Rob Gronkowski grew up brawling with four brothers — “mayhem,” as he described it. His mother, Diane, let them settle disputes among themselves, while his father Gordie added one caveat.
“He loved the competition but he had one rule: You can never ever throw a punch to the face or to the nuts,” the Patriots tight end recalled on Chase’s “Kneading Dough” series. “Everything else.”
The rough-and-tumble rule worked as four Gronkowski’s made it to the NFL and a fifth played professional baseball. But the two-time Super Bowl champion left upstate New York with another guiding principle: frugality.