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 polarising 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 immunised.
’ 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 polarising figure. People looked up to him.
“And then all of a sudden, with those words, ‘Yeah, I’ve been immunised’, 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 publi.