Karma? Schadenfreude? Quel dommage?

by David Benjamin 

“Rodgers’ career probably is over. Few athletes come back stronger than ever from an Achilles’ rupture and, given Rodgers’ flirtations with retirement this past offseason, it’s hard to imagine him putting in 11 months of rigorous rehab just to play one more season.”

―Tom Silverstein, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

MADISON, Wis.—For the last few months, there was an odd sense of serenity and a funny little spring in my step because the vicissitudes of Aaron Rodgers had finally ceased to strain my psyche. I was liberated from paying heed to his primadonna foibles and sophomore philosophizing—as I had dutifully done through fourteen National Football League seasons. 

And then, from the airport in Chicago, Hotlips sent me a text that Rodgers had been injured on Monday Night Football. So, at the next commercial break, I tore myself away from Rachel Maddow and switched over to babbling Buck and insufferable Troy on ESPN. It was true. The latest Packer retread acquired by the New York Jets to save the franchise (see Favre, Brett, 2008) had twisted his ankle—no, wait. He was getting x-rays. Uh oh! He was wearing a “boot.” Ooh, a ruptured Achilles tendon? Really? At age thirty-nine and three-quarters?

Talk about your mixed emotions! Was this karma, or was I feeling a pang of schadenfreude? Or was I thinking, “Oh, what a pity!”? Or all of the above?

Last spring, by the time Green Bay Packers general manager Brian Gutekunst had punched Rodgers’ ticket to New York—after a Hall of Fame career in Green Bay—I had reconciled myself to the suspense of replacing Rodgers with his three-year understudy, Jordan Love. Like many devout Packer backers, I had begun to weary of Rodger’s myriad idiosyncrasies. I struggled to shrug off the annual trips to Castaneda-land to float toward the cosmos in a cloud of ayahuasca, his hajj to Sky Cave Retreats for “darkness therapy” in a watery coffin, his insistence that he was immune to Covid-19 thanks to the ministrations of Dr. Joe Rogan and the healing power of horse-worm pills. I had begun to heed the tacit warnings provided by a parade of celebrity girlfriends who, bless their hearts, tired of Aaron’s act before most blinkered football fans caught on. 

My sympathy with Aaron’s early-career tribulations had waned. I knew that he had been undersized in high school and unappreciated by bigtime college coaches, that he was forced to spend a year at Butte Community College before being discovered by quarterback guru Jeff Tedford at Cal-Berkeley. Every Packer fan felt Rodgers’ pain at dropping from the very first choice in the 2005 NFL Draft—forcing him to spend hours, wreathed in rejection, his humiliation watched by millions on ESPN—to finally being chosen 24th by the Packers. We fans knew, and understood, that his year of backwater apprenticeship at Butte and his Draft Day ordeal were “motivators.” Rodgers used that pain and anger to fuel his eventual greatness and stick a thumb in the eye of the 21 teams that had passed on him. 

However, after Rodgers had signed a series of contracts worth $306 million dollars (8,500 times the average annual income of a resident of Green Bay), my empathy waned. Rodgers persisted in claiming victimhood, but not for the sort of  hardships suffered, say, by his up-from-poverty teammate, Donald Driver. I mean, Aaron Rodgers grew up in the suburbs and went to Pleasant Valley High. His is a species of petit bourgeois victimhood with which Donald Trump has made all of us excruciatingly familiar, a tantrum over privileges to which he deemed himself entitled but somehow didn’t get enough of.

I spent years ignoring all his off-putting quirks. I staunchly defended Rodgers to Packer fans who were either less patient or who found him wanting in comparison to Brett Favre, his redneck predecessor (who also went to the Jets and got hurt). Charitably, I cited what I call the “Dostoyevsky principle,” the essence of which is that one must judge great virtuosos—in art, literature, music or football—by their work rather than by their unsavory lifestyle. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Russia’s greatest novelist, was a sickly drunk who took drugs. gambled compulsively, treated women shamefully and drove his publishers crazy. But, in prose and in his understanding of human behavior, he was peerless. 

Rodgers, I reminded his every critic (and they were everywhere!), is the most accurate passer in the history of the NFL. He was an elegant, unflappable quarterback with, arguably, the quickest mind of anyone who ever played the position. He finished his career (I’m assuming here) with a higher QB rating, and a lower percentage of interceptions, than any previous player. 

On the other hand, in the postseason, he was mediocre. He won but one Super Bowl. He grew more difficult to coach as he got older and richer. He thought he was anointed to approve or veto the personnel decisions of the Packers front office. 

Last year, playing courageously with a damaged thumb, Rodgers lost nine games and the Packers were eliminated from postseason play. There was handwriting on the wall but, still,  many—if not most—fans called general manager Gutekunst impetuous and coldblooded for jettisoning Rodgers and turning the NFL’s most historic franchise over to the untested Jordan Love. 

But I remembered Rodgers’ busted thumb, his twice-broken collarbone, his sore calf and fragile ankles. Shortly after the trade to the Jets, I went into sportswriter mode and, to everyone within earshot, commended Gutekunst for pulling the trigger none too soon. Rodgers, I said, is well beyond the expiration date for quarterbacks in the bone-crushing, brain-scrambling NFL. He’s old, I said, he’s brittle and he won’t last the season in New York. He will, I assured my skeptical friends, get hurt, and he probably won’t play again. 

When Hotlips informed me of Rodgers’ injury, I admit to feeling a little smug. I’d been right but never expected to be so prescient so fast. I wished I’d found a sports book where I could have laid down a bet on how soon, exactly, Rodgers would leave the field, the Jets and the NFL, on a motorized cart with his ass—or some other essential body part—in a sling. I coulda made money!

When Brett Favre was sloppily dispatched to the Jets, his departure triggered waves of outrage and vituperation, aimed at then-general manager Ted Thompson, at the Packers and even at Favre. In his first games, Rodgers was booed. The anger faded, partly because Rodgers proved himself a gridiron genius, and—more important—because Packer fans’ loyalty attaches more to the team than to any individual star. 

But the Packer faithful are also attentive and intuitive. As long as Rodgers played for Green Bay, as often as he expressed affection for his fans and fealty to the Packers, we always sensed that he was less attached emotionally to us than we were to him. We never trusted him the way we had trusted heroes like Bart Starr, LeRoy Butler and even Favre. We wondered—secretly, anxiously— if he could ever be attached to anything, or anyone, beyond himself. 

So, as I watched A-Rod go down in New York (okay, New Jersey!), I was once again able to feel actual sympathy. That moment, if his career really ended with that stumbling, broken play 75 seconds into his first series as a Jet, was unquestionably crueler than his Draft Day snub and all his playoff defeats. Perhaps more significantly, this heartbreak has restored Rodgers to the bosom of his congregation—the Packer faithful, to us—who loved him the best, in his best of times. 

He fell onto the unforgiving turf of MetLife Stadium as a momentary Jet. But he limped to the sidelines and hung up his cleats as a Packer for life. When he returns, we’ll welcome him home riotously—with a PBR, a butter burger and a pipeful of primo ayahuasca.