You can see the Achilles tear. Live, it was already clear, in a much-replayed clip that has since become canon for anyone paying attention to the National Football League. Leonard Floyd, a rangy defensive edge rusher who played for the Buffalo Bills for just that one year, the 2023-24 season, came off a failed block by Duane Brown at left tackle for the New York Jets, a team that moments later would enter a whole new phase of its cursed existence. Some, including Aaron Rodgers himself, have acknowledged that wide receiver Garrett Wilson was open in the flat just beyond the first down marker. For whatever reason, Aaron didn’t throw it, and so on his fourth play with his new team, he was sacked for a loss. For a moment, that seemed like all it was.

The play brought up second down, and the camera—which hangs from giant steel wires that extend to the four top corners of MetLife Stadium in the Meadowlands—zoomed down to capture the quarterback with his hands on his hips, looking at the sideline. Joe Buck, the veteran announcer, interrupted his commentary to say, “And now, Rodgers sits down.” Aaron laid down, actually, pulling both knees up over his head and rolling back. If you look close at this point in the clip, you can see that his left ankle isn’t right.

Trainers gathered around, medical staff. In football, staying down, or getting down, is a signal to the sideline that you’re hurt. “A loss of ten on the play, and hopefully, the Jets are thinking, that’s the only loss on that play,” Buck improvised. The replay was guttingly clear. Brown fell, Floyd came through from the blind side, Wilson really was open, and Aaron’s Achilles visibly snaps. It’s said that when this happens, you can feel the tendon jump and coil up through the bottom of your leg. Aaron knew. But for about ten seconds, maybe less, no one else knew anything was wrong. He tried to hop on it to test it, wanting to be wrong. Then he paused, hand on hip, head cocked to one side, before going to the turf. This moment, where he’s the only one who really understands, is frozen in time.

On December 2, 2024—about fifteen months later—Aaron turned 41. He had come back from the injury promising to heave the Jets back toward a championship they hadn’t won since Super Bowl III, with Joe Namath at quarterback, in January of 1969. Sports media lined up behind this effort, casting the Jets as “legitimate Super Bowl contenders,” many predicting that they would win the AFC East, beating out the New England Patriots, the Miami Dolphins and the same Buffalo Bills that shredded Aaron’s ankle in 2023.

Just minutes before the injury in 2023, Aaron had come charging out of the tunnel in MetLife carrying a giant American flag. It was the 22nd anniversary of 9/11, so the NFL was playing up the symbolism, making the allegory of Football As American Life into a melodrama. The moment where Aaron knows but the rest of us don’t—that his Achilles has snapped, that his career, maybe, is over—is suspended there like a temporal gap, a moment where reality has not yet sunk in even though the event has occurred, like the short period after the first plane hit the tower and it wasn’t yet clear what was going on. The second plane is what made it clear, of course, what broke the spell of the 1990s. First a thing happens, and then, when it happens again, you know what it meant.

The story that follows is about knowing, really knowing, that what you’ve done is not a fluke. It’s about the second act of life, and the struggle to accept the beginning of the end, the permanent decline that affects us all, but that men grieve in a peculiar way. It’s about knowing too much, and walling yourself off from the world with that knowledge. It’s about trying desperately not to know too much, and failing.

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You could be forgiven for not knowing that Aaron Rodgers was a quarterback. You might know him as the winner of Celebrity Jeopardy!, or as one of its guest hosts, briefly, after Alex Trebek’s death. You could remember him as the face of a State Farm ad campaign. Or you might know him primarily as a talking head in sports, on the popular Pat McAfee Show, where he accused Jimmy Kimmel of being on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane, and more recently mentioned his intent to perform a meditation ritual to summon the aliens piloting the drones recently seen in the New Jersey sky. Or you might know him as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s onetime potential running mate, a conspiracy theorist making the podcast rounds from Joe Rogan to Tucker Carlson. You might know him as a guy who does ayahuasca and “darkness retreats.”

But probably, if you’ve heard his name outside of a football context, it’s because of the infamous words he uttered in August of 2021: “Yeah, I’ve been immunized.” Aaron had not been immunized, unless you believe in the holistic protocol that he went through instead of getting a vaccine shot. He would later claim that his phrasing was not intentional deception, but instead part of a strategy for convincing the NFL to treat him as a vaccinated player, a goal in service of which he also submitted what he said was a five-hundred-page report to the league. Aaron was raised in a conservative evangelical community in Chico, California, and his slow conversion to skepticism, heterodoxy and conspiracy thinking went public in that single phrase. When he later tested positive for COVID-19, he was held out for ten days, in keeping with the league’s rules for the unvaccinated. And it was from that point that Aaron began to unravel.

Sort of. In the 2020 and 2021 seasons, he won the award for Most Valuable Player in the league back to back, his third and fourth time winning the award (he trails only Peyton Manning, who has five). By that point, it had been a decade since he led the Green Bay Packers to a Lombardi Trophy, and his time with the franchise, whom Vince Lombardi himself had coached in the first years of the Super Bowl, was winding to an ugly end.

The Packers drafted Aaron in 2005 with the 24th pick overall. The league chooses a certain number of surefire early picks to attend the draft in person each year, and Aaron was invited as a possible first-overall guy. This meant that everyone could watch his humiliation on national television, as he slid down the rankings toward the end of the first round. When he was finally picked, the biggest shock turned out to be for then-aging all-time great Brett Favre, a Green Bay icon who would toy with retirement for three years while Aaron sat behind him. Favre opened up the tense relationship by proclaiming it wasn’t his job to coach up the rookie, so Aaron’s success was both hard-won and a pleasant surprise to Green Bay, where one future hall-of-famer replaced another.

Favre typified the classic quarterback: he was the “gunslinger,” as his biographer called him, someone who took risks and laid it all out there. This meant interceptions, but also trophies. And it applied to his life, too: he lived hard, drinking and hunting and projecting a disregard of his own body that felt like a throwback even then, and would be unthinkable among the generation of quarterbacks that would succeed him. Aaron, by contrast, is the quarterback for an anxious, self-optimizing age when bodies, rather than being used and abused, must be tweaked and tended to.

When he finally got on the field in 2008, he went on a run for the ages. As he broke records and wowed fans, he showed grit, vision and above all elegance. The beauty of his spiral and the precision of his throws—dots, missiles, dimes—were the talk of the league for more than a decade. As it had throughout his life, the aesthetics and the genius of his game drove the narrative about Aaron. He was a cerebral guy who had the executive function to match a truly singular vision of the game, and the mechanics to make every play a work of art. A decisive 2011 Super Bowl victory over Ben Roethlisberger’s Steelers seemed like just the first stop on the way to further glory, and the Hall of Fame.

Most Talented Guy, however, is not the prize. Aaron’s career had the misfortune of overlapping with the Tom Brady Supremacy, that long, somewhat boring period in the history of the NFL when Brady’s Patriots went to nine Super Bowls, winning six of them. For Brady’s final trick, he went to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2020 and proved he could win without his coach, Bill Belichick, widely regarded as the greatest ever in that role himself. That year, although Aaron won the MVP, he also lost the NFC Championship game badly to Brady’s Bucs.

From then on it would be a slow decline. After 2011, the question became whether he could repeat his Super Bowl win. Having dreamed only of that one thing for his entire life, Aaron needed to know that it was real, and to make something real, you have to do it a second time.

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First as tragedy, then as farce. I don’t think it’s too much to say that something like this is the abiding mood of the nation since the election. Or maybe it’s farce first, then tragedy, a pall that has set in as we realize that 2016-2020 was an overture, not a sideshow. But when Marx wrote that Hegel, commenting on the repetition of historical events, had “forgotten to add, the first time as tragedy, the other time as farce,” the point about the genres was secondary. The more fundamental point, which Marx felt he was observing in the return to power of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon’s nephew—who had swept aside the legislature established in the 1848 revolution and claimed one of the first secular authoritarian mandates in European history—was that we only realize the concrete nature of the history we are living through when it happens again. What is historically real for us is what repeats itself. Empires—Hegel had Rome in mind, but also France—gain hegemony not when they conquer but when they legislate. Cultures rely on spread and amplification, not just expression. Life itself, at a certain point, must stop being “full of potential,” must make the endless promise of youth into something real.

When you turn forty, as a man, things change. Our culture celebrates male athletes when they are young, but most other manly successes—in business, in politics—come later in life. There’s a persistent rumor that you’re not really a man that sort of goes away when you’re forty, even if you never really feel like a man. Probably the age of cultural majority has shifted upward as the need to lay your body on the line in a mill, a war, or just in the day-to-day business of survival, has waned. The athlete at forty can be, for this reason, both ultra-successful and in midlife crisis at the same time. He stands at the intersection between the breakdown of the body accelerated by heavy use and the fear of what comes next—which is often relative obscurity. The two curves meet in that moment before Aaron sits down, admitting that his Achilles is fucked. With a hundred million eyes on him, this man is more alone than it is easy to express.

At forty, even if you’re not a famous athlete, doctors treat you differently. If you injure your ankle—whether that’s because a six-foot-three dude drags you down with all 240 pounds of his body, or because, say, you’re taking the trash down the driveway and your foot just goes under you to the point where they tell you the ankle might be broken—you might not come all the way back. You might really never return to running form, never be able to do another weekend half-marathon. You might lose badly all year and get eliminated from the playoffs in week fourteen. You might end up the subject of endless media speculation and scorn as you apparently get your coach fired, your general manager fired, and also ask the Jets to take on the contract of a still-great but aging star you clicked with earlier in your career, Davante Adams—only for the connection to be gone. You might start to think about how the aches and pains of everyday life (especially when everyday life means getting crushed into the ground weekly by living giants half your age) will probably only get worse.

But still: what happens once becomes real only when it happens again. You need a second point to make a line, to understand the direction things are going and, above all, to believe in it. The second time confers meaning on the first, and without that, everything threatens to spiral. The search for meaning will be a violent search, because this is America, and it will involve infinite litigiousness—from the Constitution to Replay Assist (™)—for the same reason. The sociologist Erving Goffman once quipped in his study Stigma that there is “only one complete unblushing male in America, a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports.” He forgot to add that the record needed to involve two trophies.

If the mind is drawn taut over its world like the muscles and tendons of these players (which is the reason these muscles and tendons snap so frequently) then maybe it makes sense that the mind can’t quite accept reality as the second act begins. To watch Aaron now is to see what might be an All-Time Great midlife crisis playing out. The theme here is control, which will appear first as the lack of ability to let go of control—over the body, the game and the media. Then it will appear as the insidious control that they, the conspirators, have over us. In other words, the quarterback naturally slides into the paranoid style that Richard Hofstadter once detected in American politics. But Aaron’s path to politics is through the body. And the body, as it ages, becomes the preserve of belief.

This question of how to secure the bag of belief, to really be sure that you’re who you are—the Best QB of all time or otherwise—translates, in the context of the modern NFL, to a kind of fast-twitch synaptic activity that never shuts off. Any given play in football involves 22 assignments, one for each guy on the field. There’s a twitch to each of their movements, every guy is reading his opposing player, for coverage, blocks and scheme. But the QB has to read all those guys, to see the whole thing, as Xs and Os in real time, and then adjust, calling audibles, changing plays and then making decisions—to hand off, to throw, like in that fateful decision not to get it out to Wilson—in fractions of a second. A good time-to-throw average is about 2.5 seconds, not more. That’s the difference between glory and a season ended by an Achilles rupture. The QB’s job is to eliminate the difference between slow and fast neural processing, to force instinct and abstraction into a synthesis that responds the right way, always. A good QB is tapping some portion of the brain that goes unused by the rest of us.

Aaron plays head first. His high school football coach tells the camera in Enigma, Netflix’s docuseries on the quarterback, that this is “what separates him from so many others. It’s how he processes information.” His biographer, the sportswriter Ian O’Connor, hammers this point on virtually every page of Out of the Darkness: The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers. From the first sign of frustration in Green Bay, he has never been able to stop himself from saying how he sees the game. And that has meant that he’s placed a lot of blame on his supporting cast. There are endless clips of him yelling at receivers, teammates and coaches. A well-placed comment was rumored to have cost Packers head coach Mike McCarthy his job. Shortly before Jets head coach Robert Saleh was fired this season, a shot of him congratulating Aaron on a touchdown as he came off the field—only to have Aaron shove him in anger—went viral. As early as 2016, major sports outlets were running pieces questioning if he really could be a “leader.”

Yet the idea, as late as last August, was still that the 2024 Jets would be serious contenders. ESPN writer Mike Clay wrote an article titled “Why the Jets, Aaron Rodgers will win the Super Bowl,” proclaiming, “it’s different this time.” Chatter was high, and it all made sense, on paper. Aaron is decorated, a true veteran who could lead. Saleh’s defense was best in the league over several years, and they seemed to lack only a real offensive leader. Talent was up and down the roster; they should have been a juggernaut. Hindsight is 20/20.

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I have been to four NFL games in my life, and all of them featured the New York Jets. This is weird, because I am not a fan of the New York Jets. In fact, I loathe the New York Jets and wish them ill. This has been true since I was five years old.

The fourth time was September 19, 2024. I’ve been sent to MetLife on assignment to make sense of the Aaron Rodgers phenomenon, to see the beauty, the brain and the downfall. So I’m in a pretty good seat off the visitors’ end zone but on the Jets’ side, second tier, and the Jets are playing the Patriots. The guy next to us is in his sixties, he’s pretty drunk, and he’s got season tickets, one for himself and two for his sons, who are also there. He’s a lifer, a diehard Jets fan who spends, he says, three hours in traffic just on the way to every home game. He tells me his name is Henry. He hates the team he loves.

It’s week three, and the Jets are 1-1, which is concerning, but no one knows what’s coming yet. The Jets are going to utterly steamroll the Pats, and it’s Thursday Night Football, so they’re going to do it in style on national television, and MetLife is going to put on a show. Actual jets, the military kind, do a flyover. They stretch an American flag out over the entire field, something that never fails to amaze me. When you drive around suburban America, you often see grocery stores, auto dealers and strip malls with flags up that are just way too big. Unless the wind is like 25-plus miles per hour consistently, those flags are flaccid, spiraling whirls of drooping stripes and obscured stars, an unintentional commentary on the empire. The flag that covers the whole damn football field is another matter, and the famous Fireman Ed, who wears a Jets helmet-themed fire hardhat and stands one leg up on the balustrade on the second tier (but not where we are sitting), leading chants of “and that’s a Jets… FIRST DOWN” and more, is, well, fired up. When we enter the stadium, we’re given wristbands, green and white, with a little electronic box on them with the Jets logo. As the teams come out—it’s dark as the game starts at 8:15 p.m.—they shut the lights off in the stadium and the wristbands turn out to be little flashing lights that they make do algorithmic color displays, flashing purple, white and, of course, green. Everything in the Jets stadium is green—in a slip that Freud would have rejected as too on the nose, the team is nicknamed “Gang Green”—and the dry-ice smoke is being deployed liberally. This is my first night game, and I turn to my friend Danny and I’m like, bro, this fucking rocks. The game isn’t that important, but the atmosphere is crackling. Even Henry can’t quite deny it. Decades of bitterness seem to soften with hope.

Like I said, I fucking hate the Jets. I grew up upstate, in New York, not New Jersey, in the 1990s, when the Buffalo Bills lost four Super Bowls in a row. The Jets are in the Bills’ division, the AFC East, and there’s no love lost between division rivals. I celebrated when they traded for Aaron, because I knew this depressing chapter in his life had already started, even though I had no way of predicting just how awful it was going to be for everyone involved.

MetLife is a graveyard for great QBs. Favre came here after Aaron took over in Green Bay, only to get injured and leave after one season. Even as the Jets pick up a lead they won’t relinquish, eventually holding the Pats to just three points on the night, it takes a lot of alcohol for these fans to break through the pessimism.

You have to pay a retainer to have season tickets, I learn from Henry. It’s ten thousand dollars, I guess held in an escrow, and when you sell the seats, the next holder has to buy you out. The kind of market capture needed to be able to demand something like this is wild to me. The Jets have sucked, for decades—as Henry keeps repeating. He estimates—and he estimates loudly, and probably five or seven times total over the course of the night—that he’s spent two hundred thousand dollars on these seats over the decades. He could have bought a house, he says. And each time he repeats this information—with Aaron throwing a quite nice game down on the field, with things, to my mind at this point, genuinely looking up for the Jets—he prophetically bellows “for FUCKING NOTHING!”

Prophetic, because the Jets are about to do the most Jets thing ever, and just flop the season in the most spectacular fashion. Early on, in September, when there’s hope, you can already see that Aaron isn’t that mobile, and the thought is that maybe he isn’t fully back from the tendon tear, which is normal, and he’ll get more mobile, make more plays, as the season progresses. And he does: he starts, in the last few weeks, to put more points on the board, even if the wins don’t really reflect it. You can see the thrust in his legs, his ability, even at 41 now, to scramble, back to at least a fair level. But October—and November—were bad. From September 29th, they lose eight of nine games, so when Aaron gets his legs back there’s no chance anyway. And during that time, he seemed to be tampering with the entire organization, spinning out and dragging the whole multibillion-dollar enterprise with him. This is where the bold talker started to waver, to make excuses and—on the talk shows—to lash out, to shift the spectacle from the abysmal on-field show to a weird, defensive, conspiratorial televisual game. Henry doesn’t know any of this, but he’s right not to celebrate in week three.

It sucks to be a sports fan. There’s something involuntary about it—like a minor, private mental illness that you both share with some vast supermajority of the country and which is stingingly painful and isolating nevertheless. My cousin, a Steelers fan, tells me he used to have to sit alone at the bar even when he was with friends who also liked the Steelers, because the emotions ran so high even if they were winning (the Steelers have six rings, the most recent well within his adult life in 2009, so I tell him to shut the fuck up). I don’t have to be alone, personally, although when the Bills flubbed the end of the divisional-round 2022 matchup to the Kansas City Chiefs, in the infamous “thirteen seconds,” I did leave my wife and mother-in-law in the room—they thought, from my previous reaction, that the Bills had won, not paying attention—and laid for the better part of an hour in the dark. My heart is beating a little faster, there’s a noticeable spike in adrenaline, even as I just type out an account of those moments.

That all traces back to the four consecutive Super Bowls that the Bills lost—we used to say, on the playground, that “BILLS” stood for Boy I Love Losing Superbowls, which sometimes caused fistfights—from the 1990 to 1993 seasons, when I was ages seven to ten. My love of football was forged in the petty fires of boyhood cruelty, and I suppressed it for decades. But around 2015, it came back, much to the chagrin of my wife, who to be fair really did not sign up for this shit. For almost a decade, as I approached forty—in lockstep with Aaron, who is just a month older than me—I descended back into the maelstrom of an involuntary fandom that shreds me apart—or makes me high—weekly.

Maybe the quarterback is the ultimate symbol of the American male in control, ascending, transcending the confines of our domestic worlds. If so, the fan is the opposite, the American man as patient, acted upon. Aaron is in the transition from actor to patient, having never blended them well. The pathology of football is the synthesis, the thing where, as a man, you want to be strong, active, adventurous and protective—a leader of men—and the thing where, as a man, you’re looking into a void, an abyss of meaning with no guidance and nothing but utter contingency staring you down as you confront the middle age of the United States of America. From Plymouth Rock to 9/11 to now, we’ve poured blood, our own and that of others, into this nation. For fucking nothing.

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In 2024, Aaron brought out a bloodlust among fans that I’ve never seen so close to the surface before. It’s anecdotal, of course, but some version of “I hope he blows his leg out again” was awfully easy to come by in talking to friends this season. Aaron has had to work hard for the kind of hate that brings the clear subtext of the NFL (joy in violence) across the membrane from id to ego.

Mike Florio describes the base-level violence of the game like this. Imagine standing seven feet from your garage door and running headlong into it at top speed. Now do it fifty times. Now do it every Sunday for eighteen weeks. Playing is not just glamor and riches, he says: “It’s pain and it’s agony and it’s surgeries and it’s pressure and it’s stress and it’s everyone you know wanting some of what you have.” In between the beatings, you also have to use an iPad to try to make sense of a bunch of data about what just happened, so you can try to hit the door at the optimal angle when you go back in. Meanwhile sixty thousand to ninety thousand fans are screaming and millions more (in nationally televised regular-season games, it’s often twenty million or more) are invested in your body. Some of them, a lot of them, have money on your movement, your health, your decision-making at speed, in the form of parlay bets, or just fantasy leagues.

Leonard Floyd, the Bills defensive end, came off the right side of the formation, beating the left tackle, on that play in the 2023 opener where Aaron tore his Achilles. That side of the line is called the “blind side” because a right-handed quarterback has his back to it. In a 2006 book, Michael Lewis documented the rise to superstar prominence of the offensive tackle on the left, whose job it is to protect the blind side. He recounts one of the most famous injuries in the history of the NFL, Lawrence Taylor’s career-ending sack on the Redskins’ Joe Theismann, a play in which the telecast clearly shows the quarterback’s lower leg shatter. I recommend not googling this.

Taylor had come off the right side, beating the offensive tackle easily—as Floyd did in 2023—so the game reacted, with general managers and coaches investing in the left tackle position as a way of protecting their most crucial players. The NFL also pours time and money into making the sport safe, as the conversation about chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) over the last two decades shows. But it’s not safe, and it can’t be. You have to keep running at the garage door. The cycle of panic about a particularly gruesome injury, the corporate reaction, the intense fan conversations, the liberal self-fanning and all the rest of it—none of this is new. An early instance of this type of controversy cycle occurred in 1955, when Life magazine published a photographically illustrated piece called “Savagery on Sunday.” The most recent one was probably in January 2023, when Damar Hamlin’s heart stopped on the field after a routine hit, and the NFL took the extraordinary measure of allowing the players and coaches to walk off, canceling the game.

All of this is part of football. There’s no clean line separating America’s culture from the NFL. Too much talk about football seems to assume that the people who play it, organize it and profit from it are somehow somewhere else, not part of the more general ethos of the nation. But football is now a foundational part of American culture—the collegiate game has its origins in the Reconstruction era—and that’s because it’s a cocktail of violence and litigiousness. The American epic is total war combined with endless sentimental debate about the rules. This is why Florio is such a great commentator (he runs the most important NFL news and commentary blog for NBC, Pro Football Talk): before he did this, he was a lawyer. It was Florio the lawyer who said that what Aaron had done with the phrase “I’m immunized” was a lie. This is a very low bar for serious journalism, but then, NFL news just repeating what players and coaches say.

You still have to be tough as nails to be the epic hero of this entertainment cocktail. Aaron proved he was suited for this role too, when he was carted off in the 2018 season opener with what appeared to be a broken leg. McCarthy, still head coach, got the news that Aaron was done for the year over his headset from the locker room. But Aaron talked his way back onto the field, throwing for 273 yards in the second half in a 24-23 win against the Chicago Bears, all hopping on one leg. Stories like this are common coin in the NFL now. A QB who plays head first has a shot to play with one leg. It’s a game of vision, where you embody the strategy and toughness that threads the needle of all the ambient violence, while avoiding entering the judicial fray. It’s this last part that Aaron hasn’t been able to avoid, and that seems to be his main limiting factor, especially as he has gained power over the organizations he plays for. (2018 was the year he allegedly got McCarthy fired, and things have only gotten muddier in the intervening years.)

As the 2024 season dragged on, I watched every post-game press conference Aaron held. Because of his preternatural capacity for processing information, he can walk any reporter through any play from the game with an almost arbitrary level of detail. He knows exactly what he saw, and he can’t stop himself from saying it. Garrett missed that route. The play-call was BS. Blocks were thrown in the wrong order.

By November, he started saying that it was a game of inches, and ultimately contingencies: “sometimes the ball rolls your way” is standard coach-speak, but when the Most Talented QB of All Time is saying “you have to make a decision and pick a side [to throw to], and sometimes you pick the right side and sometimes you pick the wrong side,” there is simply a lack of belief in skills as the governing factor in the game. “It’s just one of those weird things, sometimes you pick the right side and get lucky … that’s the beauty and the frustration of this game.” It’s a game of inches, of microseconds, but above all of belief in success. Aaron’s belief has started to fade as reality sets in, the week before Thanksgiving in the Year of Our Lord, 2024.

When belief fades, chatter begins. Aaron is on TV all the time now, most often on former Colts kicker Pat McAfee’s popular show, where he launches near-weekly controversy. This fall, the scandals became boring, but informative. Pat: Tom Brady has been saying the game has gone soft for years, that you can barely hit a guy anymore, and what does Aaron think of that. Aaron: “I think it depends on what society does, you know, we’re mirroring society a little bit, the softer we get the softer our game gets and vice versa.”

The game’s violence and its relationship to America itself has been the topic of football from the beginning. To win a Super Bowl, as Aaron did, is to become a hero in the American epic, to found—or refound—a city, like Gilgamesh, or Aeneas. Big Ben, Joe Namath, Joe Montana—all loom over their team’s respective hometowns. Hell, Josh Allen, on just the strength of great hopes in Buffalo (and now an MVP award, after the fact), appeared on a truly monumental billboard (for Gatorade) downtown this fall. To found a city, let alone a country, you usually have to commit some violence, often a great deal of violence that can’t be redeemed except in the light of the founding. But then, somewhere along the way, you have to enter civil life, a less violent social thing—you have to find your way to a legacy in which the epic is only the beginning.

America can’t throw off that founding violence, and neither can Aaron. “Going soft” is part of the story of being unable to secure legitimacy after you win, after there’s a state, a government, a grown-ass man, in place. The question stops being about the violence itself, and starts being about knowledge of violence. It stops being action too fast for reflection, and starts being narrative. It is at this moment that the quarterback becomes a talking head.

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Richard Slotkin, the historian and professor of American literature, wrote a vast trilogy about violence and fiction in the United States. Regeneration Through Violence (1973), about early colonial fiction and bloodshed, was followed by The Fatal Environment (1985), on the literature of the frontier, and the cycle was closed by Gunfighter Nation (1992), on the Western as genre. Slotkin’s theory of the American myth gets more mature over the course of two decades, until he is able to articulate how self-accounting and the ability to both withstand and inflict physical cruelty are braided together in the nation’s DNA. Although nostalgia plays a great role in many violence-centered genres, Slotkin shows us how myth, literature and actual bloodshed combine to make up the American ethos.

He writes in the final installment that “In America, all the political, social, and economic transformations attendant on modernization began with outward movement, physical separation from the originating ‘metropolis.’” The epic hero of the American myth must separate from all that is familiar (usually on the East Coast); regress by shedding civilization, becoming a self-sustaining woodman, and often a Native in spirit and ability; and then enter conflict in the form of war. That hero must also suffer, or at least negotiate, the bureaucracy that seeks to overcome the Nature into which he has regressed. The myth is ambivalent about the bureaucratic violence, the institutional stuff, that has been the other main feature of American history. The hero does not usually have anything to say (except by his freer deeds) about things like the Trail of Tears or the plantations (even if sometimes he is the guy executing the murderous plan). The hero is not a politician, not a theorist. He makes his mark by acting, by embodying the Promise of the Nation.

The West was won in the nineteenth century, in a story that Slotkin didn’t have to tell for us to know. But the genre of the Western, which looked back to that century—with its Gold Rush, its ranchers, the truly genocidal campaigns against various western tribes and its settlement, above all, of California—came into its golden era just as the West was being secured. California and Nevada went from outposts to economic powerhouses, well-populated states with west-facing metropolises, only in the twentieth century, and only truly after the Second World War. Hollywood rose earlier, of course, on the heels of San Francisco’s rise. As Malcolm Harris lays out in his sprawling history Palo Alto, the Bank of America, the breeding of thoroughbreds, the railroad and the American sport, football, all found a strange entwined origin just around 1900. The West, at this point, had been won. But from that point to about the 1970s, we had to find a way to believe it.

This transformation has been depicted repeatedly, doggedly, in film and television, although not in a single genre. Chinatown, Casino and Mad Men all tell stories of the rise of the Industrial West. Every one of them is still, even now, trying to convince the viewer that California and the West are real. The story of Las Vegas and the Western outpost the Corleone family takes up in The Godfather Part II, as much as Don Draper’s escape to LA and his eventual epiphany at Esalen, are all attempts to depict the west becoming part of the nation at scale, the very fact of there being a nation from sea to shining sea. Most of these stories are about the violence that attends the glamor of the West in the ascendant—think L.A. Confidential—and so they remix the national myth, bringing the entertainment to the fore even more than the fiction that Slotkin emphasized.

It was in this part of the story that the NFL rose as a national force. As Michael MacCambridge has argued in his magisterial history of football, America’s Game, the NFL’s success depended on its expansion to the West Coast. It went west when baseball resisted, in spite of the various teams that eventually grew up from Anaheim to Denver. Football’s origins are in the steel belt—its marquee franchises are Green Bay, Pittsburgh, Baltimore—but it was quick to find Los Angeles for its Rams, and quicker to realize that television would make the pastoral day at the ballpark (which could even be a doubleheader, lasting the entire day and with the only alternative being the vivid radio play-calling) a thing of the past. Football required not free time and childish wonder, but participation in a raging spectacle—a deliberate confusion of the line between fun and bloodlust. It had to spread west, to blanket the entire territory, before it could wash back over us all, reuniting the nation in a Californian cultural creed that shored up what we had won but left gaping the question of what it all meant, of who we were. Football played a crucial role in the second act of Manifest Destiny.

Aaron was born after this story had played out, into a mixture of austere evangelicalism and high-tech, New Age hippiedom that we call Northern California. The hero must go back, bearing the regression and conflict born of his having gone out. Aaron’s story fictionally but also really coincides with the end of the myth. And the later it gets in the empire’s day the more it all starts to slip between your fingers, even if you’re the guy. Because at the end of the day, you can have all the stuff the earlier guys had—“grace under pressure,” “the right stuff,” in MacCambridge’s selected phrases—and you can even play right through a broken leg, as Aaron did in that 2018 season. But you’re not Johnny Unitas going back in with a broken nose. Suddenly you’re possessed of a grit no one really needs. And the more we don’t need it, the more desperate we are to secure it. The spiking neurons no longer have their object.

California has washed back over us, the televisual spectacle has superseded the real one, and in our need for meaning, in our need for knowledge of ourselves and our nation and our manhood, we enter the realm of conspiracy, that mythic twin of myth itself. Lots of guys tear their Achilles, but it feels fitting that Aaron would tear the most symbolic tendon as the territory of his career was filled out, and as the knowledge question finally asserted itself so completely. When no youth, no land and no trophies are left to be had, there is only the question of history that remains, the problem of life, legacy and meaning, of how you fit in to the bigger scheme of things, and whether you can be sure you do at all.

●

In March of 2024, it was reported that Aaron was on the shortlist for RFK Jr.’s running mate for president. The New York Times reported that the two men had been in “pretty continuous” conversation for the previous month. In Enigma, we get to see footage of them hiking together, discussing the extent of the exclusion of reasonable views from the public sphere and the worries they have about our nation’s health. Later in the series, Aaron says that his dad didn’t have them get flu shots as a kid, worrying about what was in the shot. Maybe if he’d mentioned it on the hike, RFK could have given him a lecture on thimerosal, the mercury preservative in flu shots that he believes is responsible for a sharp rise in autism over the last decades.

NFL players, weirdly, rarely go on to national office, unlike their metaphorical counterparts in the military. The House has a smattering of former football players, but this doesn’t feel very significant, as the House has a smattering of virtually every breed of weirdo that the U.S. regularly produces, as the framers intended. Even a marginal presidential candidacy felt surprising, but narratively right, for Aaron.

RFK went a different direction, of course, and Aaron claimed that he had chosen football when he realized he couldn’t do both. (You have to admit, doing both would have been fucking awesome.) That other direction has led RFK to a nomination for Secretary of Health and Human Services, which has brought the Make America Healthy Again movement to the White House. The two men share a concern about what goes in people’s bodies, and who decides that.

On McAfee, Aaron went to war shortly after the Jets had been eliminated from playoff contention. Pat asked him what he thought was different since he had entered the league twenty years ago, and as his answer found its legs on a long, winding path, he eventually said that it was the commentators themselves that were new. You used to be able to just watch highlights on ESPN, but now it’s all these guys who never played, or weren’t good when they did, and they’re out there with their takes. Lombardi Trophy winner and current analyst Ryan Clark went after Aaron for this comment, and a host of fans came out to defend the best current NFL commentator, Mina Kimes, who has obviously never played professional football. Most painful about this episode was that the very comment seemed to bounce off its rubber targets and stick to Aaron’s gluey reality today: he has played football—very well—but now he’s a takes guy.

Responding to Clark, Aaron said, in the ensuing days (on McAfee again) that he didn’t mind so much if you talk shit about him, but if you do, you should state your vaccination status first. “Then when you say things about me, people can at least be like, “Oh, you are captured by the multibillion-dollar propaganda psy-op and you’re still upset about it … just like it’s in the bottom for me that I’m the champ, you know, MVP, and I’m enthusiastic about ayahuasca.” McAfee’s chyron dutifully displayed those bullet points, including “ayahuasca enthusiast.”

This attitude, and the isolation it suggested, didn’t start this year, or even in 2020. In the decade between the Super Bowl win and the “yeah, I’ve been immunized” comment, Aaron peeled himself away from his own world. While dating the actress Olivia Munn, he sided with her in a series of disputes that contributed to a long-term estrangement from his parents and brothers. As he drifted from his upbringing and toward MAHA, he lost family and friends along the way. Some he got back, but the combative guy on McAfee doesn’t seem like he’s surrounded by a supportive cast. The mansion in Malibu lacks the feel a real entourage provides.

I don’t really know if RFK is going to de-fluoridize our water or ban the polio vaccine. But the world Aaron is now in—call it the Roganverse—is equal parts intense anxiety about what goes in your body and unlimited resources to affect the same. The NFL, no less than growing up in Camelot, assures a level of physical care and medical treatment that is unprecedented in  history. This painful soul-searching universe of YouTube videos and podcasts and message boards and protein powder and hormone-replacement therapy and macros and mixed martial arts fandom and fear of seed oils and furious debate about weed and masturbation and meditation and ayahuasca and shrooms and darkness—I dive into it, for weeks. Barely a moment passes where I’m not listening to, watching or reading about how my body should work, how a cold plunge—or anything that’s hard to do, really, anything I don’t want to do—can save me from depression.

Early in 2024 Aaron spends two and a half hours on Rogan, playing the hits. At one point, they discuss how those who took the vaccine, up to the point of being the hated Mind Virus Fauci Soldiers, are pitiable, lovable, deserving of mercy. Rogan quotes the Bible, and Aaron kind of balks visibly on camera, responding: “I don’t know about the ‘meek inheriting the earth,’ I think that might be taken slightly out of context.”

Aaron starts talking about the “Tartarian Empire,” which is the subject of a conspiracy theory that apparently says that many of the buildings built in the World’s Fairs were extracting “free energy” with the help of “copper balls”—the reason that many of these buildings were subsequently demolished. (Last summer, Aaron missed part of the Jets’ training camp—unexcused, as Saleh emphasized to the media—for a trip to the Giza pyramids, presumably to take in some of the traces of the free energy in person.) I’ve heard of this conspiracy but never spent time looking into it, so I google it as the interview plays on YouTube. I bookmark a Bloomberg article which calls it “the QAnon of architecture” as Rogan asks Aaron where he’s read about the theory, to which Aaron responds, “Just online.” Even Rogan laughs at this admission, and his assistant duly googles it, pulling up the same article I just bookmarked, which Rogan then reads long parts of out loud, but mostly the part that describes the theory—not the debunking that comes after the description—and says, “I’d love to believe that that was the case.”

Did oil companies squash ancient technologies that were somehow floating around in the last nineteenth century? Was there once some kind of water technology that could run engines, possibly? Aaron responds that the guy killed in the Buffalo shooting—unclear to me at the time which one he means (it later transpires that it’s the retired cop who tried to stop the supermarket shooter in 2022)—was working on a “filtration system” for “clean drinking water.” There are “too many” of these cases, he says, to believe there’s nothing there. Free energy from suppressed technology is a major theme of these historical conspiracies. The way things work now is dirty, messy, unhealthy, and they have probably been hiding a better way for decades, if not millennia.

I’ve got the same webpage open as Rogan and Rodgers. I got there the same way. We’re in the same epistemological space, the same plane of mental existence. Am I going to do the work to find out that the Tartarian Empire never really existed? Of course not. I guess I believe Bloomberg.

As I typed the last paragraph out, I lost track of the conversation for like, less than a minute, and now Aaron is saying that “we’re so in our bubble of identity politics,” and they agree that this is ruining comedy. I can’t keep up. Now it’s the vaccine again. The putative topic of this last hour, as labeled by YouTube, is “cults,” which I want to hear more about. But they don’t really talk about cults very much, it’s a diffuse group of topics that includes the idea—this one was new to me—that Stanley Kubrick filmed the faked moon landing, and that there are Easter eggs throughout his films that confirm this fact. Rogan and Aaron agree that Eyes Wide Shut is a killer movie, and I do too. I’m realizing, clicking around and opening endless tabs, that every Rogan interview is at least this long, that RFK has explained his worldview on there, that the Stanford professor and self-optimization guru Andrew Huberman is on Rogan regularly, in addition to his own podcast, where every episode is also hours long. I’m entertained, but I’m never going to meet my deadline if my job is to critique this wonderful flood of content aimed squarely at me.

Aaron Salter, the assistant now says, was in fact working on a water-powered car when he was killed in the shooting in Buffalo. The fact-checking site they’ve called up rates the claim that those things are connected “false,” and the assistant says, “Well, so, it says that.” I vaguely remember that this was a hate crime. Rogan mentions the racial element, but quickly pivots to talking about mind-control experiments, MKUltra. If you sprinkled in a little COINTELPRO, maybe the Iran-Contra scandal, this would have been my reading when I was a teenager. And that’s what I’m realizing as this goes on. I like this.

I also agree. A lot. Like 60 percent I agree. Tartarian Empire aside, Rogan, across a lot of his work, is just saying totally unobjectionable stuff. He says dudes shouldn’t try to win every argument, shouldn’t think they’re good at everything. They should be vulnerable with one another. When Huberman comes on, he walks Rogan through Cole Hocker’s shocking 1500-meter gold-medal race in Paris, narrating with the same childish wonder I’ve done, literally with the same video, to any friend or relative who could bear to listen to me. Rogan responds with a very long explanation of fighting techniques, calling up videos and explaining left kicks and, um, “power bars.” I don’t care about martial arts, so I kind of tune out at this point, but it’s like tuning out when my buddies are talking. I tune back in as Huberman says, “I’m willing to wage my entire career on this” and explains that the guy with the preternatural left kick has a “brain circuit” that is a “left-kick circuit.” That’s not really how the brain works, I know, but the point is basically a good one, I think. You can’t just will yourself, train yourself, into something that requires genetic talent. Hocker can run with a group for which training is only necessary, not sufficient.

Huberman makes this exact point now, as if he’s repeating what’s in my head. He and Rogan talk about recognizing your limits, knowing that you’re never gonna be Hocker or whatever the MMA guy is called just because you’re tough, just because you’re a man, just because you have that ego, that you’re never gonna be as good at some highly specialized skill—skateboarding, tae kwon do, Muay Thai fighting. Someone who either has some sort of genetic predisposition to it or else has been working on it since they were a kid—nature and nurture, a brilliant analysis—is just gonna be better than you. Might as well admit this, and work your own seam. This is middle-age man shit, reflection on a life that has become concrete, rather than wide open with potential. It’s all about accepting your body, your self, about using what you know to make sense of what has happened and making peace with that, flourishing in that.

Years ago, I went to Hawaii with some of my cousins, after one went through a bad breakup and had the chance to live cheaply with his friend on the north shore of Oahu to recover. I recall vaguely that this cousin was then into the Roganverse, or some part of it, and that there was fighting about the politics of it, but what strikes me listening to this stuff is that it’s pretty similar to what we were doing then. Every day was surfing, or snorkeling, or hiking, followed by drinking and ping-pong and intense, soul-searching discussion. The one cousin made a fire down below the cave we slept in at the end of the Kalalau trail on Kauai’s Napali coast, where we went without permits and almost got helicoptered back to jail in Lihue by rangers who looked like linebackers, standing each 6’4” and with biceps the size of my thigh. Around the fire, coming down from a long day of hallucinogen-fueled spelunking, we talk about whether all pain is ultimately good, whether you heal and get stronger from anything that doesn’t kill you. Opinions differ, as my cousin’s friend, who suffers from early-onset arthritis, lives a lifestyle that causes him constant, unrelenting pain, refusing to stop surfing and all other manner of adventure in the face of this condition. My cousins want there to be some redemption at the end of the arc, as we all process our lives taking turns we don’t really approve of, that we didn’t imagine, all approaching our forties. But there isn’t one, in this case: it would be just be better if that pain didn’t exist, if the friend’s joints were not degenerating. This conversation could have been, if not on the Joe Rogan Experience itself, in some other corner of the Roganverse. It’s just how men talk.

Maybe the biggest thing I’ve learned about Aaron in all this is that he’s kind of prissy about his body. When you read about his ill-fated tutelage under Favre, you get a clear sense of the contrast. Favre, whose own biography is called Gunslinger, lived hard. You could see it in his body, even back then. Aaron is tough too, that’s part of playing the game, but he also doesn’t drink, almost at all. Never has. He’s California sober. Favre was all-American in a different way: drinking, rasslin’, hunting, seeking out adrenaline highs. It makes sense that his second act included committing millions of dollars of welfare fraud. Other than being The Quarterback, Aaron is most famous for being publicly picky about what does and doesn’t go in his body. He’s the American Man not as adventurer but as worrier.

Anxiety is the national mood, and the inverse of body control is the fantasy that “they” control—or are trying to control—your body. In the middle of the Achilles year 2023, Aaron bizarrely accused late-night talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel of being on the Jeffrey Epstein flight logs. Kimmel responded with an angry monologue accusing Aaron of having gone off the deep end, and Aaron had to apologize. All this was, once again, on the Pat McAfee Show. But even as the Jets managed the scandal, Aaron said this: “They’re terrified. They’re terrified of people that think for themselves that aren’t controlled. I’m not beholden to anybody. … I have very few sponsors now … Nobody controls my messaging. Nobody controls my social media. Nobody can control me.” My body, my message, my culture.

My reality. Rogan says to Aaron at one point in the interview, “It’s an ideologically based mentality that’s gonna change the world at large unless we stop it in its tracks. They’re not looking at reality.” I can’t even remember at this point which mentality they’re talking about, and it hardly matters. The conversation, at this hinge point, turns to detransitioners, those who regret having made concrete steps to alter their bodies to match their trans identities, and change their minds. People go to college, Rogan says, and get trans-pilled. Aaron agrees.

All the talk of energy brings them around to Callie and Casey Means, MAHA movement leaders who have RFK’s ear and wrote a book called Good Energy. The problem with American health, they tell Rogan on their own episode, is that medicine isn’t approaching things “metabolically,” so we have bad energy. The problem is inflammation, and the problem is spiritual. Casey: “All of us are a little bit dead while we’re alive.” We’re surrounded and invaded by microplastics, she continues (this is true), and they cause the overproduction of the wrong hormones, so that we are “living in this estrogen stew” that is “depleting American vigor.”

Rogan makes no secret that he does TRT, testosterone-replacement therapy. He’s done whole episodes about it. If you’re on the Means train, this is resistance to feminization caused by a conspiracy to make us all trans. Rogan defends this Good Testosterone like this: “There’s a stigma attached to that in a lot of people, like, you know, ‘where do you get your testosterone from? I get it from my balls.’ All that matters is that you have it in your system. If you don’t have it in your system, you’re not going to feel as good. It’s real simple … this is 2018, hormone-replacement therapy exists for a reason.” But if all that matters is that you have it in your system, then surely what we are saying is that everyone is trans. That’s a big horizon here, global control of the earth by big pharma, generalized inflammation of the body caused by the toxins leaching into water, food and soil, and global control of messaging to force you to be a woman. For this reason, you have to inject testosterone to be a real man.

●

On December 29th Aaron goes to Buffalo with his eliminated Jets to play the Bills. A friend who grew up near the stadium is sending me video from the fifty-yard line as Buffalo wideout Amari Cooper catches a spectacular touchdown from Josh Allen. Vibes are high. The Bills’ unofficial anthem this year, the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside,” breaks out during a commercial break. Aaron goes twelve for eighteen for 112 yards and two interceptions. He has played through an MCL strain in his knee in the hopes of throwing his five-hundredth career touchdown to Davante Adams, who caught his two-hundredth and four-hundredth touchdowns. But the sentimental journey doesn’t end in week seventeen this year, and Aaron breaks another record instead: he becomes the most-sacked quarterback of all time. For the nth time this season, we get sideline pictures of his distress. This might be the worst season of his career, including the Achilles spectacle of 2023.

At MetLife Stadium on January 5th, the last game of the season, with eight minutes left in the second quarter, trailing 0-6, inside the Miami Dolphins’ ten-yard line, Aaron takes a snap from the shotgun. The pocket collapses fast, but he steps up into it, and with a little hop before crossing the line of scrimmage he light-touch overhands the ball for his five-hundredth touchdown pass. The receiver is tight end Tyler Conklin, not Davante. Narratives just aren’t working at this point, and even though the Jets go on that day to eliminate the Fins from the playoffs, 32-20, they improve to just 5-12 to finish the year. Five and twelve is not just bad, it’s sort of unthinkable from a Rodgers perspective.

Just before this essay goes to press, we learn that the Jets’ management has finally told Aaron that they’re not bringing him back for another season. This costs the Jets 49 million dollars in dead cap—already-promised salary, which restricts their ability to pay other players, and about a fifth of the team’s overall salary cap. As it turns out, Aaron, like Brett Favre, only gets one full season in New Jersey, and the phoenix doesn’t rise from the ashes.

Tragedy/farce. No one can say, not even Aaron, if he’s going to play for a third team. It’s hard to know if he’ll be willing to cede the control he’s had, or if there is a team so desperate at this point that they’ll cede as much control as the Jets did to him. He admits he’s thinking more seriously about retirement this year. I don’t know if he wants to try again, if his return to athletic form down the stretch bodes well for another season of this narrative. But I know this: Aaron has finally completed the real goal of American manhood, which is to transcend accountability.

Aaron has speculated publicly about having a child, part of his reasoning for not taking the vaccine. That would be a version of the second act. But vague talk of children is just another way of expressing how hard it is to imagine that we are passing on something of value to the future, the risk that comes with that. Real ego death is parenthood, I suppose. But the fantasy of a child, not the reality, fits with everything we’ve seen here: it’s a way of saying that you are alone. Family, friends and soon teammates and coaches—all pass through a sieve of alienation until you’re talking into a void on the Pat McAfee Show. It echoes with anger, but no one is really there. This is the middle of life.

When you leave the realm where someone can object to you, when you get to the point where not even a billionaire owner can tell you to shut up and sit down, everything becomes relative, relative to you. And this isn’t optional, it’s not one of those things you can manifest away by meditating. When Aaron speaks of the ego death, whenever the Roganverse starts to sound like Carl Jung, you know they’re casting about for a way to touch grass in a world that they correctly see is all artificial turf. Money, fame, manhood: all of it moves around the intellect in question, which plays headlong and head-first. People move around it too, become relative to it—even a family that comes and goes depending on your mood.

In that moment after four whole plays in one game in 2023, that moment where he knew, but maybe didn’t quite believe, that his Achilles had popped, you can see the epic ambivalence of the American male. Ralph Waldo Emerson, attempting to grapple with the death of his beloved son, wrote, “up again, old heart.” Grief begins with suspension, which becomes the struggle with denial. How to accept the rupture of the tendon, the death of the child. Not all grief is nationally televised.

At some point, though, acceptance comes. There will be no second ring, no absolute proof that you were not a fluke. If Aaron returns to the field in 2025, even having flashed a bit more athleticism down the stretch of 2024, recovering slowly, as anyone would, from the tear, it’s hard to imagine how he’d get back to the Big Game.

The grief setting in in that frozen moment, the pain in his eyes, the hand on his hip, before he voluntarily goes down, is the realization that there is no second act of the same kind. The man and the empire he represented as he flew that flag on 9/11 22 years later have entered decline; now they have to decide how to be in the middle third of life. First as quarterback, then as man, and nothing more.

On November 6, 2024, Bookies.com reported that “Aaron Rodgers has +3000 odds to win the 2028 US Presidential Election as an Independent.” That’s a bit over 2 percent, or one time in just under fifty times. That is just about the same as the odds the Huffington Post infamously assigned to Donald Trump on the eve of the 2016 election. Maybe, after the darkness, there is another act after all.

Photo credit: UPI/Alamy Live News, photo by John Angelillo/UPI. Aaron Rodgers walks back on the field after a stop in play in the first half against the Denver Broncos in week 4 of the NFL season at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey on September 29, 2024. The Broncos defeated the Jets 10-9.