Tommy Martin: Aaron Rodgers still turning up in the search for meaning
STILL GOING: Aaron Rodgers of the Pittsburgh Steelers during Minicamp at UPMC Rooney Sports Complex on June 11, 2025 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Joe Sargent/Getty Images) NFL
For the latest in this column’s occasional series of Oul Lads Still Doing It, we welcome 41-year-old Aaron Rodgers to Croke Park this weekend.
Of course, the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback is in the ha’penny place when compared to Kildare football legend Johnny Doyle, who, at the age of 47, came off the bench to score a goal and a two-pointer to help save his club, Allenwood, from relegation out of the county senior championship.
The fascination with these guys is two-fold. There’s the bit that wonders why they’re still doing it and then the bit that wonders how they are still doing it. The latter comes from the knowledge that your body is less of a weapon at this stage of life than a bag of old tools that you drag around the place, full of rusty old spanners that might break at any moment.
Even for guys who have presumably looked after themselves with a bit more care and science than the rest of us, you do wonder whether, when about to collide with a hulking 25-year-old adonis (yes, they have them in Kildare too), it occurs to them that a nice sit down with a cup of tea would have been a better idea for a Sunday afternoon.
The ‘why’ is, of course, the more interesting bit, with its connotations of the aging boxer taking one punch too many or the fading superstar putting off retirement’s long silence.
For Doyle, there is the plain fact of the GAA life cycle, which means dragging yourself onto the field to give the club a dig out until the very moment your hips need replacing. “Look, you don’t ever really retire. You just move on and you move into a different role,” he told the , as if deciding that sharing a dressing room with a bunch of TikTokking twentysomethings would at least mean he wouldn’t be cajoled into being club secretary.
Rodgers is a different kettle of fish, having just pitched up at the Steelers after his long and glorious spell at the Green Bay Packers and his short and inglorious spell with the New York Jets. Last Sunday he passed Brett Favre, master to his apprentice in Rodgers’ early days in Green Bay, to move to fourth in the all-time touchdown passing list.
Ahead of him are only the godly figures of Tom Brady, Drew Brees and Peyton Manning, so those who’ve gotten tickets to Croke Park are getting to see a proper big name in the history of the NFL.
People who know about these things reckon his inability to add to his tally of one Super Bowl by producing the goods in playoff matches is all that’s keeping him out of real GOAT conversations and maybe explains why he’s rattling himself up Jones’ Road on Sunday just months away from his 42nd birthday.
It’s also saying something that all of this is probably the less interesting part about the life of Aaron Rodgers. If you want to bone up on the guy, you can watch the three-part Netflix special, Aaron Rodgers: Enigma. (Spoiler alert, he’s only an enigma in the way that sport treats anyone who’s a bit different, like in the GAA when Paul Galvin declared he was into fashion or in soccer when it emerged that Graeme Le Saux read the Guardian).
Rodgers is, depending on your perspective, either an independent thinker or a complete wingnut, having embarked on what he calls a ‘spiritual adventure’ after winning the Super Bowl in 2011, when he asked himself the question common to many of those who have achieved sporting immortality: Is that it?
Thereafter, his search for meaning took him through offbeat strands of Christianity, via the customary run-in with the Dalai Lama, to an all-out California hippy-dippy enthusiasm for mind-expanding spiritual awakening. Easily the funniest thing currently on Netflix are the scenes showing Rodgers blissfully banging away on a bongo while off his tree at a three-day ayahuasca ceremony in Costa Rica. Maybe Johnny Doyle prepares for matches the same way.
Parallel to the woo-woo stuff was a fondness for appearing on podcasts which allowed his “questioning mind” to venture toward the more wackjob end of the US cultural and political spectrum. In fact, we are fortunate to be graced by his presence in Dublin this weekend at all, given that, had Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s short-lived presidential campaign proved successful, Rodgers apparently would have been his vice-presidential running mate.
We learn this in the documentary after seeing Rodgers and RFK Jr go for a hike together, whereupon Rodgers tell us reckons RFK Jr is the man to sort out the injustices and inequities of American society. This is same RFK Jr who has long spouted all manner of conspiracy nonsense, propagated Covid-19 anti-vaccination misinformation and is currently, in his role as Donald Trump’s health secretary, behind the egregious stuff about Tylenol causing autism in children.
It was the anti-vaxx business that turned Rodgers from a man regarded as being on the kookier side of the sporting spectrum into a national hate figure. During the pandemic, Rodgers declared in a press conference that he was “immunised”, when he had in fact not taken the Covid-19 vaccine, allowing him to break protocols designed to keep colleagues safe from the virus.
The documentary paints Rodgers in a more sympathetic light. He seems like a decent bloke with a restless mind whose sporting exploits hid a vulnerability born of a difficult family relationship. His is the great American story of a search for internal peace not found in the unimaginable rewards afforded by success.
Not only is he not an enigma, but these days he seems pretty normal: a three-way cross between a sporting superstar, that friend who went a bit nutty during Covid, and your crazy aunt who believes that crystals can cure her bunions.
“The ability to walk between both worlds,” Rodgers explains having just bunked off New York Jets training to go see the pyramids of Egypt, “the world of the introvert who enjoys meditation and medicine retreats and spiritual adventures, and then the extrovert who loves and thrives as an alpha leader of men as quarter-back.”
Twenty years ago he would have been locked up. These days that’s the kind of stuff people are putting on their LinkedIn profiles. He’s a man of his time. Thank God for Johnny Doyle.
