Gronk Kinda Seems to Be Leaving the Door Open for a Return to Football
Rob Gronkowski to Rich Eisen, on his post-football life:
“There’s definitely going to be times when you miss it and everything. I would always say, ‘It’s still the offseason right now.’ I mean, I can’t really say how I’m gonna feel about it when the games start rolling around and everything. You know, I just felt like it was time. I feel really good right now and it was just definitely something I thought it was the right time and the right thing to do.”
“You want to know something? I never had an August off in my life. So, it’s gonna be a little different. That’s when it’s gonna start really seeing the change is when that comes around in August when I’m not in training camp. I might not know what to do with myself.”
It just occurred to me that I spent a good chunk of last year combing through cryptic, hard-to-decipher Rob Gronkowski social media posts trying to figure out whether, as it was being reported all over the place, he was truly sick of being on the receiving end of Bill Belichick’s verbal abuse and about to quit football to go start a new career dishing out flying elbows or playing “Henchman Who Gets Shot at Point Blank Range Under the Chin No. 69″ in “John Wick 4.”
Now it seems like I’m relegated to doing the opposite in 2019: Parsing Gronk’s words and the words of everyone who knows him for signs that he’s going to unretire. Not to mention trying to follow the physical clues. Like the fact over the weekend he looked like he did in high school:
This is my quest. My journey. I’m Bilbo Baggins exchanging Riddles in the Dark with Gollum. Only my Gollum is slightly less articulate and the Precious I’m hoping to come away with is the best tight end in history back in his 87 jersey for a tight end-deficient team.
So what do we make of this latest riddle? Trying too hard to parse Gronk’s words is always a dangerous path any time you choose it because he’s never been one to say things with an agenda. He’s a stream-of-consciousness guy without a phony, PR-conscious bone in his body. He’s alwasy struck me as a guy who’ll answer your question as honestly as he can in the moment, not to send some “message.” Thinking of him as the anti-Kyrie is always a pretty accurate take.
On the one hand, you can take the parts I boldfaced as Gronk simply acknowledging he can’t speak to how he’ll feel come August, when the games start up and for the first time since his mid-teens he won’t be suiting up. Meaning he’s making a simple, honest statement that Early July Gronk can’t speak for Football Season Gronk.
On the the other, it sounds like he’s leaving the door open for a possible “Boys of Fall” moment. When he feels that chill and smells that fresh cut grass, he’ll feel like he’s back in his helmet, cleats and shoulder pads and decide he left the game too soon. It’s happened before, and not just to Kenny Chesney. Matt Patricia described that very thing, and it got him to leave a lucrative career in designing submarines to take a low-level assistant coaching job. Just saying the words “I can’t really say how I’m gonna feel” and “I might not know what to do with myself” seems like a tacit admission that he’s open to the possibility of missing it so much he wants back in.
So which is it? A harmless statement that he doesn’t know how he’ll feel down the road? Or a window into his soul that doubts he’ll be able to stay away from the game once his teammates are back at it? As in all things, when faced with two diametrically opposed possibilities, I will choose to believe the one I want to believe.
After hearing this, I’m once again recalibrating the Gronk UnRetirement Probability Meter. It’s now back to 50/50. It didn’t last in the negative numbers very long. Thank God.