'd be like, Aaron, come on, let's pray on this now.

Come on, let's think of Aaron a prayer.

And being like, what did he just pray on?

They prayed together.

They practiced after practice and shit.

But the problem was every time Aaron would go back back home to Bristol, Connecticut, he would reconnect with his bad boy crew of cousin Tanya, Tito, Carlos Ortiz, and Bo Wallace.

They would also often come to home games in Gainesville and cause trouble around town.

His brother DJ would even plead with Coach Meyer to not let him come back home because he would just slide back into hanging out with these gangsters again.

Every time Aaron came back to Gainesville from Bristol, it was like starting from scratch.

Aaron felt allegiance to them because they were the ones that were there for him when Dennis died.

Man, don't know how many times I got to say this, but just because someone was kind to you when you were younger, that does not mean that you have to fucking let those people bring you down for the rest of your fucking life.

Well, also, he's the type of guy that is now living like his father.

So, Aaron Hernandez, he views himself as his father is a role model.

The father's the king, right?

Every decision he's made, everybody's lauded.

Even though he ended his life in obscurity and sadly died, right?

Like, you know, like he technically, you'd, you'd say his father flamed out.

Oh, very much so.

Yeah, that's why he pushed his own kids so hard.

Yes, but they viewed him as somebody that was a, you know, this perfect role model.

So I can see Aaron Hernandez is walking around and he having, he has an idiot's idea of what a confident man does and what a confident man chooses.

And so in his way, he's like, those are my friends.

They've always been my friends.

And when you say that they're not my friends anymore, I get meh because they're my friends.

Because it's this whole like he's he now views i think in his own way no i protect them now like they're i protect them they're all this is my coderie and they all suck his dick and they all like yeah aaron whatever you want aaron because they know he's going to be a millionaire yes yeah maybe but i mean i think it's like one of those things towny it's like a towny thing it is a towny thing yeah and i think a lot of it also has to do with uh with his intense need for structure and he's just always looking for it wherever he goes because you know with the severe ADHD, like this is a guy, he should have been on medication.

He should have been in therapy.

He should have gotten structure at all points.

And I think when he goes back to Bristol, he's looking for some sort of structure.

He's looking for something.

But all he finds are people that are just telling him what he wants to hear.

He's literally sleeping on the couch while they're doing drugs around him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And he just thinks it's, he, that is his version of what family and home is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because it's, because it's his cousin, his first cousin that took him in.

And so he thinks

it's normal.

He can't be wrong.

It's my family.

And also, she loves me so much.

And she's the one.

And, you know, her mother is Aaron Hernandez's mother is hitting him in the head with a fucking hammer to try to cure his ADHD.

And, you know, his cousin Tanya is patting his head and saying, I love you.

And that's what he wants.

It's a TV version of what a happy family is.

And that's what he wants because that's all he can kind of remember.

Yeah.

All right.

So now let's get into the shooting incident in late September 2007 after UF lost an early division game to Auburn.

Tensions were high, losing such a pivotal game so early in the season.

Aaron Hernandez was out blowing off some steam with some other Gators when an ex-gator, now NFL player Reggie Nelson, came back to town to celebrate.

Everyone was partying at the nightclub, creatively called the venue.

Along for the ride was the Pouncey Twins, who would be connected to Hernandez for years to come.

yeah he even tattooed their initials on his body oh um it should be noted that two guys

was it two guys two guys mike pouncey and uh i actually um i didn't take the time to learn how to pronounce the other pouncey's name if you have a man's whose last name is pouncey yeah tattooed on your body You might be a homosexual.

Well, it should be noted that Mike Pouncey later had a very public incident when he played for the Miami Dolphins.

Him and offensive lineman Richie Incognito tortured and bullied teammate Jonathan Martin for being gay.

They were reprimanded, and Martin quit football and later got in trouble for an IG post he made of a shotgun that was captioned, when you're a bully victim and a coward, your options are suicide or revenge.

It's interesting how these things keep coming around.

Keep coming around.

A lot of themes that are repeating.

Oh, yeah.

Now, the details vary between sources, but allegedly, one of the Pouncey twins got a chain stolen off his neck by some local gangster named Randall Cayson, who had it out for UF players because one kicked the shit out of his brother a week prior.

Never have an issue with an entire football team?

Yeah.

It seems that they might have a bunch of numbers against you and they might just beat the living fuck out of you till you're dead.

They're kind of strong.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was fucking the football player is a texas tech oh you can't even stayed away

from the football like they was i gave the fsu players a wide berth they were like they were such dickheads that like when one like one of the fuck football players like got paralyzed uh during his season and everyone was like Good.

I hate that.

That guy.

Because he was a fucking monster around campus.

He would go into parties and start punching people.

I did not meet a nice one.

Yeah.

They were very frightening.

Yeah.

And they were too big to be in school.

They shouldn't have been let go.

And if you get to a certain weight class, you can't be amongst other kids anymore.

Like, you got to leave.

You're too big.

You're too dangerous.

I'm sure some of them are very nice.

Sure.

Man,

these schools or football is like a big fucking deal.

Sure, Jamie Wilson used to just show up and just park halfway across all the handicapped spots.

It's just like, you can't say anything to him.

No, yeah, Chris Ricks, man.

He would always get in trouble for parking in the handicapped spots.

Jesus.

Yeah, yeah.

And And they're just, I guess they're just supposed to be like, one day I'll make one.

After the club closed, there was a quick scuffle in the parking lot.

Jason,

the Pouncey twins are here.

Hello, my name is Michael.

This is my twin, the Pouncey twin.

I can't pronounce my other name.

He is unpronounceable, and thus he is ungovernable.

I'm the Pouncey twin.

Tie me back to my costume.

My butt is hanging.

Oh, don't worry about that.

I want to make sure that your butt is not open to the public.

We're the Pouncy Twins.

When Casey and one of his crew went up to them and said, fuck your chain, and then showed him a gun in his waistband, which obviously made the Pouncey twins and Hernandez pissed.

But it was all broken up by the NFL or Nelson, and the night did not end there, unfortunately.

The locals, led by Casey, were stuck in traffic and their crown Vic.

Late nights in college towns tend to be a standstill of drunk drivers when the bars let out on game nights.

It's chaos.

Because there's a bunch of people that are illegally drinking who also don't know how to drive in a traffic jam.

It's the worst.

Kaysen stuck his head out the window to holler at some chicks in the car next to him.

He then noticed that they were being followed by a big black SUV with the players inside.

But the 2 a.m.

procession traffic had everyone at a standstill.

All of the people in Kaysen's crowned Vic were strapped except except Squirt, who was sitting in the passenger seat.

Shit was being talked.

The tension started to develop.

And it was a developing situation.

Yes.

They were on University Drive, and a sign ahead of them said, Welcome to the University of Florida.

They were in the middle of everything.

Then, according to Kaysen, apparently a man that looked exactly like Hernandez walked up to the car, stuck a gun in the window, and fired five times.

Squirt was shot in the head, and the driver was shot in the arm.

Then as a distraction, someone threw some black cats in the street while the man who looked exactly like Hernandez ran away.

Let's go to the CTE mobile.

Other witnesses said the man who shot the gun was a black man with cornrows.

Now at the hospital, Kaysen was boss.

Certainly made squirt.

Squirt.

That's right.

Now at the hospital, Kaysen was beside himself.

He felt guilty that he got his friend Squirt shot in the head.

Kaysen and the other fellows with guns in the car had local gang ties, but Squirt was just some dude in community college with shitty friends.

My name's Squirt.

Kaysen was screaming, it should have been me, over and over again when Detective Patty Nixon arrived to take his statement.

He fingered Aaron Hernandez as the shooter and the Pouncey twins as the instigators.

I'm not an instigator.

I am a master.

I am an initiator.

I'm not a defibrillator.

Even though uninvolved witnesses had said the shooter was a 5'8 black man with cornrows, Hernandez was 6'2, Hispanic, and covered in tattoos.

Squirt, a black man, was not dead and could not speak.

Coincidence.

But when asked who shot him, he kept pointing to the palm of his hand, not the black side of his hand.

He would like point at the black side of his hand and go like no, and then turn his hand over and point at the palm.

They took this as it was possibly Aaron Hernandez who did the crime.

It It was the thing from the Adams family film,

or possibly it was just the side effect of being shot in the head.

Yeah, maybe.

Yeah, yeah, just yeah, who knows?

He probably reported to a little man.

He's like, the little man will tell you,

there's a witness in my hand.

Detective Patty Nixon

reached out to the university for them to help bring in the involved parties, but was confused on how it took them almost five hours to comply.

They They were getting their story straight with the football team's lawyer.

Yeah, that's what's incredible about it is that it is every time Aaron Hernandez gets into trouble at the University of Florida, like he immediately gets a lawyer from the university itself that it gets him out of trouble every time and tells him what to do and what not to do.

He's a real good football player.

He was the best.

He was incredible.

They had two national championships when he was there.

Yeah, the lawyer, his name was Huntley, I believe.

And he was like an effortlessly good player.

Yes.

Yeah, he was like one of those guys that just showed up and he just was immediately better than everybody else.

He could party all night long and show up and fucking murder it.

And when he's 24 and 23, he was like, but he got to age.

I mean, even so, man, like, I couldn't, like, I had a hard time fucking, you know, showing up to play well when I was, you know, I remember our coach would always say, smells like a goddamn brewery out here, oh, you fucking boys.

I know you've been drinking last night because we were all playing like shit because we had been drinking the night before.

It takes a special kind of person to show to party all night and show up and still play.

Yeah.

The lawyer.

Yeah.

The lawyer, Huntley.

He said that he's a dog.

He's a dog.

That's me, man.

I got a fucking dog, man.

It's little.

Hell yeah.

The lawyer, Huntley,

he had a signed picture of the team from Urban Meyer in his office, and Urban Meyer wrote on there,

Thanks for all your help.

You're the 12th member of our team.

Basically,

well, that is the lawyer for the most arrested college team of all time.

What can I say?

I know when the getting's good.

Yeah, thank you guys.

And there's nothing I love more than getting children off for violent crimes and possibly sexual ones as well.

All I'll tell you is: you keep them crimes coming, I'll keep lawyering.

You know what I say?

Fuck the victim, let's get another championship.

Because that's what matters here in Gamesville.

When held for questioning, the Pouncey twins' stories matched mostly, saying the man stole Mike Pouncey's chain at the club, approached them in the parking lot, and showed them a chain and a gun.

Yeah, your shit had children bullshit.

Yeah.

Then the football players went to a friend's apartment, got checkers, and went home at 2:30 in the morning.

The only thing is, one Pouncey twin said Aaron went home with them, and another said he went walking around.

When Detective Nixon went to question Hernandez, she was a little upset to find him fast asleep in the interrogation room.

He's always at ease.

Yeah.

They said that's what his closest friend said:

they never saw him show fear once, ever, for anything.

After some time, she released the pouncies and Nelson and then went to wake up and question Hernandez.

After getting his rights read to him, he simply stated, I'm not going to say anything.

I want my lawyer present.

I'm sorry, my lawyer told me to say that.

Direct quote.

So, between the great UF lawyers and the unreliable witnesses and most of the victims being gangsters themselves, no one ever was charged in the incident.

Aaron never mentioned that he had a visitor with him that night.

Neither did the Pouncey twins.

The detail was only shared by Aaron's mother in an interview with the Orlando Sentinel after Aaron's suicide.

Squirt, who ended up living, but had to learn how to speak and walk again, never got any retribution for getting shot in the head.

When asked about it today, his mother just simply says, we live in Gator country.

With a stadium that fits 88,000 people and is usually oversold for games in a city of less than 150,000 residents, it's hard to argue with Squirt's mom.

There's a lot of money in the Florida Gators being a winning football team and the players getting special treatment to make sure that no matter what, they were on the field ready to play on Saturday.

Urban Meyer, as complicit as he may be in Aaron developing his superiority complex, did his best to keep Aaron on the right path.

Aaron even lived with him for a while.

His phone was always open to him night and day, and his wife, a psychologist, would often hold private sessions with him.

In the end.

Sexy.

In the end, though, he looked past some of Aaron's troubles more than he should have.

But the pressure to win for a a high-level coach can cloud your judgment.

Even being a two-time national champion, you're only as good as you are this season, and your job is on the line just about every single year, no matter how good you are.

All the pain comes rolling down from the very, very top.

It's called the viciousness of capitalism.

Yep, the pressure.

Pressure starts up top and just goes all the way down.

Yeah, man.

Aaron Hernandez was one of those it players.

He was as good as any one coach Meyer had ever coached.

He really was.

Yeah, but his off-the-field incidents continued to pile up between fights, heavy marijuana use, and hanging around with unsavory characters back in Bristol made his baggage more than the coach was willing to continue with.

Aaron missed the first game of the 2008 season from a failed drug test.

Too little weed.

Coach Meyer had him listed as hurt, but put a boot on his foot.

A player suddenly on the sideline with a boot on his foot usually meant that they weren't hurt.

They were there for disciplinary reasons.

He would have a good season as the Gators won the BCS championship.

His daily marijuana use continued to be a problem, and he was not hiding it, but finding ways to pass the drug tests with clean urine.

He would push the clean urine through a fake penis if being watched.

That was very common.

Yes, I remember these things were being called wizenators.

Yes, I had one for a job interview.

Really?

Yeah, I only had to take one drug test my whole life, and I did get cleaned for it.

You know what the job was?

What?

Janitor.

They fucking, yeah, I worked that job for like two years, but yeah, they were like, yo, you know, we want to hire you full-time, but you're going to have to take a drug test.

I'm like, if you want to hire me full-time, you're going to have to wait a month.

And then we'll take the drug test, and then we'll see.

Yeah, yeah, because God's going to be true as yourself.

I want to be on drugs as a janitor.

The 2009 season, Aaron Hernandez had an amazing junior year as a Florida Gator and won the Mackey Award, which goes out to the best tight end in college football.

This award will usually guarantee a first-round draft pick and a huge contract in the NFL.

But Hernandez, knowing that he was, maybe knowing that he was not mature enough to move on to the NFL, decided to stay in college football for one more season.

I bet you it's also just kind of, you don't know.

You don't really know what you're going to be like once you go into the NFL.

Like, I think that you, he obviously has a lot of confidence, but people's, it all changes once you're on the big, once you're in the big fucking leagues.

And Urban Meyer, even though he knew how talented and a straight-up force of nature he was on the field, told him there was no room for him on the team anymore and that he should enter the NFL draft.

I didn't know this.

I did not, because every documentary I saw always said, like, Aaron Hernandez decided to go to the NFL.

I didn't know that Urban Meyer said, like, I don't want to deal with you anymore.

Get the fuck out of here.

Yeah, he's like, there's no, he just figured he was going.

Yeah.

And then when Aaron was like, hey, listen, I'm going to stick around.

He's like, you can't.

You know, yeah, yeah, you got to go.

Wow.

So he just failed him up.

Yeah, he just told him to get out of there.

It's incredible for him.

Well, I'm sure Arbame probably had planned.

He'd probably recruited.

And so, like, okay, here's my next tight end, like, that's going to come up after Aaron Hernandez.

And they're like, yeah, why are you?

No, get out of here.

I mean, the same thing happened to me in theater.

They were like, you can't go to districts this year because we're working on the junior.

You're a senior.

And I was just like, well, but I'm a senior.

I'm finally got my spot.

I've only got the fucking spot.

I mean, I wasn't that good.

But you won in the end, didn't you?

I did.

I'm here.

He could no longer handle Hernandez's weed smoking, his overall bullshit, and off-the-field violence.

The on-the-field violence was more than welcome.

Of course.

So now Aaron declares to enter the NFL draft on the fourth anniversary of his father's death and is ready to kiss Florida goodbye for now.

He signed with Brian Murphy of Athletes First Sports Agency.

Murphy knew Aaron was arguably the most physically superior athlete entering the NFL draft.

But he didn't just have baggage.

This dude had luggage, and no one was helping him carry it.

So Murphy told Hernandez, Fuck taking your statistics class again.

Come on out to Cali with your brother DJ and we'll get you trained up and ready for the NFL Combine.

The NFL Combine sounds like it's fun.

Yeah, well, the NFL Combine is an insane experience that has been compared by some as a slave auction.

Oh.

329 players are invited to show their strength, speed, agility, and intelligence.

Oh, and their curiosity with their creativity.

Yeah.

Their whimsy.

Their whimsy.

You know, what is it they're doing?

All in their own.

Their creativity, uniqueness, nerve, and talent.

That's what they need to show.

Charisma.

Uniqueness.

Nerve and talent.

Yes.

Hernandez showed up.

You've scored three on the cunt scale.

Thanks.

You have to play for the Cleveland Browns.

Oh, no, not the brute, not the Dookies.

They named their team after shit, Dookie.

Hernandez showed up to the Combine with a torn muscle in his back, so he sat on the sidelines for most of the time.

But the scouts still were drawn to him, watching him weigh in and get measured.

Look how big his legs are.

Look how long his arms are.

They're in their underwear.

It's weird.

That's why people compare it to a slave auction because it's like they do everything but check their teeth.

Yeah, they watch their teeth, watch their gait.

Yeah.

Yeah, check under their tails.

Yeah,

then came the intelligent test.

Now, Aaron Hernandez might not have been the best student in the world, but he knew football just as well as anyone.

He scored well.

So what's this?

That's a football.

And what's this?

That's a helmet.

10 out of 10.

Well,

he scored 10 out of 10 for focus and mental quickness.

ADHD.

9 out of 10 for self-efficacy.

What does that even mean?

I don't know.

And 7 out of 10 for dedication.

But the category of social maturity, he scored 1 out of 10.

What are you talking about?

Nothing.

Oh, man.

They came at his ass hard, dude.

They pressed him about his shitty friends back home, his failed drug tests, his off-the-field incidents, his dead dad, his dad being able not to stay in school, and who murdered the cop, and his mom's new shitty husband, anything they could do to get a rise out of him to see how he reacted.

You shut the fuck up!

You shut the fuck up!

Basically, how he reacted.

Not a good way to beat her in the combine.

It's not.

No, it's like almost like he's the Ghostbusters 2 mood slime

and they're trying to get him to bubble over.

Rumors started to develop about his gang ties.

He's about an unstable molecule.

Football players having gang ties is not a new concept.

It happens often, actually.

Most players come from poverty-stricken neighborhoods around many unsavory characters, but Aaron loved his gang-affiliated members back home and considered them to be family.

Then came the pro day workouts back in Gainesville.

He had to overperform there, as well did Tim Tebow, who didn't have a great combine as well.

It turns out that it was because he was a bad football player.

Yeah.

He just choked.

It happens to quarterbacks a lot.

They are amazing in college, and then they just go to the NFL and they just shit the bad.

Was it Johnny Football from AM?

Yeah.

Yeah.

God helps those that help themselves.

So you better be good.

God help me.

Football was good for like one season in the NFL, and then everyone figured out how to go against him, and he never could do it again.

Hernandez overperformed at the pro day workouts, though, back in Gainesville.

He got a 4-5, 40-yard dash.

He could bench press more than any other tight end, but his character would continue to be called into question.

Now, April 22nd, 2010.

Yeah, man, but this is the thing, man.

Greta Turnberg isn't fucking there.

If Greta Turnberg could put a fucking 285, you'd use her.

Now,

April 22nd, 2010 was the first day of the NFL draft.

Aaron should be a top 10 pick, but the teams are passing on him.

Three of his teammates, including Tebow and Pouncey, are picked in the first round.

Because the Punsey, Mike Pumsey, is always a first-round gentleman.

Everybody needs a little kitty cat.

Everybody needs help pickle stinky cut.

I hope I go to the Detroit Lion.

Four more players from the Florida Gators would be picked before Hernandez.

Many of them not without their own issues, including DUIs and one linebacker, Brandon Spikes, that served a suspension for trying to rip out another player's eyes.

I think that's a plus.

Yeah, man, you mess with Brandon.

Yeah, don't fuck with him.

You fuck with Spikes.

Don't fuck with him.

My God, those linebackers.

That's funny.

And he's trying to rip out of teammates' eyes.

Of opposing player.

Again, that's a pro.

Yeah, that is a pro, yeah.

Finally, during the fourth round, on the last day of the draft, with the 113th pick, the bitch-ass New England Patriots, Robert Kraft and Bill Belichick, picked Aaron Hernandez.

Excited as he was to be playing for his favorite childhood team, he did not take it well getting picked so low.

He had only one failed drug test on record, but rumors said that he had failed six and UF covered it up.

Bill Belichick, evil, gross fucker that he is, knew how to manipulate the NFL draft.

Tom Brady was a six-round pick a couple years earlier, and in the second round of the same draft, the Patriots selected Rob Gonkowski, who just retired as one of the greatest tight ends of all time.

Not just that, Belichick was also known for turning troubled players into successful winners at the Patriots.

He had done so with players like Randy Moss and Brian Cox.

They even drafted the eyeball popper Brandon Spikes.

So this should have been the best case scenario for Aaron Hernandez.

I'm starting to think that there's something wrong with Bill Belichick.

Realize, well, all these guys are essentially criminals.

I need to work with them.

Yeah, it's like fucking like the Patriots are like 13 ghosts.

Yeah.

And they just like pull them together all the time.

I specifically choose the murderers.

Now, that's the Oakland Raiders.

Yeah.

A real team with real men.

Yeah.

Playing real ball.

Or I guess the Las Vegas Raiders now.

Yeah, yeah.

They'll always be Oakland to me.

They were in Los Angeles for a long time as well.

Either way, fuck Al Davis.

There you go.

But joining the New England Patriots might have been one of Aaron's sliding door moments as well.

And many believe if Hernandez had been drafted by any other team, he may not have ended up becoming a murderer.

You see, the New England Patriots play in Foxborough, Massachusetts, just a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Bristol, Connecticut, the home of all of Aaron Hernandez's criminal friends.

So, with a $200,000 signing bonus in his pocket, Aaron Hernandez is moving back to where his troubled past had begun.

He hired two buddies with criminal pasts as his assistants, and one of them was his weed dealer.

So, that's convenient.

That is called a promotion.

That is an assistant.

He's assisting him

getting weed.

Yes, absolutely.

His life back home in Bristol was no treat.

His mom had married his cousin Tanya's ex-husband, Jeff Cummings.

Aaron had refused to go to the wedding.

He did not approve of the union.

He hated the man his mom had been publicly cheating on his dad with, and the fact that he was now living at his old home really pissed him off as well.

Also, it's fair to say that Cummings was a total fuckhead himself.

He had a rap sheet that included hitting women and children.

One night, just one month before Aaron was due to report to the Patriots, he got drunk and slashed Aaron's moms in the face

with a butcher knife.

She was

Cummings.

Cummings did this.

Yes, Jeff Cummings slashed Terry Hernandez in the face with a butcher knife.

She was able to escape to a neighbor and called 911, and he was found in the backyard, and the cops took him to jail.

Not the best welcome home for Aaron.

They're all just drama monsters.

Yes.

Yes, they are.

But

I don't know if I agree with

the assumption that if he would have been drafted to any other team, he would never have killed anyone.

I just think it would have taken longer.

I think he would have eventually...

He would have found a network of shitheads.

Well, I think just the stories that they tell and the emotional dysregulation that he had and how bad the CTE was and how much he would just fucking flip.

He would have been drafted to another team, maybe, maybe not, but the possibility was always still there.

Yeah, it's not like he was well-behaved in Florida.

No, it was not.

And those guys weren't around when he was in Florida for the most part.

They were there sometimes, but you know, they weren't there when he fucking popped that guy's eardrum.

They weren't there when he fired a gun, when he allegedly fired a gun into those other two guys's car.

Like, he was cruising for a bruise.

Yeah, when he was when he popped the dude's eardrum, he was with a tennis player and the most religious man in football.

So exactly.

That's true, but never forget the Menez brothers, also tennis players.

Oh, oh, wow.

Cute.

When Hernandez joined the Patriots, he was an emotional disaster.

During his first week, he almost fought Wes Welker.

Welcome.

Sorry, you used to.

I love Wes Welker, too.

He played at Texas Tech when I was there.

Oh, yeah.

He was a great dolphin.

Yeah.

He was.

He was like the only guy who

kick returned for a touchdown, punted the ball, returned a punt, and made a tackle in the same game.

He's a great record.

He was incredible to watch in college, and he was actually a nice guy, from what I hear.

Yeah, well,

I'm out of my depth.

But you know why also?

I think the other thing too, Wes Welker, not a big guy.

No, he was a tiny dude.

He was a route runner.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He had quick cuts.

Yeah.

And there's something about like the bigger guys, like the guy that I talked about earlier that everyone hated, he was gigantic.

That's why, yeah, they're massive.

The smaller guys, nicer.

Always.

Well, the reason he tried to fight Welker is because Welker wouldn't help him figure out a weightlifting machine.

Welker just giving the rookie a hard time, said, figure it out for yourself.

Other than that incident, though, he was often referred to as a sweet guy they called him chico they all you know he was a buddy around and then he would but the thing was he would openly cry when he made mistakes or he was ridiculed uh it's not normal locker room behavior but it is normal adhd behavior the over the oversensitivity you know and his is just out of control in every way yeah there was one reporter who had a good relationship with aaron hernandez he and hernandez developed a relationship early on hernandez you know always available to be interviewed.

He was a rookie, you know.

And

Hernandez wasn't popular yet, and he was always available for an interview.

And one day he told the reporter, I like you, but if you ever fuck me over, I'll kill you.

Seemed out of nowhere, but the statement stuck with the reporter for sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, we talked last week.

He's a huge man.

Yeah, we talked last week about the Kentucky vampire kids who would always talk about they would kill this person or kill that person.

It's like, don't take them seriously.

They were 95 pounds soaking wet.

Take this guy seriously.

This is a guy that should not be throwing around like, you know, I'll fucking kill you.

I'm going to kill you.

Yeah, like he is not

fucking around.

Look at my hands.

And I just wonder, my hand's going to kill the day.

He was always smiling.

Yeah, that's why I'm doing it like this.

Like, you don't try to fuck with me.

Yeah.

Yeah, he's always like, that's crazy.

You're crazy.

Yeah, yeah, that's crazy.

Yeah.

Crazy.

Yeah, he would get very, very angry, though.

And yeah, just fucking

the way he would say, I'll kill you.

And there was also like one of his other friends.

He came loudly.

Yeah.

One of his other friends said that if Aaron Hernandez said that he was going to do something, whether it was big or small, if he said that he was going to do it, he was going to do it.

Like that was like a part of his character.

Yeah, he was definitely follow through.

Yeah.

The 2011 season, Rob Gronkowski and Aaron Hernandez were unstoppable as a tight end duo.

Even as rookies, they were both top-five tight ends in the league and combined for more yards and touchdowns than any other tight end duo in NFL history.

And the two of them had a great relationship.

Belichick had figured out something no other team had before.

These two were unstoppable together.

The AFC championship game that year was against Tim Tebow in the Denver Broncos.

Tim Tebow was all John 316ed out.

I hate him.

I hate him.

I hate him.

The previous week, he wrote John 316 on his eye black and coincidentally threw for 316 yards, averaging 31.6 yards per completion, threw 16 passes in the first three quarters.

Accused rapist,

two-time accused rapist Ben Rothelsberger, threw an interception on third and 16, and the ratings for the game were 31.6 million viewers.

John 316 was all anyone could ever talk about.

Even God thought it was a little on the nose.

It didn't matter, though.

The Patriots kicked the shit out of them the following week, 45 to 10.

God isn't real.

Yeah, killing God.

That's all that the Patriots did go.

The Patriots were headed back to the Super Bowl, but in the fourth quarter, Aaron Hernandez had to leave the game with a head injury.

But you know, that shit wasn't going to stop him from playing in the Super Bowl in two weeks.

I mean, playing with head injuries.

I mean, this is a guy that's about to play the Super Bowl.

When I was in fucking high school, I was like a sophomore.

My buddy, a friend of mine got hit in the head so hard during a game that he was wandering the sidelines yelling, Ball State wants me.

They want me.

And the coach just told him, like, hey, Gary, yo, calm down.

Just be okay.

And then after about, I don't know, a couple of possessions, he fucking shook his head and went right back into the game.

Wow.

And he was, he was hallucinating on the sidelines.

I don't know how he's doing.

And,

you know, I don't know.

I'm actually not sure.

Haven't talked to him in a very long time.

I don't know how he's doing these days.

I thought you got off Facebook.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know how he's doing.

I hope he's doing well.

He was a close friend when I was a kid.

But yeah,

that was a high school football game.

It wasn't even a district game.

Yeah.

Like, this was just like this was before the district games even came.

and he got back into the game after a hallucinatory concussion.

Dude, I dislocated my shoulder and popped it and went back in and did a long snap.

You just did that shit because you thought that's what you had to do.

Well, that was what they told you.

That's what they said.

That's

what you do to show commitment.

No, when I broke my leg, I walked, it was during practice.

I walked all the way back to the field house because I didn't want the coat.

I didn't want to ride in the coach's truck and be seen as a pussy.

And then I took a shower.

I drove myself to my parents' job and walked in and said, I need to go to the hospital right now.

But the whole time, and that's not even playing, that wasn't even playing football.

That was like just not being wanted to be seen as a pussy during practice.

Oh, yes.

And think about the fucking, you know, the pressure of playing in the Super Bowl.

Yeah, I know.

It's fucking nuts.

So, Super Bowl Sunday.

During Kelly Clarkson's national anthem, the cameras turned to Aaron Hernandez.

He stood there, visibly lost in thought, swaying with his mouth agape.

Aaron Hernandez scored a Super Bowl touchdown in the third quarter, but ultimately was unable to catch the last-second Hail Mary, and the Patriots lost their second Super Bowl to Eli Manning and the Giants.

Yeah, yeah.

During this offseason, Aaron Hernandez's life would take a turn for certain disaster.

And it's with that that we pick up back next week when we discuss Aaron Hernandez and killing a bunch of people.

Eddie, great job.

Yeah, this is fantastic.

Yeah, it's intense, man.

Yeah.

I tried to fill it with jokes, but it just made me so sad.

That's my job.

It's a very sad story.

Like, you know, like, in so many ways, like, Aaron Hernandez is a shithead.

In so many ways, he made other people's lives miserable.

But in so many other ways, you know, you hear people talk about him.

Like, he was a nice guy.

He was nice to be around.

You know, like, he was a like his, well, like for, and he's, it's, what's so strange is like, there's like his wife, or I guess fiancé at the time, but like never said anything about any kind of domestic abuse.

Like he was apparently like, you know, there for his kids, like he was a good friend, but also just this violence is just living underneath at all times, you know, and just this idea that he has an entire system, a national system set up to protect him and to keep him from seeing any sort of consequences for any action that he does.

And it doesn't matter who you are or what you do.

If a human being does not face consequences for their actions, they're going to be a bad person.

They're going to do bad shit.

It just fucking happened.

Yeah, look at Lawrence Taylor's now on the fitness,

the new fitness board for the White House.

Yeah,

so is Tua.

Lawrence Taylor, the

former crack cocaine addict who also slept with a 14-year-old girl.

15, Marcus.

She was a sex worker that he bought, and he said the only reason he bought an underage sex worker was because he couldn't turn down how cheap it was.

And you see, so he's more of an hunter.

And he's working for the White House.

Yes.

He was my favorite football player growing up.

No, I loved LT.

Did I show you?

I said it to Eddie.

He made his speech and he said, I don't know why I'm here and I don't know what we're doing, but I'm happy.

And then Trump literally was like, isn't he great?

Yeah.

Jesus.

The country currently has CTE.

Patreon.com slash last podcast to the left.

And you can watch us talk about this.

Eddie, honestly, such a good job.

And next week, we're going to get even deeper into it.

Great job.

At LP on the left, you're going for all your social media needs.

Yes, and don't forget to go and check out all of our YouTube channels, Someplace Underneath, LPN Romantic, Who's the Bee, Foreign Report, No Dogs and Space podcasts, and LPN TV.

And don't forget forget to come see us on tour this year.

That's right.

We're going to be in St.

Paul, Minnesota, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Oakland, California, Cleveland, Ohio, and Portland, Oregon.

Go and check lastpodcastonaleft.com for all of our dates and stay up to date on what we are fucking doing.

Man,

let's go.

Let's go bang our heads together.

I want to get, I want to get my brains pushing up.

Within Hao Geen, then.

Yes.

And I'm going to hail.

Today is, I'm going to, I'm going to let the cat out of the bag.

Today is August 18th.

It's Brodie Stevens Day.

So hail, Brody Stevens, another great athlete we lost too soon.

Yeah, that's very nice.

Yeah, my love, my boy.

I miss him.

All right, guys.

Goodbye.

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