“Oh, shit! Did you hear that?” Fuller yelled.
Wilson would tell the police he had fired the weapon because he had been “afraid for his life.” Then, after being suspended by Coach Urban Meyer, the offensive guard copped a plea: Two years’ probation and one hundred hours of community service—service that Wilson performed while on suspension. Once he was done, Meyer let him back on the team.
This was the sort of thing that gave Urban Meyer a bad name in certain circles in Gainesville. In Gator Country, it was said, being an actual Gator brought you a boatload of special privileges. It was not that you were encouraged to behave badly, per se. It was just that, if you did behave badly, the odds were better than decent that you would be given another chance.
It was a state of affairs that explained a few of the chances that Aaron Hernandez would get as a Gator. But there was another side to the stories told around town about Urban Meyer and his troublesome players.
Years earlier, while coaching at Utah, Meyer had seen exactly what second chances could mean to troubled kids who had never caught a fair break.
There, a tailback named Marty Johnson had plowed his car into another car and fled the scene. The arrest for drunk driving that followed was Johnson’s second—it landed Johnson in jail and brought pressure on Meyer to kick him off of the team. Meyer did that, but he and his wife, Shelley, whose psychiatric speciality was addiction, also visited Johnson in jail. Their eleven-year-old daughter, Gigi, wrote Johnson encouraging letters. Upon Johnson’s release, Meyer gave the kid a second shot on the team. He brought Johnson into his home and his life. And, against all odds, Johnson ended up abstaining from alcohol, playing in the Fiesta Bowl, finishing college, and turning his life around.
“Once I got away from my old lifestyle for a while,” Johnson said, “it wasn’t hard. I have the Meyers and my teammates to thank for that.”
But Marty Johnson did not keep assault weapons in the trunk of his car. He did not threaten people’s lives, shoot people in the head, try to strangle women, or deal cocaine outside of the stadium on game days—all incidents involving Gator players that Meyer would have to contend with in 2007.
When he addressed the UF Alumni Association Gators Clubs, Coach Meyer used a certain phrase to describe his team: “The top one percent of one percent,” he would say. When it came to the 2006 season, he wasn’t wrong: The Gators ended up 13–1, setting a school record by winning both the SEC and BCS Championships. The last game of the season was a stunning upset over the number-one ranked Ohio State Buckeyes—the team Urban Meyer now coaches.
But that was the year before Aaron’s arrival in Florida. In 2007, Aaron’s first year on the team, Meyer’s players brought home a record their coach had never asked for and didn’t want.
They brought him the NCAA record for most players arrested in the course of a single year.
Chapter 12
Coach Meyer did what he could to minimize the damage. What that meant for Aaron Hernandez, in particular, was that Tim Tebow was assigned to keep an eye on the hotheaded player.
Tim and Aaron could not have been much more different. Tebow was the youngest of five children, all of whom had been homeschooled by their deeply religious parents. While Tebow’s teammates in Florida partied, fought, got high, and spent time in strip clubs, he stuck to the straight Christian path he had followed since boyhood.
The quarterback was clean-cut, clean-spoken, open about being a virgin and saving himself for marriage. Tebow sang hymns on the sidelines, and on the field he dropped down to one knee, bowed his head, and prayed after victories.
Before long, the phrase “Tebowing” would enter the national vocabulary. It involved striking the same kneeling pose.
Tim wrote references to Bible verses in his eye black. When the NCAA passed a rule that banned players from writing such messages, it became known as “The Tebow Rule.”
Like Hernandez, Tebow was an especially versatile player—6′3″, physical. A dual-threat quarterback who was as likely to run with the ball as he was to pass it. And if Hernandez had been an exceptional player in high school, Tebow had been even better. ESPN had aired a documentary about his senior year, and his decision to play for Florida over Alabama, called Tim Tebow: The Chosen One.
Now, at the start of Aaron’s first full school year in Florida, Aaron and the Chosen One were living next door to each other. On the road, Urban Meyer put them together as roommates. And on the field, Tebow was a constant inspiration. Aaron knew all about a famous game Tim had played as a high school sophomore, in 2003. In the course of that game, a bad tackle broke Tebow’s leg. Tim heard the pop and felt the bone moving. But his team was down seventeen points.
“Don’t take me out,” Tim told his coach, before fighting back against the deficit and tying the game, running for a twenty-nine-yard touchdown on his broken leg.
As a Gator, Tebow showed just as much heart. Playing against the Kentucky Wildcats, in October of 2007, Tebow separated his right shoulder but continued to play, beating a tackler and running in the winning touchdown.
Hernandez also scored in that game—it was his first touchdown as a college player. Urban Meyer could see Tebow’s influence rubbing off on the tight end. “Aaron used to text me all the time,” Meyer recalls, “about him and Tim going to train in the evenings: ‘While you’re sleeping, I’m working out. We gotta go win a national championship!’”
But in other respects, Aaron was failing, in heroic fashion, to live up to Meyer’s expectations.
The coach was especially concerned about Aaron’s friends from Bristol. He noticed a difference in Aaron whenever he returned from Connecticut. “It would almost take us a few weeks to get him back to thinking about the team and thinking about what to do right,” Meyer says. Time and again, the coach told his players: “You know, we’ve got to be very cautious about outside influences. Cautious of people who maybe should not be in your life.”
Aaron would ignore the advice.
“It wasn’t healthy at all,” Meyer says of the Bristol influence. Players that Aaron was close with would tell the coach, ‘He shouldn’t go home. Don’t let him go home anymore.’”
DJ told the coach the same thing: “He needs to be around people that are good for him.”
But Aaron was loyal to his friends on Lake Avenue. Loyal to his cousin Tanya, and her man, TL, loyal to Carlos Ortiz, and to Bo Wallace. They were the friends who had taken him in after his father’s death. No matter the consequence, he never turned his back on any of them.
Chapter 13
For all the trouble that Hernandez would get into up in New England, Aaron’s teammates on the Gators would always remember him fondly.
“Let me tell you right now, there’s not one person in this world who didn’t like Hernandez,” Ahmad Black says. “We called him ‘Chico,’ and everybody loved Chico. Everybody in Gainesville. Everybody in the division. Everybody.”
Black, who went on to play for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, came to Gainesville at the same time as Hernandez. Like Aaron’s high school friends, he remembers Hernandez as a class clown—someone who’d make funny faces to trip his friends up in public speaking, or pop Ziploc bags in the back of the class to make his professors jump.