This time two days ago, Rob Gronkowski was still retired, still technically with the New England Patriots and still a professional athlete only with WWE. But in a stunning turn earlier this week, the Patriots traded Gronk to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, reuniting the future Hall of Fame tight end with his old pal, Tom Brady, who signed a two-year deal with the Bucs in March.
And as Gronk recently explained, he teased the idea of coming out of retirement when he and Brady caught up earlier this year and said Brady was “juiced up” about it.
Per ESPN, the almost-31-year-old tight end and Brady, before signing with the Bucs, met up two months ago to throw around. And although Gronk said he tried not to pressure Brady about his free-agency future, he did hint at returning to the NFL under the right circumstances.
On a Zoom call, Gronk said, via ESPN:
“We rarely talked about what his decision was gonna be, where I’m at. But we did talk about [it] for one second. And I told him that — we talked just real quick — like, ‘Hey, you know, I’m kinda getting that fire underneath me again.’ I told him, I said, ‘I’m definitely interested in your decision that you make.’
“I didn’t put any pressure on him. I said, ‘But if there’s a right opportunity out there, and you go somewhere and that opportunity is right — even if you go back to the Patriots, and I feel like the opportunity is right — there’s a possible chance that I will definitely love to reconnect.’
“And that’s where the conversation started a little bit, and he was all fired up and juiced up about it. So that was something pretty cool at the moment, and in the end, it happened over time, which is pretty neat.”
With the trade with the Patriots — who received a fourth-round NFL Draft pick in the deal — the Bucs will take over what’s left of Gronkowski’s contract, one year and $10 million.
Brady is pumped about Gronk’s return, obviously the Bucs are too, and the tight end said that despite recent injuries, he would have stayed retired if his body couldn’t handle it.
“My body started feeling good. My desire to play the game of football was coming back,” Gronkowski said, via ESPN. “And I knew that, by the time the season would be rolling around again, I would want to be back out there. So that desire, that passion, has lit into me, and I just felt like, in the last couple weeks, it was the right time to hop on before it was too late.”
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