Bill Belichick Crucial Episode by Aaron Hernandez

[This story contains spoilers from the fifth episode of American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez, “The Man.”]

“Remind me who Bill Belichick is?” is what two-time Tony winner Norbert Leo Butz asked after learning he was shortlisted to play the iconic New England Patriots coach in Ryan Murphy's FX limited series History of American Sports: Aaron Hernandez. “That's how little I follow the NFL. I'm a big baseball fan, a hockey fan; football has never been my sport”, he confesses The Hollywood journalist.

But Aaron Hernandez Staff writer Domonique Foxworth not only knows who Belichick is, he knows what it feels like to play high-level football in high school, college and in the NFL. During his career and thereafter, he also held positions with the NFL Players Association. And he's still a relevant voice in sports today with his podcast, The Domonique Foxworth Show with ESPN.

Although Foxworth's position on the FX series initially began as a consultant, he found his way into the writers' room, offering valuable insights into sports in general, as well as many broader themes. Aaron Hernandez explore. And episode five, aptly titled “The Man” and chronicling Aaron's (Josh Rivera) introduction to the NFL, became Foxworth's opportunity to not only advance showrunner Stu Zicherman's larger vision for the series , but also to illuminate and offer context on sport globally. great, real people involved.

“I played in the league for a while and was in the football and basketball unions, so I've been around the sport my whole life,” Foxworth says. “Athletes are kind of stereotyped, and I thought that was one of the most appealing things about this story: It gives an opportunity to show a lot of different sides of an athlete and a lot of different sides of the world of professional sports in general. “

To that end, episode five is more than just the midpoint of the 10-episode series. “The fifth episode was really pivotal from my perspective and I was excited about the opportunity because we got into all these different things that I wanted to talk about,” Foxworth says. “There are great moments in football, and then there are also the difficulties of dealing with stardom and the difficulties of dealing with pressure, and all the particular difficulties that Aaron Hernandez had that were unique to him. It was my first real introduction to professional football.”

That rude awakening of professional football being different for Hernandez is clearly communicated in an early meeting with coach Belichick, played by Butz. After the first training session, Hernandez takes a shower with his teammates, boasting about his performance. “I'm telling you, Brady and I got that chemistry, bro,” he says, smiling when a veteran interrupts him and reminds him that “starters get pads.” Hernandez's initial reluctance turns into a big smile as he enters the field completely naked, covered only by his signature tattoos to retrieve the pads. In the hallway, he unexpectedly encounters Belichick who drops the wake-up call bomb.

“You know Coach Meyer said, 'I need to stick with you.' He said the moment I lost sight of you, you're in trouble. But I won't do it,” he says with some distance between them. Then he approaches and looks Hernandez in the eyes, piercing him with that sentence “This is a team of men. Be a man,” he says, before walking away.

“That conversation with Belichick is a good reference point. Honestly, I think it speaks to a lot of different things about Aaron,” Foxworth explains. “It's a unique experience where you go from being a child, to a young adult, I guess, but you're still dependent on a lot of people for help and guidance. And then suddenly you're the breadwinner of your family and now you're automatically expected to reach maturity and hit your bank account almost immediately. The expectations, especially on that team, where they had been very successful up until that point, and a lot of the veteran guys knew what was expected of you. So I think inside the locker room and outside, in normal life, Aaron was expected to be a man, or an adult, is probably a better way to put it. At no time before this did anyone expect it from him, nor did he teach or show it to him [that]. In college and high school, everyone uses Aaron for what he gives them.

Belichick's first appearance in episode five isn't as severe as it is right now. Instead, he initially sits in his office, pencil over his right ear, dressed in his signature gray New England Patriots Equipment sweatshirt, playing Bon Jovi's “It's My Life.” That Belichick never showed to the press is what Butz discovered in his research.

“He loved rock and roll, going to concerts. He had a really good core group of friends. He was a great father; his kids loved him,” Butz says of the side of Belichick that NFL fans didn't see as he coached the Patriots to six Super Bowl championships. It's a softer side that Aaron presumably never saw either. “That facade he put on [of] the impenetrable badass was all strategic and brilliantly strategic.

Butz, however, is clear about the role his performance plays. “It's the Aaron Hernandez story, so we only see Coach Belichick in relation to those years when he was able to find a place on the Patriots for Aaron,” he says. “You have to remember that Aaron Hernandez was a fourth-round draft pick. Nobody wanted to touch this guy and it's part of Belichick's strategic genius that he thought, “OK, I'll take the risk.”

That risk, as the series shows, ultimately wasn't the best for Aaron. “It's a really tragic story,” laments Butz. “In hindsight, in my opinion, for that young man, playing for the Patriots sealed his destiny. It triggered everything in that young man that shouldn't have been triggered. Him coming back to New England, being close to all that shady group he was involved with, he was given so much money,” he says, referring to his next contract.

“It was a record deal at the time; he was 20, 21 years old, with no resources, no parental resources, emotional resources, to deal with that kind of power of having a coach like Belichick who was so relentlessly tough on him, to be in a sport that, at that time, I didn't take quite seriously the issue of CTE and brain injury, it was a perfect storm.

“Essentially, when you take the next step, you have people who fall out of your life,” Foxworth explains, speaking from the personal experience of growing up in the Maryland area, playing high school and college football there, and being was drafted by the Denver Broncos. “You go from college to the NFL and those relationships drift apart and it's not as convenient when you're in Colorado and they're in Baltimore. It gives you the space to be a different version of yourself or it gives you the space to grow into a more mature version of yourself. You're on your own and trying to figure it out. This is the opposite thing that happened with Aaron.

Butz also highlights “toxic homophobia.” [Aaron] he was raised.” That and football, the Broadway star believes, put a heavy weight on his shoulders. “His sexuality, in my opinion, was fluid, but the kind of hypermasculine culture of football and his Puerto Rican father really demonized that whole part of him created a lot of fear, a lot of insecurity, [and] paranoia.”

Foxworth says the increased visibility of Shayanna Jenkins (Jaylen Barron), the mother of his daughter and his fiancée, who added Hernandez to her last name before her death, sheds light on Hernandez in episode five. “I think when we make stories like this based on a true story, we have to have people who represent different parts of the story. There are so many forks in the road that Aaron's life takes different directions. And I think Shay should have represented another,” he explains. “I think one of the best things about having Shay there is that it shows that even the person closest to him, because of his life, can never be completely himself with anyone, not even the mother of his daughter.”

To become Belichick, Butz underwent four hours of makeup. “Ryan Murphy is known for working with some of the best hair and makeup artists in the business. From The history of the GU TO Versacethey are simply brilliant at creating that doppelganger effect. It was a long process for me. I think so [naturally] share some [features]. Belichick and I are actually the children of first-generation European immigrants. He is Croatian; my father is from Germany. Since this guy has been coaching his whole life and has spent his whole life on the football field, he has that really great, weathered face with those thick wrinkles. So we had to work a lot to texturize all that skin. He has that thin hair, so we used a bald cap and a wig on top. He's not a tall guy, but he has very broad shoulders, very big shoulders, and so am I, but they also had to pad me with 30 extra kilos.

“There was a lot to deal with,” he continues. “And some days it's really miserable when they call you at 3 in the morning to do it. But they're so good at what they do that you look in the mirror and say 'oh, let's get rolling!'”

And while Butz worked on his Belichick scowl, he believes that making the future Pro Football Hall of Fame coach's mumbled, slurred speech audible was the real challenge and credits the audio department for overcoming that enormous obstacle.

“It's a fair thing about Belichick, but it's critical,” says Butz, a newly converted football fan. “It's not something that I think is even personal to Belichick; we're talking about something in the DNA of the championship, of the sport. Hopefully this show and what a lot of sportswriters write about, what we know from a lot of medical research, is that things can get better. We can have the greatest sport in America and protect the athletes.”

History of American Sports: Aaron Hernandez releases new episodes Tuesdays at 10pm on FX and Hulu.