Alex Guerrero Says TB12 Has Nothing to Do with Edelman's Positive PED Test
Tom E. Curran – The ironic aspect of Julian Edelman’s PED suspension is the shrapnel that’s now hitting Tom Brady, Alex Guerrero and TB12 Sports Therapy as a result.
According to two sources, Edelman’s positive test had nothing to do with anything he was advised to take by Guerrero. …
Here’s the statement Guerrero released:
“I’ve known Julian since his rookie year and he is a phenomenal athlete who takes his training seriously—it’s disappointing to hear today’s news. Elite athletes sometimes work with multiple coaches and health professionals as part of their off-season training.
“Here at our facility, we take a natural, holistic, appropriate and, above all, legal approach to training and recovery for all of our clients. And anyone who would suggest otherwise is irresponsible, and just plain wrong.”
There are full-time TB12 adherents, which Brady has been and Gronkowski has become. There are scores of players who go there (and are referred to by Bill Belichick even now) for soft-tissue work. … There are players who go, find some benefit and go a la carte. … Edelman, according to one source, falls into the latter category.
I said yesterday that to have TB12 Fitness’s third most high profile client (after only Brady and Gronk) is a bad PR hit for Alex Guerrero’s burgeoning Pliability Empire. Regardless of whether the company actually supplied him with whatever he tested positive for. You can call it “irresponsible” to imply those dots might be connected, as Guerrero did. But it’s the natural, human reaction.
TB12 is the most high profile, newsworthy training facility around. And that makes it a big, slow moving target. True or not true – and I vote for mostly untrue – it’s been the main issue supposedly causing the biggest “rift” in the Brady-Belichick marriage. Creating irreconcilable differences that are going to lead to divorce, to hear some of the real anti-Patriots jihadists tell it. Hell, we’ve been listening to anonymous sources for six months suggest Brady is going to retire and Belichick might be in his last year over it. Plus we had Tom vs. Time, which was basically a six part infomercial about how TB12 is revolutionizing everything we know about human physiology and performance training. So it’s only natural that that is where everyone’s mind immediately goes to when on of their own runs afoul of the NFL’s CSI: Urine team to look to them. Fair or unfair.
That said, as a Pats fan, nothing makes me happier than to learn that JE11’s positive test does not trace back to TB12. And not only to Brady and Gronk, but to the approximately half of the roster who go there for some degree of training. And obviously we don’t want it coming from team trainers, either. I mean, the last thing we need is rampant positive PED tests running through the team like Pete Carroll’s Seahawks. The best case scenario is to find out Edelman needed to bounce back from his ACL so he bought supplements from a stranger in a primered van parked out behind the playground like an Afterschool Special.
The biggest takeaway, besides the fact Tom Brady is not running a Russian Olympic Team drug lab that pumps athletes full of so many chemicals they can’t run the Belmont Stakes, is that Belichick is sending players to Guerrero for treatment. A pretty goddamned far cry from us hearing all year that Guerrero is the homewrecker who’s come in and destroyed this otherwise perfectly happy relationship. Which is the best thing these eyes have read in weeks.
So let’s all put on our resistance bands, pour a kale and banana smoothie and raise a glass to that one piece of good news. And hope this is the last of these PED suspensions we’ll have to deal with for a long time. Because, not-so-fun fact: Between the Deflategate suspension, injuries an now this, it means that since the start of the 2016 season to Week 5, the Patriots will have had Tom Brady, Rob Gronkowski and Julian Edelman on the field together for exactly six games. That’s six out of 42. It sucks enough when fake scandals or bad luck splits them up. It’s even worse when they do it to themselves.