Then, on the Patriots’ very first play, Tom Brady found himself in trouble in the end zone, threw the ball away, and got flagged for intentional grounding, resulting in a safety. The penalty gave the Giants a two-point lead.
By the end of the first quarter, the Giants had widened that lead to nine points. A second-quarter field goal by the Patriots brought the score to 9-3. Then, Brady led a spectacular, fourteen-play, ninety-six-yard drive, resulting in a Patriots touchdown.
Heading into halftime, Aaron’s team had taken the lead by one point.
Madonna played the halftime show. Then, in the third quarter, Hernandez caught a twelve-yard pass, faked out linebacker Chase Blackburn, and brought home another epic drive, totalling eight plays and seventy-nine yards.
Aaron’s touchdown gave the Patriots an eight-point lead.
During the regular season, Aaron’s end-zone dance had become an internet meme.
After each touchdown, Hernandez would pretend to toss money into the air—making it rain.
Now, in a revised version of the routine, Aaron pretended to open a safe, remove stacks of bills, and toss them into the air.
“I’m trying to get this money,” Aaron had told his childhood friend, Tim Washington. “That’s the goal, and I’m going to bust my ass in any possible way to get it.”
The goal had been met. Among other things, Aaron’s end-zone pantomime conveyed his cockiness—and the sense that, at the age of twenty-two, he had become a bona fide superstar.
At that moment in Indianapolis, Aaron Hernandez stood at the top of the world.
The Giants scored two field goals in the quarter and sacked Brady on a third down, injuring the quarterback’s already-tender left shoulder. But the Patriots held the score to 17-15.
In the fourth quarter, Patriots receiver Wes Welker dropped a crucial, game-winning pass.
“It’s a play I never drop,” Welker would tell the New York Times. “I always make it. And in the most critical situation, I let the team down…It’s one I’ll have to live with.”
Finally, the Giants had an opening. Late in the quarter, Eli Manning took advantage of that opening, with an eighty-eight-yard drive that culminated in one of the most bizarre plays in Super Bowl history.
The Patriots were down to their last time-out. The Giants were on their 6-yard line.
There were sixty-four seconds left on the clock.
The Giants were within twenty-four yards of a field goal. It had been four years since their kicker, Lawrence Tynes, had missed a field goal of less than thirty yards.
All that the Giants had to do now was run the clock down before kicking the field goal and winning the game.
Of course, Bill Belichick understood this. His only hope was to let the Giants score a touchdown, regain possession, and use that last minute to score again.
Eli Manning understood it, too. He passed the ball off to running back Ahmad Bradshaw, who ran hard up the middle, instead of trying to run down the clock.
If the Giants scored now, the Patriots would still have a minute of play.
As he approached the 2-yard line, Bradshaw seemed to realize that no one was trying to stop him. Manning screamed at him to fall down.
The Patriots had parted like the Red Sea.
Right at the goal line, the running back planted his feet, crouched, and spun around. But it was too late—Bradshaw’s own momentum continued to carry him over the goal line. As he flopped backward, awkwardly, the Giants scored.
The odd, ugly touchdown gave the Giants a four-point lead, but left the Patriots fifty-seven seconds to work with—and with a quarterback like Tom Brady, fifty-seven seconds could be an eternity.
Brady’s first pass, to receiver Deion Branch, was incomplete. Hernandez lost focus and dropped an easy catch. The Giants sacked Brady again on third down, forcing the Patriots to use their final time-out, sixteen yards shy of a first down.
Branch and Hernandez redeemed themselves on the next two plays. Branch ran out of bounds, at the 33-yard line, for first down. An eleven-yard catch by Hernandez moved the Patriots up to the 44. An illegal substitution penalty against the Giants moved the Patriots up another five yards.
Then, with nine seconds left on the clock, Brady threw a perfect Hail Mary to Hernandez in the end zone.
Surrounded on all sides by Giants, Hernandez stretched his hands out and jumped for the ball.
The Giants jumped higher. As Aaron fell backward, two Giants fell on top of him.
The ball went flying. Gronkowski lunged for it, missed.
Once again, the Giants had beaten the Patriots.
Hernandez was heartbroken, he told reporters. At twenty-two, he had many more years to bring home a Super Bowl ring. But in the off-season, Aaron’s world began to crumble.
Chapter 32
Hernandez had settled in a town house in Plainville, Massachusetts, two hours east of Bristol, Connecticut. Once again, he was within driving distance of his family, and his boys. There were old friends like Carlos Ortiz to hang out with. There was Aaron’s cousin Tanya, and TL Singleton—TL and Tanya had recently gotten married. And there were new friends, like Alexander Bradley, who had met Aaron in Bristol while he was still living in Florida.
Bradley was tall and imposing, with a broad chest and broad shoulders. He was soft-spoken. And he was intelligent.
You had to be smart to be as successful as Bradley had gotten to be in his chosen profession.
Bradley sold weed—in “large amounts,” by his own estimation. He had a rap sheet: marijuana, cocaine, and battery assault were all on the menu. But Alexander Bradley and Aaron Hernandez got along well. The first time they’d met, Hernandez had no cash with which to buy marijuana. Bradley had given him an ounce on the house.
“I used to give him credit for weed all the time,” Bradley would say. “He didn’t have much money before he got drafted. I loaned him money…I wound up getting into it with my girl over hanging out with him so much. I wasn’t around as much. She was like, ‘If you want to hang out with your boy, hang out with your boy, but this is not going to work out with us.’”
Hernandez and Bradley cemented their friendship by smoking and playing video games for hours on end, and when Hernandez became a Patriot, and moved back to New England, he and Bradley saw each other much more often—three or four times a week, with phone calls and texts on the days in between. They gambled together, driving to Foxwoods Casino or Mohegan Sun. They went to clubs in Boston, Hartford, and Providence. Once, Hernandez took Bradley on a vacation to Miami.
“We were definitely best friends by 2012,” Bradley would tell the jury, during his testimony in one of Aaron’s subsequent murder trials.
On Sunday nights, he and Aaron went to Cure Lounge, a nightclub in Boston’s theater district. Waitresses carried buckets of champagne around its big room, trailing comet tails of dry ice. Sometimes, at the bar, or on the dance floor, patrons would recognize Hernandez and stare.
“He would ask me, ‘Why don’t people stare at you like that?’” Bradley would say.
“I would respond to him, pretty much, ‘Because I’m not you.’
“He didn’t like it when people stared at him,” Bradley explained. “He felt like they were trying him. What I usually would say was, ‘You’re a famous NFL player. That’s what’s gonna happen. It’s not that big of a deal.’ In other words, I would try to explain to him that people weren’t trying him all the time. It’s just the situation—the position he was in—and he didn’t need to overreact all the time to that type of scenario.”
Bradley thought that Hernandez was paranoid. The average person wouldn’t be bothered to this extent. But it began to seem as if, every time they went out, Bradley had to step in to stop Hernandez from starting trouble.
“He acted in a manner—like a tough guy all the time. He had a problem with things that most people don’t have a problem with.”
A few months after the Super Bowl, Hernandez and Bradley were at a Boston nightclub called Rumor.
“What are you looking at?” Hernandez said to a man he’d caught staring.
“I’m looking at you,” the man said.
Hernandez got up in the other man’s face.