In life, he chose the wrong team
When news of Aaron Hernandez’s suicide broke across this city’s airwaves yesterday at dawn, the feeling it evoked here was one of being absolutely stunned, like hearing 27 years earlier that Charles Stuart had jumped from the Tobin Bridge, plummeting to his death in the Mystic River.
Just when you thought a story couldn’t get any uglier, that its capacity to shock you had finally been exhausted, you find yourself ambushed by a horror you never saw coming.
Hernandez is dead? He took his own life?
Could he simply not live with the realization of what a mess he had made of that life?
Here was a handsome young guy who had a $40 million contract to live out what’s nothing more than a dream for millions of others his age, excelling as an at h l e t e, be ing adored by multitudes.
He put all that at risk just to be seen as a tough guy in the menacing world of street life? Talk about a losing trip. Do you suppose he ever heard Robert Frost’s remembrance of coming to a place where “two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference?”
Yogi Berra used to joke: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
But in real life it’s no joke. Decisions must be made, and there’s no surer recipe for lasting regret than allowing others to make those decisions for us.
That was a common theme in the years this columnist accompanied Boston stars on weekly visits to Boston’s middle schools.
“That person pushing you in directions you know you shouldn’t be going is someone who doesn’t care about you at all,” Sox infielder Steve Lyons told kids at the Edison School in Brighton.
“To get where I wanted to go I had to leave behind certain friends who were doing things I knew I shouldn’t do,” Pats’ cornerback Ronnie Lippett told a young audience at the McCormack School in Dorchester.
But Aaron Hernandez did not die without a legacy.
In years to come he’ll be pointed to as a prime example of the perils of traveling with the wrong crowd.
Though Haverhill’s John Greenleaf Whittier died more than a century before Hernandez was born, he might have authored the latter’s perfect epitaph: “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these — it might have been.”
What might Hernandez have been?
We’ll never know, nor did he.