Aaron Hernandez's defining Bill Belichick episode

(This story contains spoilers from the fifth episode of American Sports History: Aaron Hernandez“The man.”)

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

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

While Foxworth's position on the FX series initially began as a consultant, he found his way into the writers' room, where he offered valuable insight into the sport in general, as well as the many broader themes Aaron Hernandez explored. And the fifth episode, aptly titled “The Man,” which chronicles Aaron's (Josh Rivera) entry into the NFL, became a breakthrough for Foxworth, not only furthering showrunner Stu Zicherman's larger vision for the series, but also to educate and provide context about the sport great and real people involved.

“I played in the league for a while and was a member of the football and basketball union, so I've been around the sport my whole life,” Foxworth said. “Athletes are stereotyped in some ways and I found that to be one of the more attractive aspects of this story – it offers the opportunity to show many different sides of an athlete and many different sides of the world of professional sports in general. ”

In this sense, the fifth episode is more than just the middle of the ten-part series. “Episode five was, in my opinion, a really pivotal episode and I was excited about the opportunity because we touched on all the different things that I wanted to talk about,” Foxworth says. “There are high points in football and then there are also the difficulties of dealing with the fame and the difficulties of dealing with the pressure and all the particular difficulties that Aaron Hernandez had and that were unique to him. It was the first real entry into professional football.”

This rude awakening that professional football is different for Hernandez is clearly expressed in an early encounter with Coach Belichick, played by Butz. After his first practice, Hernandez showers with his teammates and brags about his performance. “I'm telling you, Brady and I have chemistry, bro,” he says, smiling when a veteran interrupts him and reminds him, “Rookies get the pads.” Hernandez's initial reluctance turns into a big smile when He strolls to the field completely naked and covered only in his signature tattoos to get the pads. In the hallway he unexpectedly meets Belichick, who bursts the wake-up call.

“You know, Coach Meyer said, 'I have to stay with you.' When I took my eyes off you, he said you were causing trouble. But I won't do that. That’s not my job,” he says with some distance. He then comes closer and looks Hernandez in the eyes, piercing him with this statement. “This is a men’s team. Be a man,” he says before walking away.

“That conversation with Belichick is a good reference point. Honestly, I think it says a lot of different things about Aaron,” Foxworth explains. “It's a unique experience when you're a child, a young adult I guess, but still relying on the help and guidance of many people. And then suddenly you are the breadwinner of your family and are now expected to automatically reach maturity and make up your bank account almost immediately. The expectations, especially on this team where they had been really successful up to this point and a lot of the veterans knew what was expected of you. So I think that in normal life, both in the locker room and outside, Aaron was expected to be a man, or an adult, to put it more accurately. At no time before had anyone expected him or taught him or shown him (that). Throughout college and high school, everyone takes advantage of Aaron for what he gives them.”

Belichick's first appearance in episode five isn't as stark as this moment. Instead, he begins by sitting in his office, a pencil over his right ear, dressed in a signature gray New England Patriots Equipment hoodie, jamming to Bon Jovi's “It's My Life.” Butz uncovered this Belichick in his research, which he never showed to the press.

“He loved rock and roll and going to concerts. He had a really good core group of friends. He was a great father; His kids adored him,” Butz says of Belichick’s role, which NFL fans didn’t see, as he coached the Patriots to six Super Bowl championships. It's a softer side that Aaron probably never saw either. “The front he put up against the impenetrable villain was entirely strategic and brilliantly strategic.”

However, Butz is clear about the role his portrayal plays. “It's the story of Aaron Hernandez, so we only look at Coach Belichick in the context of the years he was able to find a place with the Patriots for Aaron,” he says. “Remember, Aaron Hernandez was a fourth-round draft pick. Nobody wanted to touch this kid and it was part of Belichick's strategic genius that he thought, 'Okay, I'll take the risk.'”

That risk, as the series shows, ultimately wasn't the best thing for Aaron. “It’s a very tragic story,” complains Butz. “In hindsight, the fact that this young man played for the Patriots sealed his fate, in my opinion. It triggered everything in this young man that shouldn't have been triggered. “His move back to New England, being close to this whole shady group he was involved with, and the fact that he was given so much money,” he says, referring to his later contract.

“It was a record-breaking contract at the time; He was 20, 21 years old, also had no resources, no educational resources, no emotional resources to deal with that kind of power, to have a coach like Belichick who was so relentlessly hard on him, to be in a sport that , at That time I didn’t take the issue of CTE and brain injuries seriously enough, it was a perfect storm.”

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

Butz also emphasizes that “toxic homophobia (Aaron) was raised.” The Broadway star believes that and football weighed heavily on him. “His sexuality was, I think, fluid, but the hypermasculine culture of football and his Puerto Rican father really demonized that whole part of him. It created a lot of fear, a lot of uncertainty, (and) paranoia.”

According to Foxworth, the greater visibility of Shayanna Jenkins (Jaylen Barron), the mother of his daughter and his fiancée, who added Hernandez to her last name before his death, sheds light on Hernandez in episode five. “I think when we do stories like this that are based on a true story, you have to have people representing different parts of the story. There are so many forks in the road that Aaron's life takes different paths. And I think Shay should represent someone else,” 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 fully himself, even if he's not with anyone, Not even with the mother of his daughter.”

To become Belichick, Butz had to put on makeup for four hours. “Ryan Murphy is known for working with some of the best makeup and hair designers in the industry. Out of The OJ story To VersaceThey're just brilliant at creating that doppelganger effect. For me it was a long process. I think I (of course) share certain (characteristics). Belichick and I are actually sons of first-generation European immigrants. He is Croatian; My father comes from Germany. Because the guy has been a coach his whole life and spent his whole life on the football field, he has this really great, weathered face with these thick lines. So we had to do a lot of work to give texture to the entire skin. He has such thin hair, so we went bald and wore a wig over it. He's not a big guy, but he's very broad-shouldered, very thick in the shoulders, and so am I, but they even had to add 30 extra pounds to me.

“It was a lot to go through,” he continues. “And some days it’s really bad when you get called out at 3 a.m. But they're so good at what they do, you look in the mirror and think, 'Oh, let's just start shooting!'”

And while Butz worked on his scowl for Belichick, he feels the real challenge was making the future Pro Football Hall of Fame coach's mumbled, garbled speech audible, and credits the sound department for overcoming that huge one Hurdle.

“It’s a fair look at Belichick, but it’s a critical one,” says newly converted football fan Butz. “I don’t think it’s anything personal for Belichick; We're talking about something in the DNA of the league, the sport. Hopefully this show and what many sports journalists write about and what we know from many medical studies can improve. We can play America’s biggest sport and protect the athletes.”

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