The superstar who went down the rabbit hole
GRANTED, we are all trying to forget that odd period of existence, but it was still interesting to see how last Tuesday passed without a pile of comment on the fact that it was the fourth anniversary of Leo Varadkar announcing that the world, as we knew it, was coming to a halt.
So began a deeply weird time when we were confined to our homes with no live sport to distract us. We feasted on historic events, were reminded of how dominant Bayern Munich were in the 1999 Champions League final and marvelled at the eight minutes of war between Marvin Hagler and Thomas Hearns.
It’s funny how life moves on, but there are constant reminders of what that time did and how it ruined some people for us.
Matthew Le Tissier was always one of my favourite footballers, I can still remember sitting in my living room, when I was supposed to be studying for my Leaving Cert, as he scored that wonderstrike against Newcastle. I liked that Le Tiss seemed unbothered by his own brilliance, unfussed by being consistently ignored by England managers, and he maintained that outlook on the game through his stint on Sky Sports’ Soccer Saturday.
And then came the pandemic and this brilliant footballer fell deep into a conspiracy theory rabbit hole.
OF course, that can happen the best of us — just look at the reaction to a badly Photoshopped family picture last week. But there was still something jarring about seeing this one-time magician on a football field go from questioning the Covid vaccine to claiming that the critically ill patients in Italy at the start of the pandemic were actors and suggesting that 9/11 was an inside job.
But Le Tissier is in the halfpenny place compared to Aaron Rodgers. He was always an oddball, a master of his craft at quarterback whose one paltry Super Bowl title is a very poor return for his immense and rare talent. For years, before Patrick Mahomes came along and changed the game, Rodgers was considered the most gifted in his position. But for all his excellence, he still only brought one Super Bowl ring back to Green Bay’s Titletown.
Throughout the pandemic, Rodgers proved that there was no half-baked conspiracy theory that he wouldn’t embrace. From the Died Suddenly anti-vaccine movement to the astoundingly kooky Tartarian Empire belief, which posits that a long time ago there was a global civilisation which created much of the world’s great architecture, from the Pyramids to the White House, but were then wiped out for some reason and all their hard work has been erased from history. Seriously; you should look it up.
All the while, as Rodgers espoused these odd ideas mostly on his friend Pat McAfee’s broadcasts, he was leading the Green Bay Packers into the play-offs, where they would lose tight games. And then thankfully before last season, he departed the Packers for the New York Jets, possibly because his weird views might be more at home in the Big Apple.
Long-suffering Jets fans thought this would end a Super Bowl drought going back to 1969, but typical of the Jets’ history, their quarterback got a season-ending Achilles tendon injury in the opening game of the season.
As he rehabilitated, Rodgers has had plenty of time to exercise what he claims is ‘critical thinking’. And if he didn’t have the megaphone and profile provided by his sporting prowess, he would just be another eccentric Californian who got a little too much sun growing up.
But last Tuesday, The New York Times reported that Rodgers is being considered by another committed conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy Jr as his running mate for the upcoming Presidential campaign. Among the other candidates that Kennedy is looking at is former WWE wrestler and Minnesota governor Jesse ‘the Body’ Ventura. The success of Donald Trump has damaged American politics forever, it seems. Interestingly, it was Kennedy’s father’s assassination that Rodgers claims set him out on this life of questioning everything and not taking anything at face value. But for all the kooky conspiracies the quarterback has given licence to, he has also gone down a dangerous path.
CNN claimed last Wednesday that Rodgers told one of their reporters back in 2013 that he believed that the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting — when 26 people, including 20 children, were killed in an elementary school — was staged, that it was a government inside job, the victims were all actors and that the media were intentionally ignoring this.
THIS awful conspiracy theory was pushed by Alex Jones and his Infowars website and saw Jones being ordered by a court to pay the families of the victims over $950million. Rodgers later last week denied he believed Jones’s lies about Sandy Hook.
On his chat show on Thursday night, Jimmy Kimmel, who has had a long-running feud with the quarterback after being pulled into one of his more insane ideas, devised his own conspiracy theory about Rodgers. ‘What the deep state won’t tell you is that Aaron Rodgers never played football, he’s not a football player, he faked his entire career,’ Kimmel quipped. ‘Fact, first time he played in an NFL game was last year — the week before his first game with the Jets, Aaron’s body double, the guy who played every single game for him before this, died of Covid and they had nobody dumb looking enough to fill in,’ Kimmel added to much laughter from his audience.
And that’s the thing. If you didn’t laugh, you would cry, that Rodgers, a sporting star who had given us such pleasure on many Sunday nights watching the NFL, has become this sort of tragicomic figure and not because he never fulfilled his rare talent on a field. Rodgers comes across as someone who desperately needs to prove he’s smarter than the average bear, that he is blessed with a unique intelligence that allows him to see things nobody else notices. But he’s not. He’s only a critical thinker to those who can’t think critically.
Perhaps if the pandemic never happened, if the world wasn’t paused, Rodgers wouldn’t have lost touch with reality.
Maybe he would still be with the Packers, and we would be cheering him on Sunday nights during the winter. But it did happen and the course that people like Rodgers and Le Tissier followed means we can never look at their brilliance in a sporting arena in the same way again.
That’s one of the consequences of that strange time that began four years ago. No wonder we are all trying to forget it.