There are two types of Aaron Rodgers fans: those who can’t stand him anymore, and those who will soon realize they can’t stand him anymore.
As a native of Racine, Wisconsin, and a regular visitor to Lambeau Field during the Rodgers years, I can tell you it’s no surprise to read the petulant former Green Bay Packers quarterback described as a crazy conspiracy theorist who never says “I’m sorry” and is “oversensitive.”
This is evident in “Out of the Darkness: The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers,” a biography by Ian O’Connor that promises exclusive interviews about Rodgers’ estrangement from his family, his misleading statements about his COVID vaccination (which he was/is not), and his troubled relationship with his coaches.
O’Connor is a great writer who spends about three-quarters of the book engagingly recounting the highlights of Rodgers’ career, from undersized high school quarterback to community college star and then to the University of California and Green Bay. O’Connor makes you feel like you were there, for example, during the humiliating 2005 NFL Draft, when Rodgers finished well short of the top five picks he was promised.
Thanks to dozens of interviews, there are also insights into the deals that brought him first to Green Bay and last year to New York, where he tore his Achilles after four games in the Jets’ uniform (he is said to be playing a role this season).
But the hot gossip isn’t so hot. O’Connor interviewed the quarterback. In fact, he may have spent more time with Rodgers over the past decade than Rodgers’ parents, whose calls he ignored for more than nine years. But those interviews amount to little more than the uninformative comments Rodgers has been making all along.
The break with his family may have something to do with his former fiancée Olivia Munn, whom Rodgers’ parents didn’t like, but more likely it’s the result of the quarterback’s rejection of their religion. (One incredible detail O’Connor finds out is that they didn’t like that their son, who is over 30, was having sex outside of marriage.) Rodgers admits he could have been more outspoken about vaccinations, but he still doubts their (proven) effectiveness. Oddly, his response to the little-studied South American hallucinogen ayahuasca, almost in the same breath, is essentially, “Bring it on.”
In “Darkness,” Rodgers’ intelligence is emphasized, but he also absorbs one stupid plot after another and resents the cold shoulder he received from quarterback Brett Favre when he arrived in Green Bay and the same treatment he subsequently gave his successor, Jordan Love.
