Loose-lipped Aaron keeps on shooting wildly from the hip
FLICKING through the channels after the Champions League the other evening, I stumbled upon Aaron Rodgers in all of his full-on weirdness.
The Green Bay Packers superstar, one of the most gifted quarterbacks in history, had granted Sky Sports half an hour of his time as a nod to the NFL’s most iconic franchise finally playing a regular season game in London – more of that later.
It was a reverential and wide-eyed Neil Reynolds who was peppering the even wider-eyed Rodgers with questions. Reynolds is the face of the NFL on Sky Sports and that is a status he has earned, as he brilliantly anchors their coverage, which improves year on year. Despite bagging an interview with one of the game’s biggest stars – and its strangest fish – Reynolds didn’t give Rodgers an easy ride.
Early enough in the chat, Reynolds might have pulled the pin from the grenade when he asked Rodgers about how the ordinary American might perceive him, probably in light of his decision to insert himself into the Covid culture war last year when he was held up as a figurehead for the anti-vaxxers – much to the chagrin of one Irish journalist who had the misfortune of sharing his name with one of the most famous sportspeople in America, and found himself bombarded with abusive messages.
‘I think they understand I shoot from the hip, don’t hold back in what I am thinking and what I am feeling,’ Rodgers replies, all the time having an odd thousandyard stare that seems to be looking beyond Reynolds.
‘They know I love this game and play as hard as I can, love my team-mates and care about them as much as I can.’
And then, with the slightest of smirks curling around his lips, he drops the bomb. ‘I had some opinions that have been polarising, but you know where I stand,’ he declares. And maybe that’s it about Aaron Rodgers. His ability to have opinions means that he will always be talked about.
Before the start of this NFL season, one big newspaper feature asked the question is Aaron Rodgers America’s most interesting athlete or its most annoying?
And then outlining how the Californian is not your average NFL player – or even your average athlete, down to his experimentation with a Peruvian hallucinogen.
There have been articles like this before the start of American football season for the past decade – last year, it was the Athletic calling Rodgers ‘the most intriguing individual in the NFL.’
And if you can put the whole immunisation debate to one side (and it can be easy to do when he weaves some magic on the football field as he may have done in the early hours of this morning against the Chicago Bears), his chat with Reynolds did reveal why Rodgers is considered such a fascinating character.
In an increasingly sanitised sporting world, where athletes grow more and more fearful of expressing an opinion, there is something refreshing about him and his wacky views.
And in his answers to Reynolds, Rodgers says some fascinating things. When his relaxed demeanour even in the most pressurised situations is drawn upon, the quarterback has an answer which every inter-county manager and coach is likely to have jotted down for a dressing-room speech somewhere down the line.
‘It is important to simplify things as much as possible, and that is simplification in life as much as in football. We are playing a game, it is good to keep that perspective sometimes. It is not that serious. We are just 22 guys on a field trying to beat the heck out of each other and it is important to keep that in mind.’
Indeed. Except the NFL is pretty serious, as we were reminded last week. As the new season cranked into gear, so too did the media machine in America. There isn’t a whole pile that unifies the fractured States across the American landmass any more, but a passion for their most popular sport still unites the Disunited States. No matter the creed or colour, Democratic or Republican, most Sundays are spent in thrall to this violent, but compelling, game that is a major part of their national conversation – and increasingly conversations here and across the world.
I still have the odd acquaintance and friend who refuses to fall under the spell of the NFL.
I implore them to simply watch Red Zone on a Sunday night, especially in the fourth quarter of the early games. It remains the most remarkable television in all of sport, held together superbly by the breathless and manic Scott Hanson.
In the opening weekend, there were field goals missed and two games going to overtime with more field goals. Leads changing once, twice and thrice in the final couple of minutes of the fourth quarter. And through it all, Red Zone kept us informed.
While I did change over to watch Rodgers and the Packers lose to Minnesota Vikings, Red Zone is always worth a flick deep into Sunday night because there is always drama. And that perhaps is why American Football has such a hold over its society.
It makes sense that Don DeLillo, that great chronicler of modern American life, returns to the game again and again as a metaphor.
Not only was one of his better novels about a high school team in Texas, End Zone, but his most recent work, The Silence, is set on Super Bowl Sunday when friends gather in an apartment in New York only for a mysterious digital blackout to prevent them from watching the game. In End Zone, DeLillo suggested that American Football is ‘the one sport guided by language, by the word signal, the snap number, the colour code, the play name.’ And there’s something in that. One of the things that makes it so fascinating is the number of different plays that can be called.
The following for NFL in this country continues to grow, evident in the increasing popularity of the Irish NFL Show, a start-up online show that has gone from strength to strength. It is worth checking out if you have never seen it. The groundswell for a NFL game in Croke Park will keep swirling, especially now that the league has branched out to other European cities.
When the iconic Packers finally do make it across the Atlantic, there will be plenty who will decamp from this side of the Irish Sea. Towards the end of the interview, Rodgers tried his utmost to look super-excited when Reynolds said you are finally coming to London, even if earlier he had extolled the virtues of the Premier League, especially Kevin de Bruyne, and the UK Office.
Rodgers is better when he is simply talking about the game that he has mastered. That is when he is at his most honest and believable. And when he tells Reynolds that American football is this ‘crazy, messy, mad, beautiful artistry of a game’ and that’s why he loves it, it nearly sounds like something that a character in a DeLillo novel would say.
And Rodgers comes across as just strange enough to have been dreamt up by the great novelist.
“It’s good to
keep it all in perspective”