Coming to Croke Park: Aaron Rodgers, US sporting great and castigated ‘critical thinker’

Episode two of Enigma, the Netflix docuseries on Aaron Rodgers, opens with the storied quarterback sitting under a crescent moon, smoking from a long sharing pipe. In his company at a trippy retreat in the Costa Rican countryside are a dozen others, circled round a campfire. And Rodgers starts talking, like a guru maybe, his head shaking slowly, side to side, up and down, eyes wide.

“This is a top-of-the-mountain experience,” he says. “We’re pushing ourselves to the edge with various medicines. Why? Because my life matters. I’ve got the unseen world and the whispers of the universe telling me I matter. I’m enough.”

Those other voices are not contactable on analogue frequencies, but Rodgers has long extolled the virtues of psychedelic experiences. The chemical focus of the retreat in Costa Rica is ayahuasca, a brew made from plants with hallucinogenic qualities. Rodgers refers to it as a “plant medicine” rather than a drug. Potato, potatoe, tomato, tomatoe.

There is no soundtrack to the series, but the opening scenes of the first episode are purposely overlaid with the David O’Dowda song People We Don’t Know. “Let’s be quiet for a moment,” he sings, “let the shapes begin to fall.” Are you ready for this trip?

“I live between two worlds,” Rodgers says, “as the extroverted, alpha leader of the football team, and an introverted lover of silence. Who am I? Am I the football player? Am I the off-the-field guy? I used to really think that you could separate the two, but you can’t. It’s something I’ve wrestled with for many, many years.”

The football player will take the field in Croke Park on Sunday, lining up at quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers against the Minnesota Vikings. That part of his life lends itself to narrative tramlines and familiar stops. Rodgers was an underdog from a small university town in California, forced to overcome repeated rejections before finally making it in the big league. The Hollywood pay-off came in Superbowl XXXI, 14 years ago, when Rodgers led the Green Bay Packers to victory over the New England Patriots.

As Rodgers tells it, though, that was also the night when he had an epiphany of sorts on the team bus leaving the stadium. In August 2017, he teased it out in a long interview with Mina Kimes, a senior writer with ESPN.

“As he reflected on the sacrifices and the slights, he wondered whether it was all worth it,” wrote Kimes. “And then he felt something unexpected – not regret or fulfilment, but a different sensation, like a space had opened up inside of him. He thought about life and football and everything he had invested in his sport, and a jarring realisation sprang into his mind. ‘I hope I don’t just do this?’”

In Enigma, Rodgers returns to that bus ride and the introspection it launched. “You’re sitting on the bus,” he says, “you’ve just accomplished the greatest thing ever and you’re like, ‘Damn, that was cool – now what? Now that I’ve accomplished the only thing I wanted to do in my life – now what?’ I was like, ‘Did I aim at the wrong thing? Or do I spend too much time thinking about stuff that ultimately doesn’t give you true happiness?’”

A few years earlier Rodgers had struck up a friendship with Rob Bell, a young pastor who had given a talk to the Green Bay players. Around that time, Bell appeared at number 10 on a list of “the 50 most influential Christians in America”, and for Rodgers it signalled another leap away from the evangelical ministry he attended as a child.

“I attended a white, dogmatic church [growing up],” said Rodgers, “that really didn’t serve me. It was very rigid and structured and I’m not a rigid person. It was all about shame, guilt, judgment. They were like ‘we have the truth – our way or the highway. Our way is heaven, your way is hell.’ Even talking to my parents, it was very black-and-white.”

Rodgers has been estranged from his family for at least 10 years, and it was often reported that his spiritual choices had caused the rift. His father, Ed, though, rejected that in an interview with Ian O’Connor for his unauthorised biography, Out of the Darkness: The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers.

“We’d be totally accepting for whatever he’s got going,” his father said. “I would love to turn that narrative the other way. We’re not rigid. We’re not hardline, or whatever people have said in the news. We’re just people trying to follow God. We’re not divisive. Our view on all that, on God, religion, was not part of the divisiveness that happened.”

To add a tabloid twist, the breakdown in their relationship first emerged in a reality TV dating show in which Rodgers’s brother Jordan was a contestant; Jordan won.

None of that affected Rodgers’s standing in the public eye. His status as one of the greatest quarterbacks the league has ever seen was heckled by Green Bay’s patchy record in the playoffs in the years after they won the Superbowl, but his regular season numbers were so good that Rodgers was never knocked off his pedestal.

That changed dramatically during the pandemic. As vaccinations came on stream Rodgers was asked in a prematch press conference if he had taken one and he answered that he had been “immunised”. On Rodgers’s part it was a calculated obfuscation.

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He said later that if there had been a follow-up question he would have explained the “homeopathic treatment” he had undertaken, but he didn’t volunteer that information at the time. A few months later he tested positive for Covid-19 after being the only unvaccinated player at a Halloween party attended by 19 vaccinated team-mates.

Rodgers’s shadiness on that question caused uproar. On the Pat McAfee podcast – a show that reportedly pays Rodgers $1 million a year to be a regular guest – he denied being some sort of “anti-vax, flat earther” but instead characterised himself as a “critical thinker. I march to the beat of my own drum. I believe strongly in bodily autonomy and not have to acquiesce to some sort of woke culture or crazed individuals who say you have to do something.”

In the middle of a pandemic that ultimately caused the death of more than 1.2 million Americans, Rodgers’s position generated hot condemnation.

The episode heralded a significant change in Rodgers’s public persona. He became a regular contributor to a variety of podcasts, expressing a spectrum of opinions that ranged from outrageous to offensive. He also had a side-hustle as a conspiracy theorist.

“We have a captured media system,” Rodgers told the right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan last year. “We have a captured medicine system, we have a captured education system.”

Around the same time a video emerged on social media in which he shared a theory that the government had manufactured the HIV epidemic. “The blueprint, the game plan, was made in the ′80s,” he said. “Create a pandemic, you know, with a virus that’s going wild.”

The New York Times described Rodgers as an “anti-establishment ideologue”. It continued: “He has vilified celebrities and urged listeners to question the motives of those who control the government and media, tossing around his suspicion that the ruling establishment is in cahoots with ‘Big Pharma’.”

One of the celebrities he attacked was the comedian and late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel, who has recently emerged from a smackdown with Donald Trump. In a discussion on The Pat McAfee Show early last year about the impending release of documents that would purportedly identify people linked to Jeffrey Epstein, Rodgers said: “There are a lot of people, including Jimmy Kimmel, really hoping that doesn’t come out.”

Kimmel’s name didn’t appear in any of the documents, and he issued a fulminating rebuke on X. “For the record,” he wrote, “I’ve not met, flown with, visited, or had any contact whatsoever with Epstein, nor will you find my name on any ‘list’ other than the clearly-phoney nonsense that soft-brained wackos like yourself can’t seem to distinguish from reality. Your reckless words put my family in danger. Keep it up and we will debate the facts further in court.”

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During this period Rodgers was dropped by major sponsors, including State Farm Insurance, a blue-chip company which had paid Rodgers $3 million a year over 12 years.

In his hometown of Chico in northern California, though, they saw a different side to Rodgers during the pandemic. Three local businesses that were going to the wall were saved by his financial intervention; after that he set up a small business Covid fund that funnelled $1.6 million into about 160 businesses.

A couple of years earlier, when 153,336 acres were ravaged by wildfires 25 kilometres east of Chico, killing 85 people and dislocating thousands, Rodgers raised more than $3 million for an aid fund. But, in recent years, that side of him was eclipsed in the public mind by his crackpot pronouncements on a wide variety of subjects.

Rodgers is just three months shy of his 42nd birthday and as his NFL career ticks towards midnight he has made a new start with the Steelers after two disastrous seasons with the New York Jets. In just the fourth play of his first game with the Jets Rodgers ruptured his Achilles tendon, ruling him out for the rest of that year. In his second season he couldn’t rise above the institutional haplessness of a franchise that hasn’t reached the playoffs in 15 years.

“Any time there has been growth in my life there has been an ego death,” he said in Enigma. The Jets afforded him that opportunity when they cut him at the end of his second season.

The Steelers, though, are perennial winners and Rodgers has made a bright start in the early weeks of the season, making seven touchdown passes, in the process climbing to number four on the all-time list for touchdown passes in the NFL.

He has always been a great player. In Croke Park on Sunday that might be the Rodgers you see.

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