Sport is a strangely transformative human event. They change people – the people who play them, the people who watch them. The pandemic has changed the sport and maybe the athletes, maybe Aaron Rodgers. Seeking unorthodoxy, he discovered rogueness and embraced it, perhaps in a plan to be traded, be damn worshiped in the pursuit of a self that seemed true. People were amazed about that too. In professional wrestling, they call this kind of fabricated misconduct a U-turn. Done wrong, it’s mind boggling.
For now, the heel in him seems to have softened. So what classification makes sense for Rodgers’ time here as a person of interest? A second chance, a repeat, a doubling, a clean slate? Revenge? Rodgers has yet to throw a single touchdown pass for City. The season can be glorious — or the kind of debacle that turns a simple jaunt like the one he recently “took with me” into an ordeal. Perhaps the professional relationship will not last more than a year. But maybe the residential lasts thrives. Rodgers will turn 40 at the end of the regular season. I am not an athlete, let alone an elite one. However, I’m a New Yorker, who turned 40 here, and I know what it feels like to let go of a part of the past, to finally have a home here — here in New York’s Freakin’ City. Whether you’re broke or blushing, it’s a relief, a great fortune, possibly the seed of some social and emotional gluttony. “If this town is just an apple,” Michael Jackson once sang, “Let me take a bite.”
Maybe he’ll come to love this place as many of us do, that New York, despite its obvious suffering, inequality, and mismanagement, remains a city where you can experience a tearing, weird farce about black existentialism like “Ain’t No Mo” and an artist as self-consciously and paradigmatically white as Taylor Swift. And teams with destinies and fanbases as confused as the Rangers and Knicks (and the Jets and the Mets), where people on the street give you your space until, of course, they don’t.
I caught Rodgers at the Tonys and swore I recognized a man discovering what it’s like to be himself but somewhere else, to experience what he’s seen on TV and in movies, what he’s read in books. It has been a dream for some of us to live here, in “the greatest city in the world,” to quote the musical about the history that underpins such dreams. I’m sure I’m naive. But that’s sport, which isn’t really that different from art. It works best if you suspend disbelief.