Aaron Rodgers “could roll out of bed and create a news cycle. He’s incredible. He’s a content machine.” That’s true, and that’s why bestselling sportswriter Ian O’Connor speaks to the Guardian from his home in the New York area, where Rodgers, a Green Bay Packers great, now quarterbacks the Jets. O’Connor’s new book, Out of the Darkness , tells Rodgers’ story from his California youth to college stardom at Berkeley to Super Bowl glory and on to something beyond fame — even a kind of notoriety.
Rodgers, O’Connor says, “wasn’t such a polarizing figure until about three years ago when Covid hit and he was in the middle of a press conference in August 2021 and when he was asked if he’d been vaccinated, he said, ‘Yes, I’ve been vaccinated.’ Up until that point, he wasn’t a villain at all.
“He was seen as a socially conscious athlete. He had spoken out on behalf of Colin Kaepernick and his right to protest inequalities in American society. He had supported the right of athletes to kneel during the national anthem. Immediately after the terrorist attacks in Paris [in 2015]a fan shouted an anti-Islamic insult, and he reprimanded that fan… he wasn’t a polarizing figure. People looked up to him.
“And then all of a sudden, with those words, ‘Yes, I’m vaccinated,’ it changed his life. A few months later he tested positive [for Covid]we find out he’s not vaccinated. And that changes everything about his public image.
“And since then we’ve had the conspiracy theories… and now he’s seen as a villain. And it’s just fascinating to me: What happened to his life?”
In many ways, that life is on a higher plane. Figuratively speaking, it is the world of the super-rich, of luxury homes and relationships with famous actors, Olivia Munn and Shailene Woodley among them. Intellectually, it’s the world of podcast rants and arguments with Jimmy Kimmel. Chemically, it’s the world of ayahuasca journeys And sensory deprivation therapy which inspired O’Connor’s title.
In many ways, the answer to every question about what happened to Rodgers is simply “fame.” Aaron Rodgers proved so good at his game — to O’Connor, “the most accurate thrower of football I’ve ever seen,” a top-five quarterback of the modern era behind Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes, Joe Montana and Peyton Manning — that most ties to normalcy were simply severed.
O’Connor’s book is not entirely unauthorized. He spoke to Rodgers’ estranged family and to Rodgers himself.
He had “access to him for two hours in February and that was it. He wouldn’t talk to me anymore. I tried to contact him again. It didn’t work. Then he did a couple of podcasts where he went on and on about conspiracy theories that he espoused.”
For O’Connor, Rodgers’ interest in conspiracy theories isn’t just a product of fame. It was also part of his conservative Christian upbringing: “When he was in high school, he was fascinated by the JFK assassination. One of his friends told me that growing up, ‘We believed in magic and miracles.’ And if you believe in magic and miracles, you believe in the possibility of anything, including conspiracy theories.”
Rodgers was fascinated by Operation Northwoods – which actually happenedAs O’Connor explains, “the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the 1960s came up with a plan when [John F] Kennedy was president to launch attacks on American military and civilian targets and blame them on Cuba, to start a war with [Fidel] Castro. That was a real evil plot…and Kennedy thankfully thwarted it. But now Aaron sees an Operation Northwoods behind every government crisis, basically.”
Hence the Covid controversy, in which Rodgers’ distrust of vaccines prompted him to, at best, deceive about his own vaccination status, a move that the quarterback says he now regrets it.
He told O’Connor: “If there’s one thing I wish I had done differently, it’s that, because that’s the only thing I can do. [critics] could hit me with.”
At the time, perhaps. Rodgers has faced a lot more since then. Earlier this year, amid reports that independent presidential candidate (and vaccine conspiracy theorist) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was considering Rodgers as his running mate, CNN reported a shocking reportRodgers, it said, “shared deranged conspiracy theories about the falsity of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting.”
On December 14, 2012, 20 young children and six adults were killed in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.
O’Connor says: “I’m certain the story would never have been published if RFK Jr. hadn’t disclosed that he was considering Aaron… I’ve never seen an outlet keep a story under wraps for 11 years — this one stemmed from a private conversation at a party in 2013.
“Aaron was a major public figure at the time. Okay, he was just in the sports world. But he had won a Super Bowl and was the best player in the NFL. If he said that then, why wasn’t it published? I’m not saying he didn’t say it, because when he a statement releasedhe didn’t deny it. So I’m certainly not going to deny it for him. I think if you really, really believe that Sandy Hook was staged or a hoax, that’s unforgivable. I’m a father, but I don’t think you have to be a parent to feel the same way. That’s an unforgivable position to be in. That’s not just a run-of-the-mill conspiracy theory.
“So I take him at his word that he never had that belief. But did he say it? He didn’t deny it at the time, at a party at the Kentucky Derby. If he did say it, I hope it was just a mistake. Maybe it was some kind of joke. I don’t know how you can joke about that. But I really, really hope he never had that belief.”
O’Connor suspects that the Kennedy campaign spread the whole story about Rodgers as a possible running mate in search of “free publicity” because “there was no chance that Aaron Rodgers would say yes.”
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“Kennedy has no chance of winning, so Aaron would effectively choose unemployment over continuing his NFL career. That was never going to happen.”
ROdgers is 40 but his career continues. He had 18 seasons With the Packers, culminating in Super Bowl XLV, beating the Pittsburgh Steelers 31-25 in Dallas. On the page, O’Connor recounts how Rodgers eliminated Brett Favre, a Packers great; how he led the Packers to their Super Bowl victory and many near misses; and how, like Favre, he left Wisconsin for New York and the Jets.
O’Connor decided to write about Rodgers in 2023, when “he had just been traded into my backyard…and I thought he was probably the most prominent American male athlete that hadn’t had a defining book written about him. And he was probably the most polarizing athlete in American sports.”
Then came “the night he got hurt.” Last September 11, at MetLife Stadium, the Jets star led his men against the Buffalo Bills. More than 82,000 fans were there, millions more watched on TV. After just four snaps, Rodgers was sacked. His Achilles tendon tore, aided by the field, and he didn’t play again for the rest of the year. While the Jets fans took the hit, so did O’Connor.
“Honestly, and I’ve been writing about sports in this country for 37 years, it was the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever seen. It had nothing to do with my book. I just felt terrible for him and the fans, because after four snaps, to have that taken away, on opening night? It was just a terrible feeling.”
There’s grim humor in it – as O’Connor says, the Jets are “really a Charlie Brown franchise, where everything goes wrong, and so what the Jets ended up getting with Aaron Rodgers for his first year was all the downsides of hiring him and none of the upsides. The downside is the off-field controversies, a lot of which are of his own making. And the upside … is just how great a football player he is.”
“So I hope this year that the fans, selfishly for my book and actually for him, finally see the positive side of it. Because that was a miserable 2023 for everyone.”
Asked why a quarterback as talented as Rodgers has won just one Super Bowl, O’Connor cites factors beyond Rodgers’ control, most tellingly a lack of support. Tom Brady had Bill Bellichick as head coach for 20 years at New England — and won six Super Bowls with the team.
Brady’s subsequent Super Bowl victory with Tampa Bay is a testament to his own abilities, but he is now retired. Rodgers plays on. To O’Connor: “Although people sometimes confuse victory with virtue, let’s face it, winning cures a lot of ills, on and off the field. If he could win a championship before he retires, with the New York Jets of all teams, I think that would repair a lot of damage. [from] the off-field controversies that he’s actually caused. But I do think he can turn that around by winning a Super Bowl with the Jets.”