John Riordan: NFL star Aaron Rodgers finds new ways to undermine pandemic battle

In a sport where bodies are put on the line every week, the Green Bay Packers quarterback decided he knew his own body best

Green Bay Packers’ Aaron Rodgers celebrates after beating the Washington Football Team 24-10 in the game at Lambeau Field. The quarter-back tested positive for Covid after he previously stated he was ‘immunised’ though it was discovered that he had not been vaccinated against the virus. Picture: Stacy Revere/Getty Images

Last weekend, not far west of Washington DC, a local icon and a larger-than-life NFL Hall of Famer passed away at the age of 87.

Sam Huff, who lined out during the 1950s and 60s for the New York Giants and Washington, had been diagnosed with dementia almost a decade ago. His slow demise from that cruel disease was and will be similar to that of many footballers who spent their careers delivering and receiving too many high velocity tackles.

Huff is an especially interesting one, though, because it was his calling as a tough tackling middle linebacker which had a significant hand in popularising the position in the eyes of a growing fanbase. Defence was starting to evolve as an art form and television technology was getting better at discerning it.

His death led to many tributes and it led me to learn about a 25-minute TV news magazine piece called “The Violent World of Sam Huff” which was narrated stoically by CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, presenter of a series called The Twentieth Century which took a deeper dive into current events at the time.

Easy to find on YouTube, this longform feature flows more like a short documentary which is ostensibly about young men trying to gain access to and then attempting to survive in a brutal sport. There are great shots of the training camp hustle as well as serious tactics sessions for players who can also be found nervously smoking in the dressing rooms before a pre-season game.

There are the socioeconomic backdrops too; the coal mining scourge back home in West Virginia which Huff desperately sought to escape from, his high school sweetheart taking care of their new found domestic life, the relative diversity of his teammates and the military service so central to their obligations as young adults.

The peak of Huff’s powers lined up perfectly with the zenith of the nation’s post–World War II economic expansion and his career more or less straddled the merger of the professional football leagues which paved the way for the Super Bowl era. So he was perfectly placed to occupy a starring role in a fresh look at the sport. Beamed right into every living room that contained a television in 1960 when CBS was the primary network, “The Violent World of Sam Huff” also had a not insignificant role in the push of the professional version of the sport towards that large and coveted mainstream of consumers at the dawn of a new decade.

The most innovative achievement on display here was not only its pioneering decision to highlight the unglamourous life of a pro footballer, but that it was done so by miking up Huff for sound in an attempt to bring the viewer closer to the chaos of the melee after the ball is snapped. Huff, wearing 70, is filmed having a transmitter embedded into his kit and the viewer is now a passenger astride the large defender’s “broad back”, as Cronkite describes it during a nicely measured narration.

“There’s no place for nice guys,” Huff tells us, looking directly into the camera using another technique prevalent in sports docs to this day.

“You have to be tough, you have to go all out ... I always feel real good whenever I hit someone. You feel like you’ve accomplished something [when] you’ve made a beautiful tackle … I usually feel good after a football game for two or three hours and then your blood starts to circulate and it’s not a good feeling.”

Donning a classic crew cut hairstyle and smiling through a square jaw sat atop a neck almost as wide as his shoulders, he is now “Sunday’s idol”, opines Cronkite. He is 26, 6’1, 230 pounds and relieved to have escaped his home town of Edna.

“I’d rather take my chances on the football field,” he says, but you don’t exactly get the sense that it’s all that much of an upgrade. The technology of a 1960 newsroom is strong enough to pick up on the intensity of those hits — not just in the games but in their internal sessions too. Huff is a central player for the Giants and yet he’s struggling to breathe as he emerges from every clash, plotting the next blitz whether or not he has actually managed to reach the ball carrying target.

“You have to shake ‘em up. It’s either kill or be killed,” he smiles.

After Huff, the stature of the linebacker grew and grew. There is a special place in the NFL fans’ hearts for the fearsome intelligence of the huge predator whose ultimate goal is to dispossess and hopefully destroy the quarter-back or the running back.

Kill or be killed.

A few weeks back, I couldn’t help but zero in on and decry the ignorance of NBA player Kyrie Irving whose anti-vaccination stance flew in the face of how a citizen should operate when they do so primarily in a public forum. Especially one as enclosed as a basketball arena for at least 82 games a season.

It would be a little unfair to Irving if I weren’t willing to also highlight the Aaron Rodgers lowlights of the past few weeks.

Rodgers is the Huff nemesis. A potent offensive threat from whom the ball must be ripped for fear that he picks out a pass that ends your game or your season.

Kill or be killed.

Rodgers is one of the greatest quarter-backs of the modern era and he plays for the Green Bay Packers, which, when all is said and done, is an essentially likable NFL organisation. They’re not exactly encumbered by a busy field of likable competitors, admittedly, but they have enough of the ingredients to keep the hate at bay.

They have an incredible history and they play in a beautifully old school stadium in a famously small and relatively remote city in Wisconsin. Helpfully, they haven’t won enough recent Super Bowls to move them across to nemesis territory. Yeah, the Bears hate them and the Vikings hate them and the Lions hate them but that’s as far as the local rivalry stretches.

Rodgers himself has enjoyed decent PR for the most part, give or take some family tensions that had cast a confusing shadow over him.

And then almost three weeks ago, he tested positive for Covid, began a mandatory 10-day quarantine that would force him to miss one game (they lost) and subsequently launched himself into a firestorm of hypocrisy and ignorance.

The crux of the deceit — and the reason he surpassed Irving’s heights of selfishness — was that when multiple observers delved back into the archives, an August Rodgers presser in which he declared himself “immunised” was now being shown up to be a fraudulent sleight of hand. He was, of course, unvaccinated.

It was initially alarming how loyally he followed the next stages of the science denier. He decried the “woke mob”, “cancel culture” and the lies being told about him (reminder he is unvaccinated and he contracted Covid-19, endangering people around him and the people around them and so on).

He was not “some sort of anti-vax flat-Earther”, he protested in direct reference to the antihero of the other code. “I march to the beat of my own drum. I believe strongly in bodily autonomy and the ability to make choices for your body.”

Maddeningly, a paltry fine was all he suffered personally (aside from the defeat caused by his absence) and he was back out there winning in the usual fashion last Sunday at home to Seattle.

It underlined the utter power of the quarter-back — and in particular a QB boasting a playing career like his — that he has been able to sail along, essentially unsanctioned. The NFL players’ union struck a deal with the league about how they should operate and he spotted a few easy loopholes.

Now the NFL heads into the Thanksgiving period and is starting to add some small extra measures to try and help mitigate the rising amount of cases.

A lot has changed in the game since Sam Huff was spearheading the newfound art of the linebacker. It has become faster and richer, but it has also found a way of staying reflective of societal trends, not always for the best. The pressure for the majority of players whose careers hang by a thread is to kill or be killed. Why then would well-paid and accomplished Rodgers choose to lead by such a lowly example?

Maybe it’s really just as simple as Huff’s assertion in 1960: “it’s no place for nice guys.”

@JohnWRiordan