Mind of Mike: Stop it With Baby Gronk

Baby Gronk doesn’t deserve our attention. Not the kid himself but the father who’s behind this ridiculous mess. But yet he’s so over the top and so repulsive we can’t hold our tongues. So it begs the question, is this genius or is it mental illness?

You’ve heard about Baby Gronk I’m sure. I have no clue how old the kid is now but it had to be around COVID when his father hatched up this plan. Heck, maybe it was before COVID. Take a pre-pubescent kid, compare him to the most famous tight end in history (pre Travis Kelce dating Taylor Swift) and you have something interesting. It wasn’t compelling or serious but it wasn’t cute either, it was just kind of neat.

The father reached out to me as he did with many looking to have an article or video done on his son. I asked him if he was a crazy parent or a marketing genius and believed him when he said he was the latter. I never wrote an article or did a video but I reposted a couple of things early on and was impressed with the following the dad had amassed for his son. But then it got old, very old.

And now it’s become clear, this isn’t a marketing genius. If you’ve been lucky enough to avoid noticing, Baby Gronk has now committed and decommitted from many massive schools, none of who have offered or will give the father the time of day. Now it’s become sad.

I don’t know the kid or the father save for a few DMs in the early Baby Gronk craze. But I do know when something becomes too much. What’s the goal here? Is it to become so repulsively annoying that people have to pay attention? If so, mission accomplished because even writing this is giving the father the sick attention he craves. But we can’t help ourselves. And why?

I’m not really upset that the kid is apparently being used and manipulated for the attention the father seeks. That happens all the time in families. And I’m not upset that this twisted marketing scheme continues to get attention, I don’t think I care. Maybe I do but I don’t think so. Am I jealous that someone would beg for clicks and attention so unabashedly while I have to stick to more traditional means to garner interest in my website? Maybe. I’d never in a million years provide the clickbait, made-up crap this guy does but maybe the fact that I can’t ticks me off. I don’t really know.

But something about this Baby Gronk thing angers many of us and perhaps we don’t know why. For every person that says it’s wrong to do this to the kid, they’re probably jealous in some twisted was as well. We don’t care about the kid, we really don’t. We just can’t stand the father who's doing all this.

Whatever it is, it will continue for as long as people are pissed off. Sadly, articles like this keep it going. I don’t know why it’s not easier to see this garbage (South Carolina is the latest commitment) and just move on but it is. Heck, I even blocked the account but still see mentions of Baby Gronk everywhere. Some media outlets even act as if it’s all serious like a flip from Texas to South Carolina from a middle schooler is real.