Out of the Darkness

July 8, 2024
Sports journalist O’Connor (Coach K) struggles to get inside the head of NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers in this competent if unenlightening biography. Though Rodgers was of relatively small stature when he joined his high school junior varsity team, he had a strong arm that propelled him to an impressive college career at UC Berkeley. In 2005, he was drafted by the Green Bay Packers, but he frequently butted heads with star quarterback Brett Favre, who treated Rodgers as a threat. The Packers pushed out Favre after a lackluster 2007 season, giving Rodgers his moment in the spotlight. O’Connor gamely covers Rodgers’s star-making run with the team and the falling-out with coach Mike McCarthy that led to his 2023 trade to the Jets, but the author comes up short in his attempts to make sense of Rodgers’s life off the field. O’Connor offers a granular account of barbs traded in the press between Rodgers and his estranged family, but the origins of the dispute and what it reveals about Rodgers remain unclear. O’Connor also throws up his hands when it comes to elucidating Rodgers’s conspiratorial tendencies, noting that the athlete is habitually drawn to debunked theories about the JFK assassination, 9/11, and Covid vaccines but offering little insight as to why. This comes up short.

August 1, 2024
A dispiriting yet readable biography of gridiron great Aaron Rodgers, his own worst enemy. "Rodgers was widely regarded to be among the two or three most talented players ever at the most glamorous position in American team sports," writes O'Connor, who has authored bios of other larger-than-life sports figures, including Mike Krzyzewski, Bill Belichick, and Derek Jeter. Rodgers has played through monstrous injuries and inspired his teammates to greatness. Yet he constantly rubbed people wrong with a self-confidence that smacked of arrogance, though walking the walk by excelling at basketball and baseball as much as football. Despite his talent, his mechanics gave pro scouts pause. As his college coach at Cal explained of Rodgers' fired-at-ear-level signature pass, "Aaron's was unusually high mainly because his back arm was high....He was higher than the rest of our guys. But I didn't mess with it because he was phenomenal." It may have been that passing style that led pro managers to believe that Rodgers couldn't be taught, for which reason he was selected by the Packers late in the draft in 2005. There lay the seeds of the weighty chip he would bear on his shoulder, but there was more that detracted from his undeniable on-field skill--e.g., his off-putting comments about 9/11, his "divorce" from his parents and siblings, his lying about being vaccinated for Covid-19 out of his conviction that the vaccine was "experimental gene therapy that changes your DNA," and his fascination with UFOs and seemingly every conspiracy theory to come along. Though well publicized individually, in the aggregate these foibles make for dismaying reading, and they diminish Rodgers in the face of competition like Peyton Manning and, more recently, Patrick Mahomes. A well-crafted portrait of perhaps the most talented QB of all time, allowing for a flaw and faux pas for every TD.

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