He has an otherworldly capacity for figures. The numbers he cites are always exactly right, and he finds the truth in them in so many ways. “I’m always looking at the number,” he says. “That’s the only way I can really judge you.” Gordy can claim to be successful in part because G&G Fitness has 69 employees. He didn’t care especially which college each of his sons attended, so long as it offered a scholarship and had a good business school. At his physical peak, he could bench 225 pounds—the NFL combine standard—34 times. (Rob could manage only 23.) His sons weren’t permitted to lift a particular weight unless they could do 15 reps with it; 15 reps was the standard that prevented injury. He is that rare father who even knows his children’s weight to the pound. “Robby’s 265, I think Danny’s 260 right now, Gordie’s close to 250, Chris is at 245, and Goose right now is about 238”—for that grand total of 1,258 pounds of Gronk. Gordy Gronkowski’s family is bigger than yours, and that’s a hard fact.
But there is also a mysticism in him that goes well beyond the countless hours he has spent down here vibrating the shit out of himself. In his own mathematical way, he holds an abiding faith in karma. “I always preached karma to my boys,” he says. “Take my word, I did a lot of things wrong, and it always comes back to bite you three times. I always give ’em the three-to-one ratio.”
Gordy is the son of a man named Ignatius Gronkowski. He has one brother, older, a comic-book character named Glenn. (“At his prime, he was six-foot-eight, 320, 24-inch arms on him,” Gordy says. “I’d say he’s 290 now.”) Ignatius Gronkowski was the son of an Olympian cyclist, and he was a big man and bodybuilder too. The Gronkowski family tree has only trunks. But Ignatius Gronkowski was deeply flawed, a heavy drinker and a largely absent father, giving his children little beyond their name and their mass. Glenn rebelled by retreating to his room, shutting the door, and escaping into books. Gordy hit the streets. “I was just a punk, beating people up all the time, stealing,” he says. “My way of getting attention was to be an idiot, or to go beat the shit out of someone. I was an asshole, that’s the bottom line.”
Then he got to high school and one otherwise ordinary morning, he decided to make something more of himself. “I hate to say it, but I didn’t want to become my father,” he says. Driven by rage more than anything else, he hit the weights and played baseball and football with abandon—“The one thing I got was, I’ll rip your throat out,” he says, “I got that”—setting his sights on the college scholarship that would save him. When no offers came, he stole his game film from his football coach’s office and bought a bus ticket to California (it cost him $240, he remembers), and he spent the spring of 1977 motoring up and down the state, visiting schools, trying to find one that would take him. Finally, Long Beach State offered him a spot, and he returned to Buffalo the prototypical self-made man.
Then something happened far beyond his scope. He was playing baseball back home with a friend named Dennis Hartman, who had been recruited by Syracuse. The Orange’s defensive line coach was at the game, keeping tabs on Hartman, when he happened to notice this other big kid who could move his feet. Gordy Gronkowski attended a tryout and ended up signing with Syracuse instead of Long Beach, taking a short right rather than a long left, having earned his unlikely full ride at a school that he had never dreamed would take someone like him. His victory was hard won, the culmination of his step-by-step reformation, the product of his hate and his calculus and his effort. And yet it also seemed like a miracle to him, and all these years later it still does, how quickly and completely plans and futures can change, fate the vibration plate that sits just under the surface, beneath all of our feet.
He never meant to have five boys. One year, home from college, he met a girl in a bar. Her name was Diane. The next year he met Diane in that same bar, and he met her in another bar the year after that. It seemed to Gordy as though they were supposed to be together, and he and Diane married shortly after his graduation. He tried to play pro ball in the United States Football League, but he had blown out his shoulder, knees, and ankles, and he ended up a somewhat intimidating sales executive for an oil company. (“I took that company from a million to $18 million,” he says.) He and Diane started having children, not with any particular ambition and not with any particular final family in mind. They started having children because children are sometimes the consequence of a newly married man and woman having sexual intercourse. “They were all mistakes, if you want to put it that way,” Gordy says, before he decides that he doesn’t want to put it that way. “I shouldn’t say mistakes. That sounds terrible. None of them was a mistake. God gifted us with them. Unplanned, let’s use that.”
The unplanned phase of the Gronkowski family climb continued long after the births of the children. In 1990, Gordy, still selling oil, opened his first gym-equipment store with his brother as his partner. Two jobs plus five boys equaled “total hell,” he says. (Middle son Chris looks back on the chaos of those early years and says, “I have no idea how he did it.”) On G&G Fitness’s opening weekend, the Gronkowskis had plenty of browsers but sold none of their high-end equipment, and they began to panic. “We were just like, Oh God, we made the worst mistake of our life,” Gordy says. By Sunday night, they were already plotting their escape, and on Monday morning Gordy called the store manager to tell him they were probably going to close up shop. The manager told Gordy they’d have to talk later—he was too busy. When they finally connected, the manager relayed to Gordy a number that still lights up something inside him: $9,000. He’d put $9,000 into the till when all those browsers came back to buy. The first of the family businesses was born. In 1996, Gordy quit selling oil, turning his full-time attention to the fitness empire that he’d nearly abandoned after 48 hours. He had learned perhaps his most important lesson: “You can never doubt yourself,” he says. “As soon as you doubt yourself, that’s when you’re going to end up on your back.”
The boys were all born with the confidence of true athletes, blessed with the same gifts that had been given to Gronk the Olympian nearly a century ago. But Gordie Jr., despite his size and his father’s collegiate career, never played football. He was motivated by love, not hate, and baseball had his heart. Gordy’s heart followed. He coached his children’s baseball teams for a dozen summers, winning championships 11 times. (“He got the most out of everyone,” Dan says. “Any kid you ask, if they had my dad as a coach, they’d tell you that was their favorite year playing and he was their favorite coach.”) Now method entered Gordy’s madness. He emphasized two things: form and fearlessness. He rolled and tossed and finally popped up thousands of tennis balls to his children, hoping to improve their hand-eye coordination with an object that didn’t leave either physical or mental scars when hands or eyes failed. Later, he moved on to baseballs, and his five boys lined up in the yard and together played a game they called Three Flies In. The first boy to catch three consecutive fly balls won, and perhaps not surprisingly the game evolved to include, just every so often, contact between something other than the bat and the ball. Football became the natural progression.
In some strange way, Gordy’s having five sons might have made all the difference. Baseball is a game of fathers and sons, but football is a game of brothers. According to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, 364 sets have played the sport professionally. The built-in rivalries for dinner and affection, the alternating phases of admiration and envy, the physical and mental violence that brothers routinely visit upon each other—Rob once threw a fork so hard at Goose that it stuck in his elbow—whatever it is, the fraught alchemy of familial brotherhoods can lead to success within more metaphorical ones. Each successive Gronkowski—Dan, then Chris, then Rob—was arguably better than the last, either because he looked up to more brothers or because he had more brothers beating down on him. “That’s what makes Rob great today,” Gordy says. “He’s got no fear. It started out from the get-go, the brawling. The kid just endured pain.”
Dan, the first at many things, was als
o the first to take to the basement weight room; Gordie Jr., who had resisted, saw his little brother ballooning and soon joined him. “And then it was like a virus,” Gordy says. The other boys just went downstairs as though by instinct, where they set about filling their jerseys and trophy cabinets. Gordy says Goose, entering his sophomore season at Kansas State, is the best pure athlete of the bunch. Is it an accident of genetics that he’s the fastest of the Gronkowskis, or is his speed a product of his having to escape flying forks?
Gordy doesn’t have a good answer. ESPN once determined that the odds of a family having three brothers play simultaneously in the NFL are one in 31 million. That number, perhaps more than any other, has stayed with him. It cements his sense of marvel, and he sometimes looks at his sons the way his lost teenage self would have looked at the man he has become. “It’s unbelievable,” he says. “It really is. I sit there sometimes and think, God, did this really all happen?”
Gordy’s phone dings. Dan and Chris were both knocked out of the NFL last season—Dan was cut by the Cleveland Browns, and Chris hurt his ankle and took an injury settlement from the San Diego Chargers—but today both are in Florida at a combine for free agents, trying to get back into the league. Gordy thinks they have a good shot, so long as they think they do. Earlier, he had texted both of them: Kick some ass today.
Yeah baby, Dan wrote back.
Now Chris has chimed in. I’m taking a dump. Almost weigh more than Dan so I have to get my weight down.
Gordy reads the text and laughs to himself. “Knuckleheads,” he says, and he shakes his head and smiles. Then he goes quiet for a moment. “That’s good if his weight is up there, though,” he says after he finishes another in his endless series of sums.
Gordy’s only moments of doubt, the only cracks in his faith, come when he sees one of his children in pain. That’s when everything falls apart. There was a time when he tried to coach his sons into refusing even to believe in it. One of his early house rules was: if you can get up, you get up. Dan set the standard during his first season of football in the eighth grade, when he ran off the field on a broken ankle. “I felt so bad,” Gordy says. “I was sort of a hardass on that.” Even today, whenever a Gronkowski looks hurt, he’s really hurt, and except for young Goose, fingers crossed, Gordy has seen each of his boys go down and stay down.
Gordie Jr., drafted by the Angels, topped out in the minors when he blew up his back. Dan has injured his hamstring and, like Chris, his ankle. And Rob, Rob these last few cursed seasons, Rob has been the worst: ankle surgery, back surgery, two fractures in his arm, and last December’s knee injury, which required surgery in January. When Rob was carted off the field, his father, watching from the stands—he goes to at least one son’s game each week—felt as though his broken heart was carted off with him.
“Helpless, helpless, helpless,” Gordy says, and his eyes fill with tears. “And then you just say, Why, you know? Why him? When he’s down on the field like that, everything runs through your head. Is he paralyzed? It just starts flying real fast. And you can’t do anything about it. You’re just stuck.”
Gordy decides he’s had enough of that particular strain of wondering. It’s time to regain control. He retreats to his kitchen, and he begins fixing himself a soup. There are framed photographs of his children on the walls and on his counters—next to the bottles of salmon oil and milk thistle—including one of Rob scoring a touchdown. “There’s nothing like that, on the other side of things,” Gordy says. “That’s my son. That’s my boy right there.”
Sometimes the house can feel quiet these days, even empty. The Gronkowskis used to go through $600 worth of groceries a week, two or three gallons of milk a day. The fridge was once covered with inspirational quotes. Now they’re gone, like so much else. Now there’s just Gordy, heating up his soup. He and Diane separated nine years ago; they divorced a year or two after that. “I couldn’t have done it without her,” he says, talking of raising the boys. “We had to be a team or it never would have worked.” He’s asked what eventually drove them apart. “Everything we did, I had to win,” Gordy says. “The wife hated that. She couldn’t stand that I had to win all the time. Even when we played coed volleyball or something, I had to win. She’d say it was just for fun, and I’d say, ‘Yeah, isn’t it fun winning?’” Gordy has a longtime girlfriend, but they don’t live together. She has five children of her own, a boy and four girls. Gordy’s not sure he could survive that again.
In the years since his boys moved out, he’s fixed all the damage they did to the house he built for them. He’s painted over the scuff marks on the kitchen ceiling, from footballs thrown across the room; he’s patched the holes punched into the drywall and repaired the doors torn off their hinges; he’s replaced the couches and beds that came with lifetime warranties but lasted two weeks; he’s replaced the old hot tub too. “That hot tub could have told some stories,” Gordy says. Only Dan still lives nearby. He’ll drop by every so often, mostly to work out in the basement. It’s been a while since a new trophy has been added to the cabinets down there. At the moment, only Rob and Goose are still in the competition.
At least the others have their educations from good business schools. Gordie Jr. works for G&G Fitness, living in Columbus, managing the Ohio stores. “He does a phenomenal job,” Gordy says. Depending on how his comeback goes, Dan will be working for his father too, in marketing. Chris lives in Dallas; he and his girlfriend have opened an online engraving business. “They’re killing it,” Gordy says. “It’s just something my girlfriend started up,” Chris says. Gordy cowrote a book last year about raising his sons, Growing Up Gronk. There’s been some talk of a cartoon starring the family, and a reality show called Gronk Gyms that would feature Gordy and his boys traveling across the country, installing dream factories. If those don’t work out, Gordy’s been thinking about taking a trip to Africa or building a home in Florida, a kind of family retreat where all of his boys might gather again, the way they did before.
Gordy’s phone rings. He thinks it might be Dan or Chris with news from the combine—in the end, both will suffer injuries—but it’s Gordie Jr. on the line. He’s at a Costco in Pittsburgh, where he’s set up a temporary display, selling equipment off the floor. Gordy answers the phone: “How much?”
It’s been a good day. Gordie Jr. has pocketed $15,000. The kid can work a floor.
“Beautiful, sir,” Gordy says. “Wow. Beautiful.
“Right. Right.
“Got it.
“Got it, sir.
“Wow. Beautiful. Beautiful.
“Got it. Got it, sir.
“What, oh, the Syracuse game?” Gordy says suddenly. “Yeah, it sucked. They blew it. I don’t know why he didn’t drive at the end. He took that shot at the end. I don’t know why he didn’t drive.”
And then Gordy Gronkowski returns to his soup. He put in 60 hours at the store this week and wants to take it easy for the rest of the day. No workouts on Sundays. He’s thinking he might go over to Dan’s house and maybe give his wife a hand. Just six weeks ago, she gave birth to the first of the next generation of Gronkowskis—a boy, of course, named Jayce. “He’s strong,” Dan says. “Super-alert.” Gordy says Dan has already asked him whether he might begin coaching his grandson a little. Nothing crazy. Nothing too serious. Maybe just get him holding a tennis ball, start him with something small like that.
JOEL ANDERSON
The Two Michael Sams
FROM BUZZFEED
IN A YELLOW-WALLED room in a Texas nursing home this July, a man in a wheelchair watched a flat-screen TV. He saw Michael Sam Jr. kiss his boyfriend and hug his small team of supporters—agents, coaches, and Pro Football Hall of Famer Jim Brown. The first out gay player drafted into the National Football League strode to the stage to receive ESPN’s Arthur Ashe Award, an honor previously bestowed on Muhammad Ali, Pat Tillman, and Nelson Mandela. It was the climax of a star-studded evening in Los Angeles meant to announce Michael Jr.’s arrival as a
national icon.
Michael Jr. thanked his agents, his publicist, the couple who welcomed him into their home in high school, supporters from the University of Missouri, and top officials with the St. Louis Rams, the team that had drafted him only two months earlier.
Finally, he gave a brief nod to his roots. “To my mother, a single mother who somehow raised eight kids. I love you dearly.”
Back in his cramped room at the nursing home, Michael Sam Sr. picked up his battered, flip-style phone and found his son’s number. He left a message.
“So that’s what you’re going to do?” he recalled telling his son. “After all I’ve done for you?”
Since Michael Jr. publicly announced he was gay in February—just days after he let his father know by text message—Michael Sr. has been vilified in the press. In the New York Times, Michael Sr. came off as a callous homophobe when he said, “I don’t want my grandkids raised in that kind of environment . . . I’m old school. I’m a man-and-a-woman type of guy.” When the ESPN documentary declared that Michael Sr. had “abandoned the family” and left his mother to raise Michael Jr. and his seven siblings on her own, Michael Sr. seemed the archetype of the intolerant and absent black father.
In none of these accounts did Michael Jr. come to his father’s defense. “I’m closer to my friends than I am to my family,” Michael Jr. told the Times.
But the father-son story of Michael Sr. and Michael Jr. is more than a conflict over whether Michael Sr. loved and supported his son. It’s the tale of a man who’s been reduced to a caricature but whose actual life was shaped by the loss of child after child, some to death and some to crime. The rift between Michael Sr. and his youngest son started long before Michael Jr. came out and stems in no small part from those family tragedies.
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