After taking down the Denver Broncos in the 2014 Super Bowl, the Seattle Seahawks came painfully close to going back-to-back the following year. They faced the Patriots in February 2015 with a chance to repeat, but New England stole the win in dramatic fashion.
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Come Week 10 of the 2016 season, the two teams met again in a regular-season showdown that felt anything but ordinary. It was a revenge game for Seattle. Tensions were high, and the hits were even harder. Just ask Rob Gronkowski.
Late in the second quarter of that SNF game, Tom Brady connected with Gronkowski on a seam route. The tight end extended to make the catch, but before he could gain those crucial yards for his team, Seahawks safety Earl Thomas delivered a brutal, devastating hit. Gronkowski vividly remembers it even today. It left him fearing a punctured lung, and he was spitting blood out of his mouth.
On an episode of Get Got Pod, Gronkowski revisited the moment that left him physically shaken, unsure of what was happening to him.
“Right when that ball hit my hands, Earl Thomas, man, this [expletive] is a true missile… Earl Thomas ran full speed. I wasn’t looking. I was looking at the ball, he hit me, and literally knocked the wind out of me,” the former Patriot recalled.
“I went back to the huddle, and I was spitting up blood out of my mouth. And I was like, ‘Damn, what the f*ck is going on with me?'”
But Gronkowski wasn’t going to let a hit like that, even if it was severe, deter him from playing the game or showing the opponents his toughness.
“I gotta toughen this up. I gotta show that I’m not hurt. Three plays later, I catch a ball, a fade route on the left one-on-one with another DB and bring it down to the two-yard line. And now, it’s fourth and goal. I’m sitting in the huddle and I’m like, ‘I can’t f*cking move. I’m hurting. But I’m gonna out-tough everyone with just my mental toughness.”
The Seahawks ended up taking the win home after defeating the Patriots at Gillette Stadium. And Gronkowski may have looked tough as he returned to the huddle after the hit, but he revealed the truth after the game. “That was a big hit for sure. Probably one of the hardest I’ve got hit in my career for sure,” the TE said. He also had nothing against Thomas for the play, adding,
“[The hit is] by a good player; a good fast player who’s like a missile. It was a good, clean hit; nothing against it.”
Thomas, too, tweeted his respect for Gronk, wishing his opponent well and hoping he’d return to the game soon. And Gronkowski did exactly that, playing in Week 11. He sat out Week 12 but was back on the field shortly after.
Hard to believe how physical the game was, not even a decade ago, compared to how it looks today.
