Remember after the 2012 Olympics and everyone was like “Ryan Lochte is amazingly vapid”? It’s not that Lochte was a bad guy, or mean, or cruel or nasty. He was just like a big, friendly, dumb puppy. People sort of fell in love with that. And Rob Gronkowski is the new Ryan Lochte. Gronkowski – best known as GRONK – is a tight end for the Patriots. He’s been famous for a while, but in the past few years especially, Gronk’s fame has become next-level. Much like Lochte, Gronk is known for being a nice guy, never mean or nasty, but not known for being particularly bright either. So, Gronk covers the new issue of GQ and this piece is AMAZING. Gronk, his dude-crew and the GQ journalist just hang out together for several days in Florida. And there are so many Gronkisms, someone needs to make some t-shirts.

Gronk on lifting weights: “The importance of lifting weights is it kind of makes me who I am.”

He’s hairless: “No, I do not wax my back.” Your chest? “No. Nothing… It’s natural. Except, like, sometimes I get like a little couple pieces of hair on my chest and stomach, but I just take the quick razor and shave it off when it gets super long. I don’t like any hair.”

Group activities: “I love being in a group. Then you don’t feel awkward at all. When I’m all by myself, I would still feel awkward. But in a group—we know each other. Yeah. Definitely.”

Being shirtless: “You know what’s awesome? I like wearing no shirt, but you have jeans on the bottom. It’s cool but it’s not. It feels good. It actually feels awesome.”

Whether he gets bored with having sex with beautiful women: “Depends. Sometimes if you’re getting too much of it, having everyone come up to you every night, you definitely get bored of it. But it’s pretty wild when it happens. I’m not gonna lie—98 percent of the time, no matter where we go, it happens. It’s literally been like that since the fourth grade. Wherever we roll, it didn’t really matter, chicks would come to me no matter what. Even before anything. But a lot of the time when it doesn’t happen, you have more fun, anyway, because you can hang out with your boys.”

Pet peeves: “My pet peeves are people touching me a lot. Random dudes grabbing me and slapping me across the back. They’re not doing it on purpose, but it’s like they forget I’m a person. But you can’t do anything about it. What are you going to do? People misunderstand who I truly am. Truly who I am. If I go somewhere, people just think I’m a party boy 24/7. Like, it’s a Monday night and I walk into a restaurant and people start handing me shots. I’m like, Yo, I’m in season right now. I just played a game, I can hardly walk.”

On drinking: “I don’t drink because I like the taste. Beer is nasty. I would never sit there and have a beer with dinner—it would ruin my whole meal. I drink to have fun, to feel good, to get tipsy. But my drink of choice is vodka and water. Vodka and water, with a lemon or a splash of cranberry. But it puts the water in you while you’re drinking. Vodka water, so you’re getting your fluids.”

[From GQ]

I sort of understand the vodka and water thing, which means I am a 3 on The Gronk Scale. Like, I enjoy hard liquor on the rocks, and after the ice melts a bit, everything tastes better. As for the rest of it… Gronk is Gronk. Gronk is about two seconds away from referring to himself as Gronk. Gronk is like a more successful Kellan Lutz. Gronk is already Peak Gronk. The journalist tried to talk about politics with Gronk but Gronk “says he doesn’t talk politics.” Then Gronk and his crew tried to figure out when the presidential election was being held. Gronk is The Way.

Photos courtesy of Peggy Sirota/GQ.