The reporter who quoted former Patriot Matt Light as saying he “never believed in anything Aaron Hernandez stood for” is standing by his quote after Light said this week that he never said it.
Light said in a radio interview this week that he was out in the woods working with campers for his foundation at the time those quotes surfaced, and that he hadn’t talked to any reporters. But Tom Archdeacon, the Dayton Daily News reporter who initially published the Light-Hernandez quote, gave me a detailed account via email of the time he spent with Light.
“I spent some 4 1/2 hours with Matt Light that day,” Archdeacon wrote. “He brought the kids from his camp to the Cox Media headquarters for a tour of the Dayton Daily News and the WHIO-TV studios that I set up. He even did an interview live on WHIO that day with Mike Hartsock. I bought he, his counselors and all his kids lunch at our media restaurant. We then took his group to our printing press in Franklin. While he was there, he got word his son broke his arm and I drove him 75 minutes north to the hospital in Greenville where his boy was. That night he returned to Dayton to throw out the first pitch for the Dayton Dragons game in front of 8,000 people.”
There’s no middle ground here. Light is flatly stating that he never talked to any reporters, and Archdeacon has given a thorough description of their conversation. My guess is that Light said what Archdeacon quoted him as saying, never expected it to become a national story, and now wishes he had just kept his mouth shut.