“I Thought My Leg Was Broken the Entire Game”: Rob Gronkowski Recalls Playing Injured in a Super Bowl Game vs Aaron Donald’s Rams

Rob Gronkowski built a Hall of Fame career on being something close to indestructible. Broken arms, torn ligaments, surgeries stacked on surgeries, none of it ever seemed capable of keeping him off the field for long.

If the Patriots needed him, Gronk usually found a way. He truly was a force of nature, essentially a monster on the field, which is perhaps why he bagged a multi-year endorsement deal with Monster Energy Drink.

That reputation was never clearer than on the biggest stage of all. During Super Bowl LIII against the Los Angeles Rams, Gronk was already carrying a body that had been through nine surgeries. By the end of that night, however, he was operating on something far worse than routine pain.

On the latest episode of Dudes on Dudes, Gronk revisited what he now calls the “biggest injury” he ever played through. It was a severe quad contusion that the tight end suffered during the Patriots’ 13-3 Super Bowl win over Sean McVay’s Rams, with Aaron Donald as the centerpiece of the defense.

“I took that quad contusion… like a quad contusion where a thousand milliliters of blood got taken out,” Gronkowski remembered. That injury was so debilitating for the legendary Patriots TE that by the final moments of the game, his leg had completely stopped responding.

“By the end of the game, with two minutes left, I couldn’t move my leg anymore. I maximized the amount of use I could get on,” he added.

With the Super Bowl on the line, Gronkowski had to block elite pass rushers like Aaron Donald as well:

“The last two minutes on the final drive, I was blocking with one leg and just kind of throwing my shoulder into like Aaron Donald. It didn’t look pretty.”

And as it turned out, that drive ended with the play that defined Super Bowl LIII. On a critical third-and-long, Tom Brady found the tight end down the seam for a 29-yard catch, the biggest offensive play of the game, which set up the game’s only touchdown.

Gronk’s co-host, Julian Edelman, naturally had to heap some praise on the tight end. “You made the fu*king play of the game, bro,” Edelman said. And Gronk didn’t disagree. “I did,” he replied, before adding, “I made the play of the game with a quad contusion where I thought my leg was broken the whole entire game.”

What fans didn’t fully grasp at the time was what came next. In the days and weeks after the Super Bowl, Gronkowski’s body essentially shut down. Speaking to reporters weeks after the Super Bowl, Gronk revealed that doctors drained nearly a liter of fluid from his thigh, an amount he said qualified as a hospital record. For weeks, he could barely walk.

“I was in tears in my bed after a Super Bowl victory,” Gronkowski admitted back in 2019. He couldn’t sleep for more than 20 minutes at a time and needed multiple procedures just to manage the internal bleeding.

However, the pain surely must have been worth it. From blocking Donald on one leg, catching the game-winning pass, and then barely being able to stand afterward, those are some really good subplots to have in one’s third Super Bowl-winning story.