On August 27, 2012, the New England Patriots signed then 22-year-old tight end Aaron Hernandez to a $40 million contract extension that included a $12.5 signing bonus and $16 million in guaranteed cash.
Today he looks to spend the remainder of his life eating reconstituted mashed potatoes with some semblance of gravy puddled on top while donning an orange size XXL jumpsuit seated next to some guy aptly nicknamed Weazel which also happens to be tattooed across his neck, in case he forgets.
Based on the 20 touchdowns Hernandez scored – 18 in the regular season and two in the postseason over a three-year professional football career — that means that the beloved Super Bowl champions were willing to give this man $2,000,000 every time his body crossed the goal line with pigskin in hands.
That’s 16,293 football fans – or, roughly, the entire population of the Town of Mashpee – who would have needed to cough up $122 apiece every time Hernandez spiked a leather ball off of the artificial turf to the sound of musket fire. The average price per ticket to attend a Patriots’ game is $122, the highest in the NFL.
Perhaps for that sort of insane investment – one that shows just how out of kilter with reality our culture has become – the powers that be should have added a personal guidance counselor for someone whose bare chest better resembles a tattooed history of a life of crime rather than that of an upstanding citizen who has thousands of children looking up to him as a role model.
But this isn’t about pointing fingers. I absolutely live to turn on the TV and watch the Patriots on crisp autumn Sunday afternoons. This has nothing to do with the beloved Patriots or even the NFL.
But it absolutely is all about a complete lack of empathy for someone whose life choices include telling his fiancée to toss his hidden metal stash box full of weed and ammo in the nearest dumpster as the State Police prepare to knock on his front door.
And now my tax dollars will have to pay his salary for the next 50 years.
Found guilty today of first degree murder, Hernandez has finally brought to fruition the very prophecy he himself had permanently emblazoned upon his skin and it will cost the Massachusetts taxpayers approximately $53,040.87 per year, according to the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security.
In Fiscal 2014, $53,040.87 was the average annual cost in Massachusetts to incarcerate an inmate. So, say, 50 years from now, when he is 75 years old, if that cost were to never rise one cent, Aaron Hernandez’s “Thug Life” will have cost the taxpayers of the Commonwealth $2,652,043.50.
Regardless, the local hardware store couldn’t supply enough red flags for how many were popping up around this man as the checkbook was being opened and seven zeroes with the numeral four were being penned along the amount line.
Coated with gang-style “ink” from his neck line to his fingertips, carting upon his back an already shaky if not shady background dating back to his early teens, how was it not in the entire NFL’s best interests to spend $50,000 a year to hire someone just to shadow this young man if not mentor him to at least the point where he might understand that posting selfies in the mirror holding up a 9MM Glock is not a wise decision?
It’s all so sad that the real story behind this outrageous crime may never, in fact, come out. It’s even sadder that a man’s last moments in life were spent in some dimly lit back alley of an industrial park as a gun was raised to his head. What reason could an up-and-coming NFL superstar have to pick up a loaded gun and point it at another human being, nevermind pull the trigger? We will likely never know the real truth behind those questions.
It’s been said that the phrase “Thug Life” was coined by the late Tupac Shakur and that phrase is commonly mistaken as synonymous with the word “criminal.” It’s been said that “Thug Life” is defined as the opposite of someone having all he needs to succeed and that “Thug life” is when you have nothing, and succeed, when you have overcome all obstacles to reach your aim.
Aaron Hernandez may have come from relatively simple means. In the eight-year span from the time he left middle school to the moment he was handed a multi-million dollar check, adored by thousands on national television and in the press on an almost daily basis, he had attained all he needed to succeed. Given that definition, one could say that all of life’s obstacles had been removed for him.
Except the one that blocked him from possessing even the slightest shred of common sense or the most basic idea of the difference between right and wrong or that there are consequences to every choice we make or perhaps the epiphany that no amount of money on the planet is enough to afford every man the one thing he needs more than anything to succeed: a brain.
— Sean Walsh is the sports editor for www.capecod.com. His column “One on One” appears here weekly. His email is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @coachwalshccbm
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