Sports are a surprisingly transformative human occasion. They change individuals — the individuals who play them, the individuals who watch them. The pandemic modified sports activities and possibly the athletes, possibly Aaron Rodgers. Looking for unorthodoxy, he found villainy and embraced it, maybe in a scheme to get traded, damning being adored in pursuit of a self that appeared true. People had been baffled by that, too. In skilled wrestling, they name this kind of manufactured misbehavior a heel flip. Done unsuitable, it’s baffling.
For now, the heel in him seems to have mellowed. So what classification will make sense for Rodgers’ time right here as a Person of Interest? A second likelihood, a redo, a doubling down, a clear slate? Revenge? Rodgers has but to throw a single landing go for the town. The season may very well be superb — or the kind of debacle that turns a easy jaunt just like the one he took “with” me the opposite day into a trial. Maybe the skilled relationship doesn’t final greater than a 12 months. But possibly the residential one lasts, thrives. Rodgers turns 40 on the finish of the common season. I’m not an athlete, not to mention an elite one. I’m, nevertheless, a New Yorker, who turned 40 right here, and I understand how it feels to let among the previous go, to truly, lastly have a residence right here — right here in New York Freakin’ City. Whether you’re broke or flush, it’s a reduction, a nice fortune, probably the seed of some social and emotional gluttony. “If this town is just an apple,” Michael Jackson as soon as sang, “Then let me take a bite.”
Maybe he’ll come to like about this place what numerous us do, that regardless of the evident struggling, inequality and mismanagement, New York stays a city the place you possibly can expertise a lacerating, queer farce about Black existentialism like “Ain’t No Mo’” and an artist as self-astute and paradigmatically white as Taylor Swift and groups with fates as addled and fanbases as infected because the Rangers and Knicks (and the Jets and the Mets), the place individuals on the road provides you with your house till, after all, they gained’t.
I caught Rodgers on the Tonys and swore I acknowledged a man discovering what it’s prefer to be himself however some place else, to expertise what he’s seen on TV and within the films, what he’s learn in books. It’s been a dream for a few of us to reside right here, in “the greatest city in the world,” to cite the musical concerning the historical past undergirding such goals. I’m certain I’m being naïve. But that’s sports activities, which actually isn’t so totally different from artwork. It works greatest once you droop disbelief.
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