Rob Gronkowski is a weightless thing. Not literally: if he's in shape, he's right at 266 pounds or so. And because he is in shape, Rob Gronkowski weighs exactly 266 pounds right now, give or take a massive, three-pound banana-and-avocado protein shake in transit through his gigantic digestive system.
He is weightless. His weightlessness means a lot more in the NFL than it would in most other sports because more than anything, at every level but especially in the NFL, the rule is gravity. Players must fit in systems. These systems are run to conclusions. Leads are managed, clocks are bled, and risks are averted. At its highest level in the NFL, the league runs less like a sports franchise, and more like its organizational peer: the American investment company, right down to the valuations against life expectancy, its cloaked actuarial tables, and the periodic threat of indictment for its owners and executives.*
*Real, actual actuarial tables are something the NFL has an actual horrifying need for after the past few years.
It is what pilots would label a high G environment in every sense of the word. Prospects who floated through college like immortal dervishes hit ground with a thud. (Hi, Vince Young). Coaches who can maintain a 52 percent win percentage are considered job-worthy if they can maintain something just over break-even. (Related to last parenthetical: hello, Jeff Fisher). Even if someone thrives, injuries can end careers in seconds, and incrementally transform a first-rank talent into a gimpy role player. Entropy is the rule, and gradients of individual success are sketched out against some grim, grim math and even grimmer specialized verbiage: game manager. Spot back. Situational corner.
The thing living outside those rules is the naked football astronaut Rob Gronkowski, the giant baby-monster scattering systematic approaches to evaluation and planning. Did you think there is a way, in the 384-page defensive playbook to cover him? No, no there is not, because in zones he finds space and the ball finds him. Cover him one-on-one, and disturbing things start to happen to otherwise competent pass defenders. You'll get outrun, or walled off in the most literal sense of the word. When Gronk turns his back to a defender with inside position on a pass route, it is covering a possessed wardrobe with legs and telescoping arms running at a full sprint-lope down the field. Gronk may also push off, but even then the subtlety of the push-off is done with a feathery brute force. It's more of a nudge, or occasionally the kind of slap you'd use to paw off a dog trying to steal bacon from your pocket.*
*If you have bacon in your pocket and you're not going to give it to the dog anyway, well, I admit this is a weird analogy. But you're giving the dog the bacon, unless Rob Gronkowski wants it.
That's not the weightlessness, though. The immunity to gravity, or the laws of size and speed, is most apparent in the hands. Most tight ends appear to be dogs of unusual pedigree. Their mothers were linemen, their fathers were wide receivers, and they move and clank along even at their best as something in between. Tony Gonzalez was an enlarged wide receiver; Jason Witten, a player with a blocking tight end's body and a weird addiction for catching the ball. This doesn't mean they aren't great. It just means they look like tight ends, which is to say: a hybrid player, easily broken down into percentages of the other types of players they're made out of at the tight end scrap yard and assembly plant.
In the most naive way possible, I don't know what position Rob Gronkowski is when he steps onto a football field. Saying that a tight end or wide receiver "played basketball in high school" is a cliche, but Gronkowski clearly looks like something you could put on the basketball court with great results because he has that reach, glide, and loping gait of a power forward. In fact he's already done that, in high school at least, averaging 21 ppg and 18 rpg as a senior, and dunking on hopelessly overmatched opponents with just the appropriate amount of dickery. (There's video of it and everything). His hands don't paw passes into the catch; rather, the ball seems to reel into his hands, like you've reversed footage of Gronk heave the ball backwards to Tom Brady.*
*Ironically, it's kind of hard to write about Rob Gronkowski, the football player, without bordering on erotica.
That weightlessness extends to the persistent gravities of the league's toll, too. Stolen by the Patriots in the draft by Bill Belichick after Gronkowski suffered a back injury and underwent surgery in his junior year, Gronkowski had the kind of wunderkind first act a lot of NFL talents have had: a promising first year, then the sophomore burst of 1,327 yards receiving, 17 TDs, 90 receptions, and the attendant party boy tailings and features straight from the Jeremy Shockey business plan. He posed nude on the cover of the ESPN Body Issue; he reinvented the Spanish language; he attained the kind of buoyancy only a second-year player in full defiance of the NFL's physics can have.
A knee injury was supposed to force re-entry into something like a mortal reality for Gronkowski. For the better part of 2013 it did, but after the kind of ordeal no player is supposed to fully recover from Gronkowski ... did. There was a lot of work, yes, work that doesn't get as much attention as something like "Rob Gronkowski owns his own custom party bus," or whatever other broheim legend Gronkowski might be busy at this very second writing with his life. (The truth, as with a lot of seemingly bulletproof young athletes with zero fear display, is that they're athletic workaholics from the jump, and built much of what seems like effortless brilliance).
Yet despite the injury, Gronkowski in motion still looks like someone immune to the traumas of the NFL. He catches touchdown passes like outlet passes, blocks like he's pawing off a lesser sumo, and bounds up from huge hits like a sheepdog colliding with a wayward lamb. He is AC/DC, fresh off Bon Scott's death, ripping into Back in Black with zero repentance or lessons learned. He plays like someone who has learned nothing from injuries or pain, and seeks to learn less in the future.
There's still plenty of time for that horror to unfold. Gronkowski is 25, an age in football where things might not catch up as quickly as they should. Charitably speaking, we need to start thinking about football as a kind of radiation. You can only have so many exposures, so many snaps, and so many years before the little bar on your chest goes black, and you end up as another case for the forensic files. Whether you accept that or not is part of not only being a football player, but a fan. You are an accomplice or shareholder, depending on what you think of the sport's terrific (and not totally unique) costs.
I don't know when that happens for Gronkowski, whatever role you think he happens to moonlight as on a football field. I do know what he could be universally. Rob Gronkowski could play handball and be a god in the Czech Republic. He could play significant minutes for a Turkish league team, line up in goal for a Korean soccer squad, or take a turn in the WWE, or heave a bobsled for the US Olympic team. Put him on an Aussie Rules team, or let him bat at Eden Gardens in Kolkata. Oil him up for Mongolian wrestling, and he'll not only let you take a picture, but will probably insist that you do.
I know that as one of football's only truly weightless players, he seems like something too quicksilver and remarkable for the brutal science of the NFL. In a perfect world he floats free to serve as one of the world's all-time athletes, a cameo jock for the globe working in the world's hot spots by learning their sports, and thus ensuring the world sees America at its purest: huge, athletically gifted, and yelling out cheerful gibberish. Diplomacy started with a ping-pong ball once. There's no good reason it can't begin with a Gronk.