Aaron Hernandez and the Whitewashing of Sports History

The NFL wants you to forget Aaron Hernandez. There are slip-ups, like when his former teammate, Devin McCourty, says the week before the Super Bowl, "Yeah, I think people think about [Hernandez]." But, by and large, the NFL has done a remarkable job pretending Hernandez was never one of its most promising young stars.

The league's collective whitewashing of Hernandez bears recounting, repeating, and emphasizing. After releasing Hernandez, the Patriots allowed fans to swap their Hernandez jerseys for any other player's jersey in the team store. Estimates vary, but somewhere between 1,200 and 2,000 fans took advantage of the offer, costing the organization around $250,000 by owner Robert Kraft's calculations. In a particularly smarmy sentiment, Kraft told the Boston Globe that the costs associated with the jersey swap and cap hit from releasing Hernandez were a triumph of "principle" over capitalism. He didn't elaborate on precisely what that principle was, although he did tell the Globe that the team was going to "destroy the jerseys by grinding them up."

The Patriots weren't the only practitioners of this policy. The NFL initially removed Hernandez's career stats from their website, but later replaced the statistics without a player photo. Instead, there's an anonymous avatar of an indistinguishable black face wearing a black helmet and jersey. I couldn't find another player with that photo, probably because the photo is used for the most anonymous NFL.com fantasy football players.

Likewise, the Pro Football Hall of Fame took down the winner of its 2010 photo contest because it featured Aaron Hernandez high-stepping into the endzone against the Green Bay Packers. "In the spirit of good taste we thought we'd take it down," Joe Horrigan, vice president of communications and exhibits for the Hall, told the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, which took the photo.

The NCAA took part in the revisionist act, too. Hernandez's college team, the Florida Gators, tore Hernandez out of their history in the most literal way possible, by digging up a brick outside their stadium that had his name inscribed. This came after the school removed all photos and images baring his likeness. In 2008, then-coach Urban Meyer got emotional seeing the bricks, telling GatorCountry.com, "Guys gave their life and their soul to make this program great, and now they're permanently part of the history in the greatest stadium in all of college football."

The NCAA, of course, is no stranger to re-writing the history books. Vacating wins is a frequent punishment for institutional infractions, the very idea of which is a giant logical fallacy: that the games happened but one team didn't play, the winner never won, and the loser still lost. This allows the NCAA to pretend that nobody benefitted from the infractions, which, like most everything the NCAA does, makes sense as long as you don't think about it.

Efforts to re-write history are almost as old as history itself, but the connotations are rarely positive; you don't pretend the truth is a lie unless the truth makes you look bad. Sometimes, revisionism is simply debating the history books with new information and perspectives, a contentious concept within university history departments. But, other times, it's straight up propaganda. Perhaps the most notorious exemplar of historical revisionism comes from the Soviet Union, where assassinated military officers would be airbrushed out of pictures with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Vladimir Brovkin, associate professor of of history at Harvard, wrote "Soviet historiography has tended to treat the party line and reality as one." Anything that didn't make the party look good was erased and rewritten.

This is the very definition of propaganda, and the NFL and NCAA don't just practice it, they're encouraged to do so. The Hall of Fame photo was removed because fans complained about its presence. Likewise, the jersey swaps and brick removals were responses to fan demand. "We know that children love wearing their Patriots jerseys, but may not understand why parents don't want them wearing their Hernandez jerseys anymore," team spokesperson Stacey James said. "We hope this opportunity to exchange those jerseys at the Patriots ProShop for another player's jersey will be well received by parents." Erasing Hernandez is just as popular amongst parents who want to ease out of unpleasant conversations with their children as it was with the NFL. Both parties agreed it would be be best if Aaron Hernandez simply never existed, airbrushed out of our collective conscience.

As inconvenient as it may be, Aaron Hernandez did play football for the Florida Gators and New England Patriots, and he played very well. This is the problem with conflating athletic accomplishments with morality. Nothing about running quickly, jumping high, having soft hands, or memorizing playbooks makes someone a good person. This seems like such an elementary point, yet it is the crux of the entire Hernandez situation. We can't seem to reconcile his athletic accomplishments with his abhorrent behavior, as if the two should be contradictory traits.

Even more troublesome for the proponents of neat narratives is that murderers sometimes do good things. You'd never know it, but Hernandez was once one of Kraft's favorite players. After signing a $40 million contract extension less than a year before his arrest, Hernandez immediately donated $50,000 to Kraft's charity, the Myra Kraft Giving Back Fund, named after his recently-deceased wife. With tears in his eyes, Kraft called it "one of the touching moments since I've owned the team."

When Hernandez signed his extension, he told the press "I'll remember this day forever. I just hope I keep going, doing the right things, making the right decisions so I can have a good life, and be there to live a good life with my family." Given what we now suspect about him, this is a really inconvenient quote, a tough thing to reconcile. The way the press and public at large fawned over his character is not just wrong in hindsight, but uncomfortable. It has lots of disturbing implications about celebrity culture and what we as a society applaud. It's a hard thing to wrestle with, but that doesn't mean it never happened. Aaron Hernandez played well for the New England Patriots, and we admired him for that.