Aaron Hernandez harbored immense evil.
Darkness followed Hernandez during career with Gators
One of Aaron Hernandez’s first official acts as a freshman football player for the Florida Gators was to sucker-punch an employee at a Gainesville bar so hard that he ruptured the poor guy’s ear drum.
Tim Tebow, who then was a sophomore quarterback, intervened in the dispute and tried to make everything better.
Tebow, you see, was the public face of Urban Meyer’s national championship-winning program at UF.
Aaron Hernandez was its secret and seedy underbelly.
It’s hard to believe the Gators had one of the greatest role models in sports history and one of the most heinous criminals in sports history on the same team, at the same time. And not even all of Tebow’s goodness could eradicate the immense evil Hernandez harbored inside himself.
Hernandez, the UF All-American who helped the Gators win a national title and the Pro Bowl tight end who was on his way to being a future superstar for the New England Patriots, apparently tied a bed sheet to his cell window and hanged himself at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley, Massachusetts, early Wednesday morning.
Obviously, it was a tragic end to a soulless life, but the reaction of some of Hernandez’s former UF teammates was troublingly telling on Wednesday. It was almost as if they were mourning a martyr instead of murderer.
“I'm gonna miss u bro, you my family!” tweeted former UF safety Ahmad Black. “Despite other allegations and whatever else u had going, ill always love you bro.” Other allegations?
You mean like being convicted of killing one person and likely getting away with killing two others simply because lawyer Jose Baez got Hernandez off just like he got Casey Anthony off?
Mike Pouncey, another former UF teammate and now the center of the Miami Dolphins, wrote on Instagram: “To my friend my brother! Through thick and thin right or wrong we never left each other's side. Today my heart hurts as I got the worse news I could have imagined. It was just a day ago we shared our last (conversation). I will forever miss you and love you bro. we will meet again rest easy!”
Please spare us the touching tributes to this maniacal murderer. Where was Pouncey’s sympathy for Odin Lloyd, the former friend whom Hernandez killed, execution-style, in an abandoned industrial park?
Oh, that’s right, Mike Pouncey and his twin brother Maurkice, were both photographed wearing “Free Hernandez” hats while their former UF teammate was being convicted of murdering Lloyd. The reaction of the Pounceys to Hernandez’s heinous crimes is the ultimate example of athletic entitlement. Teammates, coaches, fans, boosters, even police investigators too often close ranks and do everything possible to protect the team. (see Sandusky, Jerry).
It should be noted that Hernandez was never criminally charged in the incident in which he ruptured the Gainesville bar employee’s eardrum, nor was he given any significant punishment by UF.
In another more serious case in 2007, he was reportedly never even questioned by police or his head coach even though he was a suspect in Gainesville shooting that left two men wounded, including one who was shot in the back of the head. That case, categorized as an attempted homicide, remains unsolved.
When the Gainesville Sun’s Pat Dooley asked Meyer, now the head coach at Ohio State, about the shooting incident four years ago, Meyer made it sound as if it was just a minor distraction. He told Dooley he was informed of the incident by one of his UF assistants and “didn’t think about it again until a couple of days ago.”
Sorry, but I don’t believe that. I don’t believe a football coach whose players are being questioned in an attempted homicide case is going to think nothing of it until six years later when Hernandez was arrested and charged with murder.
Then again, college football rosters are filled with troubled kids from violent backgrounds who are recruited for the purpose of winning. Many of those kids, when given the discipline and the structure of a college football program, turn their lives around. Some, though, simply cannot be saved.
Especially a deranged monster like Aaron Hernandez, who should go down as the most evil athlete in sports history, even more sinister than O.J. Simpson.
O.J. apparently snapped and killed (allegedly) out of jealousy. His was a crime of passion.
Hernandez was a serial psychopath who seemingly killed for the sport of it.
O.J. was a football player who committed murder.
Hernandez was a murderer who happened to play football.
And on Wednesday, he murdered yet again.
Except this time he finally killed somebody who deserved to die.
Himself. Email me at mbianchi@ orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on Twitter @BianchiWrites and listen to my Open Mike radio show every weekday from 6 to 9 a.m. on FM 96.9 and AM 740.