Aaron Rodgers “could roll out of bed and create a news cycle. He’s unbelievable. He’s a content machine”. It’s true and it’s why the bestselling sportswriter Ian O’Connor is talking to the Guardian from his home in the New York area, where Rodgers, a Green Bay Packers great, now plays quarterback for the Jets. O’Connor’s new book, Out of the Darkness, tells Rodgers’ story from childhood in California through college stardom at Berkeley to Super Bowl glory and on to something beyond fame – a sort of infamy, even.
Rodgers, O’Connor says, “was not this polarizing figure until really about three years ago when Covid hit and he was in the middle of a press conference in August ’21, and when he was asked if he was vaccinated, he said, ‘Yeah, I’ve been immunized.’ Up until that point, he was not a villain at all.
“He was considered a socially aware athlete. He had spoken up on behalf of Colin Kaepernick and his right to protest inequities in American society. He had supported the athletes’ right to kneel during the national anthem. Right after the terrorist attacks in Paris [in 2015], a fan yelled out an anti-Muslim slur, and he rebuked that fan … he was not this polarizing figure. People looked up to him.
“And then all of a sudden, with those words, ‘Yeah, I’ve been immunized’, that changed his life. A few months later, he tests positive [for Covid], we find out he’s unvaccinated. And that just changed everything about his his public image.
“And since then, we’ve had the conspiracy theories … and now he’s considered a villain. And it’s just fascinating to me: what’s happened to his life?”
In many ways, that life happens on a higher plane. Figuratively, it’s 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 spats with Jimmy Kimmel. Chemically, it’s the world of ayahuasca trips and sensory deprivation therapy that helped inspire O’Connor’s title.
In many ways the answer to any 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 the football I’ve ever seen”, a top-five quarterback of the modern age behind Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes, Joe Montana and Peyton Manning – that most ties to normality were simply cut.
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 was not going to talk to me again. I tried to re-engage with him. It didn’t work. It was after that, that he did a couple of podcasts where he went on and on about conspiracy theories that he embraced.”
To O’Connor, Rodgers’ interest in conspiracy theories is not solely a product of fame. It was also part of his conservative Christian upbringing, “back when he was in high school, being fascinated with the JFK assassination. One of his friends told me that growing up, ‘We believed in magic and miracles.’ And when you believe in magic and miracles, you believe in the possibility of everything, including conspiracies.”
Rodgers was fascinated by Operation Northwoods – which actually happened. As O’Connor explains it, “the joint chiefs of staff in the 1960s came up with a plan when [John F] Kennedy was president to stage 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 nixed it, thankfully. But now, Aaron basically sees an Operation Northwoods behind any government crisis.”
Hence the Covid controversy, in which Rodgers’ distrust of vaccines prompted him to at best mislead about his own vaccination status, a move the quarterback says he now regrets.
He told O’Connor: “If there’s one thing I wish could have gone different, it’s that, because that’s the only thing [critics] could hit me with.“
At the time, perhaps. Rodgers has since been hit with much more. Earlier this year, amid reports that the independent presidential candidate (and vaccine conspiracy theorist) Robert F Kennedy Jr was considering Rodgers as his running mate, CNN released a bombshell report. Rodgers, it said, “shared deranged conspiracy theories about the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting not being real”.
At Sandy Hook, Connecticut, on 14 December 2012, 20 young children and six adults were killed.
O’Connor says: “I’m sure that story would never have been published had RFK Jr not disclosed that he was considering Aaron … I’ve never seen an outlet hold a story 11 years – this came from a private conversation at a party in 2013.
“Aaron was a significant public figure then. All right, he was only in the sporting arena. 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 released a statement, he did not deny saying it. So I’m certainly not going to deny it for him. I think if you really, truly hold that belief that Sandy Hook was staged or it was a hoax, that is unforgivable. I am a father but I don’t think you have to be a parent to feel the same way. That is an unforgivable position to have. That is that is not your garden variety conspiracy theory.
“So I will take him at his word that he’s never had that belief. But did he say it? He didn’t deny saying it back then, at a party at the Kentucky Derby. If he said it, I hope it was just a mistake. Maybe it was some sort 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 the Kennedy campaign planted the whole story of Rodgers as a possible running mate, seeking “free publicity”, because “there was never any chance in hell Aaron Rodgers was going to say yes”.
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“Kennedy has no chance of winning, so effectively, Aaron would be choosing unemployment over continuing his NFL career. So that was never happening.”
Rodgers is 40 but his career continues. He had 18 seasons with the Packers, Super Bowl XLV the high point, beating the Pittsburgh Steelers 31-25 in Dallas. On the page, O’Connor tells how Rodgers came to oust Brett Favre, a Packers great; how he steered the Packers to their Super Bowl win and plenty of near misses; and how he, like Favre, came to leave Wisconsin for New York and the Jets.
O’Connor decided to write about Rodgers in 2023, when “he had just gotten traded into my backyard … and I thought he was probably the most prominent American male athlete who had not had a defining book written about him. And he was likely the most polarizing athlete in American sports.”
Then came “the night he got hurt”. Last 11 September, at MetLife Stadium, the Jets’ star signing 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. Achilles torn, helped from the field, he did not play again all year. As Jets fans absorbed the blow, so did O’Connor.
“Honestly, and I’ve been covering sports in this country for about 37 years, that was the most heartsick I’ve ever been watching a game. It had nothing to do with my book. I just felt terrible for him and the fans because after four snaps, to have that ripped away, on opening night? It was just an awful 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 of the downside of employing him and none of the upside. The downside is the off-field controversies, many of them self-generated. And the upside … is just how great of a football player he is.
“So I’m hoping this year that for the fan base, selfishly for my book, and really for him, that they finally get the upside. 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 out of Rodgers’ control, most tellingly a lack of support. Among other star quarterbacks, 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 win with Tampa Bay argues for his own abilities but he is now retired. Rodgers plays on. To O’Connor, “Though sometimes people 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 do think that will repair a lot of damage [from] the off-field controversies he basically started. But I do think he could reverse this by winning a Super Bowl with the Jets.”