Aaron Rodgers sounded like the calm, rational voice of reason as he addressed the New York media this week in advance of the Jets’ opener Monday night against the 49ers.
“You can’t ride the highs too high and then the whole world is crashing down on you if you lose,” Rodgers said. “If we win, the headline is going to be, ‘The Jets are going to to the Super Bowl.’ If we lose, it’s going to be, ‘Same old Jets.’ I think we need to get away from some of those outside themes.”
It seems as if Rodgers has been all about outside themes for the last several years.
The messy breakup with the Green Bay Packers. Lying about his COVID vaccination status in 2021. Embracing or at least considering various conspiracy theories including the 9/11 attacks and the Sandy Hook school shootings. Sparring with Jimmy Kimmel over whether the comedian’s name would be linked with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Voicing support for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for president and pondering being a vice presidential running mate. Bypassing the Jets’ mandatory minicamp for a previously scheduled trip to Egypt.
There have been some high-profile romances over the years (Olivia Munn, Danica Patrick, Shailene Woodley) and an estrangement with his immediate family.
A four-time Most Valuable Player award winner with the Packers, Rodgers morphed from a respected first-ballot Hall of Fame candidate to a sideshow, which wasn’t helped when a torn Achilles four plays into 2023 prematurely ended his first season in New York.
This is the guy to lead the Jets to their first Super Bowl championship since Broadway Joe Namath on Jan. 12, 1969?
Rodgers attempts to restart his career at age 40 at Levi’s Stadium in front of a national Monday night audience against the team that bypassed him with the first pick of the 2005 NFL Draft. He’s 6-3 against the 49ers during the regular season but 0-4 in the playoffs.
“He’ll be wearing a different uniform but it’s definitely still him,” defensive end Nick Bosa said. “We’ll prepare like we’re playing him.”
It was a story with too many angles for Ian O’Connor to pass up. A New York Times best-selling author based in New York, O’Connor has written unauthorized biographies of Mike Krzyzewski, Bill Belichick, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus and Derek Jeter.
Originally working on a LeBron James bio, O’Connor, 60, pivoted to Rodgers once the quarterback was traded to the Jets.
“Aaron Rodgers turns 41 in December,” O’Connor said in a recent phone interview. “Can you imagine if he pulled it off, winning a Super Bowl at 41 for the Jets? Nothing in my lifetime would match it in New York.”
The end result is “Out of the Darkness: The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers,” for which O’Connor conducted more than 250 interviews of friends, teammates, former coaches and family members as well as media members with knowledge of Rodgers’ path from Chico, Butte College and Cal before his precipitous draft plunge to No. 24 in 2005.
The goal was to pull back the curtain on an athlete who was once upon a time regarded as congenial, smart, funny and socially aware but turned into something else in terms of public perception — a know-it-all who is always convinced he’s the smartest guy in the room and wields an inordinate amount of power within the structure of an NFL team.
Rodgers agreed to do a sit-down two-hour interview at his home in Malibu with O’Connor for fact-checking purposes while declining to participate more fully in the project.
“He was very cordial, engaging, thoughtful,” O’Connor said. “It’s unauthorized so he didn’t owe me a thing. He gave me this limited cooperation with no editorial control, no money going his way. He definitely made it a better book and I very much appreciated it.”
To O’Connor, the Rodgers line of demarcation from popular to polarizing is clear:
“Yeah, I’ve been immunized.”
Those were the words Rodgers used to reporters asking about his vaccination status, which was required by the league during the pandemic.
“I think those four words dramatically changed his public image in life,” O’Connor said. “He became a villain in the NFL. He was not a villain before that.”
They were words Rodgers came to regret, rather than telling reporters the real reason was an allergy to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and questions about the effectiveness of Johnson & Johnson.
It surprised O’Connor that during their interview Rodgers said he’d erred with his handling of his vaccination status. O’Connor said it has been his experience that “the greats” seldom admit mistakes, believing it shows a sign of weakness that would “compromise their chances of winning at the highest level. He said, ‘I should have told the truth and I gave my critics ammunition they still have against me today.’ I was almost shocked that he admitted the mistake.”
Even with the outside noise, Rodgers has remained a popular teammate.
Charles Woodson, a teammate of Rodgers in Green Bay remembers him as a player who sat behind Favre and soaked up all the knowledge he could.
“He didn’t say a whole lot,” Woodson said in a phone interview. “He was a good teammate, ultra-competitive. All the stuff that happened with the vaccine and a lot of stuff that’s going on now, I don’t know that Aaron. I know the Aaron from 2008, 2009, just a guy who wanted to prove a lot of people wrong.”
Aaron Rodgers (12) is pursued by Javon Kinlaw (99) as a member of the Green Bay Packers. Rodgers and Kinlaw are now teammates on the Jets.
Being on the field could help rehabilitate Rodgers in the public eye. While injured last season, he was a regular and controversial guest on ESPN’s Pat McAfee Show.
“The Jets get the upside this year instead of all the downside of employing Aaron Rodgers,” O’Connor said. “The upside is he’s playing, so I think a lot of the conversation will go back to football. The problem last year, when he wasn’t playing, you had only the downside of employing Aaron Rodgers, and that was conversations that could go some pretty strange places.”
Included in the book is an account of Rodgers’ fall in the 2005 NFL Draft, where he thought there was a chance he’d go No. 1 to the 49ers and instead fell all the way to No. 24. It’s a chip “the size of a boulder” Rodgers still carries around even if going to Green Bay was a far better situation than playing with either the 49ers or the Raiders, who were at No. 23.
Rodgers had grown up a 49ers fan and the early feeling was that either he or Utah’s Alex Smith would go No. 1.
The irony, as O’Connor details, is that coach Mike Nolan actually wanted Rodgers, but was overruled by management. Offensive coordinator Mike McCarthy, however, didn’t want Rodgers, preferring Smith, and then went on to win a Super Bowl with Rodgers at quarterback.
The green room wait turned into the NFL’s first dose of reality TV, but Rodgers said he has left all those feelings behind when it comes to Monday night.
“If this had happened in the first or second year as a starter, there’s a different kind of energy when all the guys have passed on you,” Rodgers said. “You’re having this bitterness you’re holding on to. I don’t have that anymore.”
Kyle Shanahan, the 49ers’ head coach, expects nothing less than vintage Rodgers.
“I don’t care how many Achilles he’s had or how old he eventually is, he’s always going to be able to throw it,” Shanahan told KNBR-680.
For O’Connor, it all makes for a good opening act.
“He grew up wanting to be the next Joe Montana and the next Steve Young. That was his team,” O’Connor said. “He had been watching 49ers games since he was 4 years old. It’s going to be riveting TV.”