They are saying it takes 10 years to turn into an actual New Yorker, however Aaron Rodgers appeared to earn his bona fides in only one summer time. In March, after solemn contemplation at what he referred to as a “darkness retreat” in Oregon, the 39-year-old introduced, with pomp befitting his superlative N.F.L. résumé, his intentions to proceed his profession with the New York Jets, a younger and hungry crew whose in any other case first-rate roster occurred to be lacking a serviceable quarterback. The transfer took Rodgers from the league’s smallest market, in Inexperienced Bay, to its largest, and he leveled up accordingly, refashioning himself as a metropolis boy. He bought a $9.5 million house within the New Jersey suburbs, naturally, however handled a younger teammate to dinner at Carbone in Greenwich Village. He sat courtside at Knicks video games, subsequent to Jessica Alba, and shopped downtown at Rag & Bone. He went to MetLife Stadium for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and later visited the Gershwin Theater to see “Depraved.” And the Jets, newly hyped as Tremendous Bowl contenders, had been chosen to be featured on the 18th season of the all-access collection “Exhausting Knocks,” guaranteeing that HBO cameras can be on website to doc the early days of his tenure within the Meadowlands.
Certainly, to have watched Rodgers storm out of the tunnel on Sept. 11 on the crew’s season opener, brandishing an American flag just like the Marines at Iwo Jima, was to grasp one thing of what was anticipated of him. However as is usually the case within the N.F.L., fortunes modified abruptly: On simply his fourth snap as a Jet, as Rodgers scrambled to keep away from being sacked by the 240-pound Leonard Floyd, he ruptured his Achilles’ tendon. “I’m fully heartbroken and transferring by means of all the feelings,” he wrote on Instagram, the day he underwent what was most certainly a season-ending surgical procedure.
I’m not a Jets fan myself, however I occurred to be watching with a number of of them — buddies for whom Rodgers’s arrival in New York promised nothing wanting deliverance from the hapless quarterbacking of Zach Wilson and a lifetime’s price of common disillusionment. (It has been 54 years for the reason that crew final received, and even appeared in, the Tremendous Bowl.) This, after all, is among the principal joys of fandom: to play common supervisor, to mythologize the one human, to think about your crew is only a single participant away from glory, even when that participant is pushing 40 in a bodily debilitating sport, treats a Covid an infection with ivermectin and generally alludes to the doubtless healing advantages of ayahuasca and the sounds of dolphins making love.
This isn’t to counsel that Rodgers’s embrace of unconventional science and even his age rendered him significantly liable to harm. Solely that fandom, like hallucinogens, impels a kind of magical pondering, one wherein the merciless and random nature of sport is bypassed in favor of extra engaging notions of future and redemption. That the protagonist of Frederick Exley’s 1968 e book “A Fan’s Notes” — a hard-drinking New York Giants die-hard — spends his time out and in of psychological hospitals is an amusing, if darkish, metaphor for the expertise of loving a crew unconditionally. If I admitted how a lot time I spend trying on the Baltimore Ravens harm report, attempting to find out the distinction between a high- and low-ankle sprain, you may counsel I be institutionalized, too. However for the fan, powerless to have an effect on the result of the sport itself, the distinction is endowed with explicit narrative urgency. And it’s in narrative, as a lot as anyplace else, that the fan stakes his declare.
