Sports is an incredibly transformative human phenomenon. They change people – the people who play them, the people who watch them. The pandemic has changed sports and maybe athletes, maybe Aaron Rodgers. In search of non-orthodoxy, he discovers evil and accepts it, perhaps in a scheme to exchange, destructively worshiped in search of a self that seems to be true. People are confused by that too. In professional wrestling, they call this type of manufactured misconduct a heel turn. Done wrong, it’s confusing.
For now, it seems that his heel has softened. So what classification makes sense for Rodgers’ time here as a Person of Interest? A second chance, a repeat, a duplication, a clean slate? Revenge? Rodgers has yet to throw a touchdown pass for the city. The weather can be glorious – or the kind of debacle that makes a simple trip like the one he took “with” me the other day an ordeal. Perhaps the professional relationship does not exceed one year. But maybe the residential one will last, EXPANDS. Rodgers turned 40 at the end of the regular season. I’m not an athlete, more of an elite. I am, however, a New Yorker, turning 40 here, and I know what it feels like to let go of some of the past, in fact, to finally have a home here – here in New York Freakin’ City. Whether you’re broke or flush, it’s a relief, a great fortune, perhaps the seed of some social and emotional greed. “If this town was only an apple,” Michael Jackson once sang, “Then feed me.”
Perhaps he will love this place as many of us do, that despite the obvious suffering, inequality and mismanagement, New York remains a city where you can experience a lacerating, queer comedy about Black existentialism like “Ain’t No Mo ‘” and an artist as self-aware and paradigmatically white as Taylor Swift and teams with fortunes as addled and fanbases as hot as the Rangers and Knicks (and the Jets and the Mets), where people on the street give you your space until, of course, they don’t.
I caught Rodgers at the Tonys and I swear I know a guy who discovers what he looks like somewhere else, to experience what he sees on TV and in the movies, what he reads in the book. It’s a dream for some of us to live here, in “the greatest city in the world,” to quote the musical about history that inspires such dreams. I’m sure I’m naïve. But that’s sports, which isn’t really that different from art. It’s best if you suspend disbelief.