Growing Up Gronk: A Family’s Story of Raising Champions

by Gordon Gronkowski

  Although he is the second-oldest brother, Dan was the first to excel at football. Everyone in the family agrees that his success opened the door for Chris, Rob, and Goose.

  The brothers welcome young Goose into the world. From left, Rob (with a black eye), Chris (holding Goose), Dan, and Gordie.

  Outside the right-field gates at Baltimore Orioles ballpark, 1995. From left, Dan, Gordy (holding Goose), Rob, Diane, Gordie, Chris.

  7

  Competition and Physical Play

  “What we do now as professional athletes is what we did when we were kids running out of control.”

  —DAN GRONKOWSKI

  WHY ARE THE GRONKOWSKIS so successful as athletes?

  What happened under that roof to defy the long odds of making it to the highest level of sports? Aside from astronomical food bills, with two refrigerators and two freezers stocked at all times, was it just good genes? Motivating parents? Something in the water?

  Often athletes use sport as a way to escape the squalor of a poor home life. The game provides a focus that is different from the poverty that defines every day. That is not the case with the Gronkowskis. They are an upper-class family from a wealthy suburb, educated and financially stable. There was no plight from which to escape, no need for sports to provide a better life.

  Why, then, are the Gronkowskis successful where others aren’t?

  There is no easy answer, only contributing factors.

  “Looking back at the things I do and where I am now, that’s because we always used to be so competitive,” Dan Gronkowski said. “I don’t think many kids did the things we did. We had tournaments and fought over who won games. We brought a competitive side to everything. We were hitting and checking each other all the time. That was our normal, running into each other.”

  The eldest brother, Gordie, agreed that competition defined their early years.

  “Who wouldn’t want five athletic brothers, all close to each other in age?” Gordie wondered rhetorically. “We were like a team out there. We’d play two-on-two hoops, two-on-two mini-stick hockey, two-on-two roller hockey against each other. We made up games and had competitions in the backyard. Even though it was fun, there was always that competition. Everyone wanted to be better than the other person. Things used to get heated. Rob used to throw his mini-stick at everyone. Golf clubs would get chucked. It didn’t matter what the sport was, we were always competitive.”

  “What we do now as professional athletes is what we did when we were kids running out of control,” Dan said. “Not many people have four other brothers where they can always have a pickup game. There were times we were watching TV and someone would say, ‘Let’s go in the basement and get a game going.’ And next thing you know, there’s a competition. Anytime we went in the backyard, we had a ready-made team of two on two.”

  So competition was a contributing factor. But so were collisions and contact, well beyond the typical “boys will be boys” roughhousing that characterizes many kids’ play. Often the physical toll was punishing, and sometimes it was by choice.

  “Chris would beat the hell out of Rob,” their father explained. Gordy recalled regular fights between them as kids, suggesting Rob reveled in the conflict.

  “Robbie would never give up. One day Chris beat him up, and then Rob waited until Chris was sleeping on the couch, snuck over, and wailed him in the face, just to get even. He didn’t care. Chris leaped up and beat the living shit out of him again. Rob would crawl out and say something stupid again and get the crap knocked out of him a third time. It was weird that he loved that, but the kid never backed down. He just kept coming and coming.”

  The physical punishment may be a contributing factor to Rob’s fearlessness on the football field. His speed makes it difficult for defenders to catch him, but once contact is made, it usually takes more than one person to tackle Rob.

  “That’s why he’s one of the best tight ends in the game now, because the kid has no fear,” Gordy said.

  Fearlessness aside, Rob is a Pro Bowl tight end who plays with the joy of a child, as evident in his signature move after scoring a touchdown, when Rob surveys a spot of end-zone turf and winds up, windmill fashion, spiking the ball into the ground with power and ferocity—Gronking it. Anything beneath that ball would be crushed. In fact, after his second season, Rob was invited to a Worcester Sharks minor-league hockey game, where he led the ceremonial puck drop. But instead of following tradition and merely releasing the puck, letting it fall to the ice, Rob stood and eyed the faceoff dot. Stepping back, he wound up and Gronked it.

  The audience erupted in applause when the rubber disk split in two.

  When it came to competition on the home front, it wasn’t always Gronkowskis versus Gronkowskis. Occasionally the brothers would band together to form a team against neighbors or friends. Those kids didn’t stand a chance.

  “Sometimes it would be the group of brothers against everyone else,” Gordie recalled with a smile. “It wouldn’t matter, as long as we were playing. Sometimes we were poor sports. If we were snowmobiling or four-wheeling, sometimes we raced to the point where it was dangerous.”

  By all accounts, Rob’s behavior was the most reckless. In addition to reveling in physical punishment, he had a wild streak and sometimes displayed poor judgment.

  “One time, we were racing four-wheelers,” Gordie recalled. “Rob had his going forty miles an hour and lost the edge, turning directly into a tree. He totaled the brand-new machine and wrapped his knee around the trunk. We tied up the four-wheeler and brought it back, thankful that he wasn’t seriously hurt. Luckily, he wore a helmet. We never told our parents what happened and they didn’t notice the crumpled bike. Three or four weeks later, we realized Rob was wearing sweatpants all the time.”

  His father’s nickname for Robbie was “Slobbie,” so Rob’s fashion choices weren’t exactly a topic of household conversation. Still, the brothers noticed the sweats and wondered what was up.

  “Turns out a tree branch went through the skin, and he had a huge chunk of wood embedded in his leg,” Gordie recalled. “The skin healed over it. He went to a specialist, and they cut it open and pulled out a sliver as thick as your finger. His leg was pussed all over and he was hurting the whole time but didn’t say anything. It shows you how tough the kid is. That’s the extent to which we take things. It gets dangerous because we want to win a backyard race on a four-wheeler.”

  Because of the brothers’ size, sometimes the physical play had to be stifled. Getting the big kid angry was never a good idea.

  “In high school, Rob was a boy in a man’s body,” commented Bill Gorman, the assistant basketball coach at Williamsville North High School, where Rob played on the varsity team for three years, beginning as a ninth grader. “He’s freakishly strong and he lives for contact. If somebody tried to knock him around, that wasn’t going to happen.”

  Part of Gorman’s duties as assistant coach was to keep an eye on Rob. Because of his stature, other teams would often use several players to cover him, bumping and jostling to distract Rob from his game.

  “He wouldn’t get calls against him because he was so big,” said longtime friend Charlie Teal. “Rob never got the benefit of the doubt on any fouls. Referees figured he should be able to deal with it.”

  “I was the two guard,” explained John Ticco, a high school teammate. “I’d get the ball, dump it to Rob, and my guy would leave me and go down and hack him. He got fouled so much. They weren’t touch fouls, they were hack fouls. We nearly got into a brawl once because the other team kept cheap-shotting him up high when he’d go up to dunk. It got to a point where it was dangerous for Rob to be playing the game.”

  “If his fuse got short, he might seriously hurt someone,” Gorman recalled. “He could play rough, but because he was so big, it looked worse than he intended. There were times when he’d say, ‘I’m going to kill that kid,’ and he literally could have. We’d get him off the floor, give him a little breather wit
h a sub, and get him calmed down.”

  “Coach, they’re hitting me,” Rob would complain.

  “Take it easy,” Gorman said. “You’re fine.” Only when he returned to an even temper would Rob be reinserted into the game.

  All the Gronkowski brothers had large frames, and added muscle when they began working out at age fourteen. But Gordie, Dan, Chris, and Goose didn’t completely fill out until their late teens. During his redshirt year playing baseball at Jacksonville University, for instance, eighteen-year-old Gordie grew from six feet three to six six, and added thirty pounds to his frame. Rob, however, was big and muscular at a younger age.

  “I saw them all play in high school,” said Glenn Gronkowski, Gordy’s brother and the boys’ uncle. “What’s freaky is how they grew. They weren’t as big as they are now until they got into the senior high and got older. All of a sudden they had unbelievable growth spurts.”

  The brothers were smart enough to use their size as an advantage. In addition, each possessed a resolve to achieve.

  Gorman recalled a high school basketball game where Rob was being double-teamed with a boy in front and another behind him, limiting Rob’s access to the ball. Frustration grew on the part of the Williamsville North team, which was losing because its best player was being denied. During a time-out Rob approached his coaches at the bench, shaking his head.

  “Have our point guard throw the ball high and I’ll get it,” Rob promised.

  This was not a play they had practiced before, but the coaches figured they were losing already. Something needed to change. In the worst-case scenario, they would lose by more points if Rob’s idea didn’t work.

  “Three plays in a row, we came down, threw it high, literally a foot over the rim, and Robbie went and got it each time,” Gorman said. “Two of them were baskets. We ended up winning the game because of that strategy.”

  During a later time-out, Rob trotted to the bench and grinned knowingly at his coaches. “I told you I’d get it.”

  Rob’s physical dominance was evident from a young age. By fourteen, his frame was already like a bodybuilder’s.

  “It was embarrassing when he took his shirt off, because he was so cut,” recalled Chuck Swierski, the varsity basketball coach at Williamsville North High School. “Watching him in high school, he was so much bigger, so much stronger, so much faster than everybody else.”

  His uncle Glenn remembered seeing a basketball game that opened his eyes to how impressive an athlete Rob had become as a high school sophomore.

  “I saw him play where the guard threw a lob pass from close to half court,” Glenn said. “Rob went up with a big guy in front of him, jumped over the guy, grabbed the ball, and jammed it through the hoop with two hands. I remember thinking, ‘This kid’s got some serious ability.’ It blew me away, really.”

  At times, Rob’s strength could be overwhelming. Gorman compared Rob’s physical traits to those of Lennie, the character in John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men. Gorman is quick to point out that the similarities don’t extend beyond the physical—Rob doesn’t need to be told what to do—but like Lennie, Rob doesn’t know his own strength.

  Sometimes the physical play led to unintended consequences.

  “During exam week our gym wasn’t available because all the desks were set up for tests, so we had to run practice at Williamsville East,” Swierski said. The district is large enough that it contains three high schools. The intradistrict rivalry can be intense.

  “We were doing a lay-up drill.” Swierski recalled. “Rob caught the ball on the baseline, went up and dunked it, and didn’t hang on the rim but shattered the backboard and came down with the rim in his hands. He just went up strong and the backboard completely shattered. Williamsville East wasn’t happy. It kind of screwed up their season for a few weeks because it took them a while to get a new one. They didn’t have a backup anywhere, and by the time they ordered it and had it installed, they had to move a few games around. They thought we did it on purpose because of the whole school-rivalry thing, but he honestly didn’t. The kid is just that strong.”

  As a stay-at-home mom raising five active boys, Diane Gronkowski’s duties were far more demanding than any nine-to-five office job.

  “I pretty much woke up, turned on the ovens, and started cooking,” she said with a laugh. “I liked to cook and grocery shop, so it was okay with me. If I wasn’t driving one of them somewhere, that’s what I was doing. People used to ask me if I was grocery shopping for a group home. You could say that.”

  The family often bought half a cow, or several forty-pound boxes of poultry. In addition to the refrigerator in the kitchen, there was a second refrigerator in the garage, accompanied by two full-size freezers. None contained leftovers, only supplies for the next meal.

  “There were never any leftovers,” she said. “They ate, I’ll tell you that. While I was doing dishes, the boys would come back and pick at the dinner we just had. I never put food away. They were never full.”

  The boys would regularly wander into the kitchen and ask what was around to eat. A favorite phrase was “But Mom, I’m starving.”

  “We just finished eating, and a half hour later, they said they were starving,” Diane recalled. “We did not eat out. There was no McDonald’s or Burger King or pizza night. Every meal was homemade. One reason was nutrition. Another was the expense. Can you imagine how much it would cost to get these guys full? Another big reason was that we rarely ate at the same time. Everyone had a different schedule. One summer I had thirteen baseball teams going at once. There were house teams, select teams, travel teams, and there were five boys. So how could you possibly eat at the same time?”

  The Gronkowski home was a familiar stop for the boys’ friends. It was the place where kids gathered, and Diane made sure that everyone was welcome.

  She invited kids inside, baked cookies, asked them to stay for dinner, not worrying about little things like dirty shoes. Sometimes a boy would stay for an extended time if his parents moved away or got divorced. The welcome mat was always on display. Diane was the lone female in a male-dominated house.

  “I was outnumbered,” she admitted with a laugh. “At times it was frustrating. It was always the guys’ point of view. Nobody ever looked at things from my perspective. There was a male dog and we had a goldfish for eleven years. I was convinced he was male, too, because there was nothing in the house that wasn’t.”

  To illustrate the point, Diane recalled that her sons often fell asleep in bedrooms other than their own. Whenever they were tired, they would simply spread out in a bed, regardless of whether it was that boy’s room.

  “More than once I woke up the wrong kid,” she explained. “Everyone just slept where they wanted to sleep that night.”

  Diane was always organized. Having to balance the schedules of five boys, often the majority of her day was spent driving kids to practices and being sure their homework was done in the limited time between sports.

  “There were Saturdays when one had hockey at four fifty in the morning and another had hockey at nine o’clock in Niagara Falls and a third had hockey at two in the Pepsi Center and then there was another game at eight that night at Sabreland,” she said, mentioning rinks that are several towns apart. “So when we went to bed the night before, all the hockey gear was loaded into the van. You didn’t wait until it was time to leave to decide you needed your skates sharpened or your equipment washed. The van had to be full of gas because you’re not going to be driving the next morning low on gas. I also worried about what we were having for dinner, because I was going to be gone all day. Dinner was made the night before.”

  Those organizational skills, Diane believes, have rubbed off onto her children. Despite their active lifestyles, the boys are able to juggle different responsibilities. But she is more proud of the fact that her sons are good people.

  “Yes, three of them are professional football players, but that doesn’t last forever,” she said. “They
have to have something else behind that. They’ve worked hard for what they have, but the whole world isn’t sports. I always tried to teach them right from wrong. I sent them to religion class to learn morals. Trying to get them to treat others the way they wanted to be treated was important.”

  When each boy left for college, Diane explained that he had been given opportunities that others may not have.

  “I filled out all the paperwork, made sure they had their physicals on time, drove them to and from every practice, checked that their homework was done. I gave my twenty-four/seven to them. I’m proud that they’re all good citizens, athletic, and have done well academically. If you can get one person in your family to achieve that, it’s phenomenal. But we have five of them who achieved. It was definitely worth it.”

  “I could never have done it without her,” Gordy reflected. “I’m not taking all the credit. She was a great mom who worked hard to get them to the next level. She got those boys through school. Danny and Chris were easy, but she sat at that table every night with Gordie making sure his homework was done and that it was done right. She spent hours running them around each day, and was always there to defend her kids.”

  Once, when Gordy was coaching his boys’ hockey team, he was out of town during a scheduled practice. The team’s other coach could not attend either, so Diane laced up her skates and ran practice in their place.

  “It probably wasn’t the best practice they ever had,” Gordy said with a laugh. “But we couldn’t be there, so she was.”

  Although they are no longer married, he is quick to point out her contribution to raising their boys. She was the one who cooked healthy meals. She was the one who ran them to and from endless practices and games. She made sure their paperwork was complete, their education was stressed, and that schedules were kept.