In late July, as NFL players across the country were dragging their battered bodies back to pre-season camp, the Green Bay Packers posted a slow-motion video of Aaron Rodgers on social media. “Let’s do this,” the caption read, while the quarterback, dressed in a vest tucked into a pair of relaxed fit denim jeans, hair swept back, facial scruff untamed, strode purposefully across a parking lot. The clip was, of course, a tribute to Nicolas Cage’s performance in 1997 action classic Con Air. A few weeks later, Rodgers revealed that he had been sent a bust of Cage’s head. The bust now sits in Rodgers’s locker, next to his shoulder pads, calmly looking on as the NFL’s reigning MVP goes about the torrid business of trying to turn himself into a figure of cross-cultural significance.
Is Rodgers America’s most interesting athlete, or its most annoying? For much of the 38-year-old’s career in the NFL – now entering its 18th season – the question did not even present itself. Quarterbacks are the focal point of every football team, usually the only players with the star power to transcend the sport. But even as he rose to prominence around a decade ago, leading the Packers to the Super Bowl in 2011 and nabbing two league MVP awards in 2011 and 2014, Rodgers remained an extremely talented but mostly unremarkable fixture of the American sporting scene. If he was seen as anything away from the field, it was as something of a social activist. He went on the record with his support for The Enough Project, a nonprofit raising awareness about the use of conflict minerals in cellphone batteries. He traveled to India with the Starkey Hearing Foundation to fit hearing aids on deaf children, taking a detour to see the Dalai Lama. And in 2015, after a fan broke a minute’s silence at a Packers game held out of respect for victims of the Paris terrorist attacks with the cry “Muslims suck!”, Rodgers used his post-game press conference to eloquently admonish the fan: “It’s that kind of prejudicial ideology that I think puts us in the position that we’re in today, as a world,” he said.
