New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers leaves the field after an NFL football game against the Arizona Cardinals, in Glendale, Ariz., on Nov. 10.Brynn Anderson/The Associated Press
Three years ago, quarterback Tom Brady was a young 44 coming off his seventh Super Bowl. He could see no end in sight.
“I could literally play until I’m 50 or 55 if I wanted to,” Brady said. “I don’t think I will obviously … my physical body won’t be the problem. I think it’ll just be, I’m just missing too much of life with my family.”
Brady’s body turned out to be a problem. While he was coming to terms with that, the family become one, too. Now 47, he lives and works alone.
Everybody can now agree on two things – Brady had a magnificent NFL career, and that it lasted too long.
This was always going to be the issue with sports’ eternity movement, led by the likes of tennis stars Roger Federer and Serena Williams. It’s going great until it is going terribly, and you move from one state to the other in bang-bang fashion.
Instead of seeing someone strut away at the peak, you get to watch them stagger out of the arena being chased by a pack of children. Federer and Williams were both barely able to cope by the end. Rafael Nadal – who has been standing in the hallway holding his coat for a year and a half – looks even worse than that.
The famous fortysomething athlete, so thick on the ground just a few years ago, is a perishing commodity. The ones who remain aren’t stars. They’re role players with alimony payments.
The last outlier is Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James. He turns 40 in six weeks. He had three triple doubles last week.
It’s also November. James plays for a flawed team. The most famous thing he’s done recently is fix it so that his kid, who can’t sing or dance, is starring on Broadway. The end is closer than he or anyone else wants to believe.
It would not be right to include quarterback Aaron Rodgers in the James category. He’s got a similar pedigree and the same sort of hold on public imagination, but Rodgers can’t fake his mojo any more.
Rodgers is the end point of sports’ extreme longevity movement. He’s what happens when everyone buys into Brady’s fiction – that mind can defeat body.
Rodgers turns 41 in a couple of weeks. He’s had a shocking NFL season, statistically and otherwise. The New York Jets were built to his specifications. It turns out that architecture is not his forte.
It’s not that Rodgers is bad. It’s that he’s become average, but he’s still leading a team designed to be piloted by a game-altering superstar. It’s like dropping you or me into a Formula 1 car and wishing us the best of luck at Monaco. It’s going to end in flames.
Rodgers may still appear young, but he can’t help but sound old. The worse it gets, the grumpier Rodgers becomes. It’s never his fault. It’s his idiot teammates or the idiot coach. When the Jets go out and get him new teammates and a new coach, they’re just as bad.
Rodgers continues to fascinate because he is the avatar of a specific type of online discussion. It’s one led by fitness influencers, tech true-believers and unqualified doctors. Their goal is to extend human endurance and life. To feel like you’re 20 when you’re 40 and 40 when you’re 80.
Are they enjoying things now? Absolutely not. That’s the point. They’re in the gym twice a day, guzzling CoQ10, trying to figure out what Mark Zuckerberg is doing right so that they can do the same thing. Once that’s done, they’ll enjoy things later.
Rodgers is their most successful adherent. He’s the kind of guy who goes on darkness retreats and has words of affirmation to hand out for every situation. He’s had just about every material success you can have, and he isn’t anywhere close to satisfied.
He is the spirit animal of the 35-year-old who’s feeling their knees for the first time, and has become concerned they may not live to 150.
At its core, this movement is a rejection of presentism. These are people who eschew the past (when all the bad people were alive) and the right now (which is a hellscape, according to four out of five self-taught historians on the internet).
The future is where it’s at. You’ll finally be happy there.
These Jets (3-7) are the worst team Rodgers has ever led, but according to him things are going great. Not right now maybe. But next year.
This week, Rodgers was asked if he would return for 2025.
“I think so, yeah,” he said.
If he sounds unsure, that’s because he can’t be certain any team wants him. This way, if he doesn’t get what he wants, he can pretend it was his idea all along.
If the aged athlete is going out of fashion, Rodgers is its apple-bottom jeans and the boots with the fur. He’s the look that will soon make stylish people cringe.
Everyone already looks silly here. Rodgers looks silly for deluding himself. The Jets look silly for turning their organization into his footstool. All the other guys on the Jets look silly for bowing and scraping around him. There’s only one way for this is end – one more season, even worse than this one.
In good time, people will remember Rodgers for the player he was in Green Bay. But that’s only when they remember him at all, which will be rarely. It’s not as though people sit around gushing about Steve Young and he won three times as many championships as Rodgers.
If anyone’s getting memorialized from this generation of quarterbacks, it’s Brady – the guy who was first out the door. That must be part of Rodgers’s insistence on remaining.
In the end, Rodgers’s most enduring legacy will be as a great cautionary tale of the age. Someone who could not live in the only time we have – the right now – but chose instead to fixate on what might still be.