Watch the Patriots’ 5-minute tribute to Rob Gronkowski
The team's salute to its future Hall of Famer is something to behold.
After nine seasons, four Super Bowls, three championships, 69 career catches against his hometown Buffalo Bills, 6,969 yards of offense he had on regular-season Sundays — seriously, he had 6,967 receiving and 2 rushing — “Yo soy fiesta,” and whatever else you’d like, trying to remember all that Rob Gronkowski the football player was promises to be no easy task. Credit the Patriots for a tremendous start to the effort.
The team released a nearly five-minute tribute to Gronkowski on Wednesday afternoon, three days after the 29-year-old chose to hang it up after what he termed “the most satisfying year I’ve ever been a part of.”
That was in there, as was plenty more.
All the feels.
There were a lot of special moments over the last nine years, and we enjoyed every single one of them. Thank you, Gronk. pic.twitter.com/GHzbhAOt2t
— New England Patriots (@Patriots) March 27, 2019
Gronkowski departs the NFL with an absurd parade of NFL records, to say nothing of his place in the Patriots franchise. Fourth in catches, second in yards, a runaway first with 80 total touchdowns. (That one rushing touchdown, for the record, was on a backward pass in 2011.) And yet the team’s tribute didn’t forget about Gronkowski’s charity work, a role he took to with the same fervor he took to everything else.
“He’s impacted so many lives off the field that it can be difficult for him to keep them all organized on the fly,” wrote The Athletic’s Jeff Howe in his tremendous tribute piece about, in his words, ‘the first Gold Jacket I covered from start to finish.’ “Another time, I relayed a message of gratitude from a family whom he’d helped, and he got choked up, noting that’s the greatest reward for him, hearing long after the fact how he could use his platform to help others in need.”
“To see him on draft day, with he and his family jumping on the stage, that’s still the way he is,” Tom Brady remarked before the Super Bowl victory against Seattle.
And tributes like this one help ensure that’s how we’ll remember him. Not that he figures to be fading to obscurity any time soon.
