Book review: Out of the Darkness: The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers

Phil Hanrahan is a Milwaukee-based writer and the author of Life After Favre: The
Green Bay Packers and Their Fans Usher in the Aaron Rodgers Era. His first interview
for the book was with Cheesehead TV at the Packers bar Kettle of Fish in New York
City. Below is his review of Ian O’Connor’s new book, Out of the Darkness: The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers

 

As I drove to pick up the book Van Morrison popped into my head. Not one of his
songs—not “Brown Eyed Girl” or “Moondance”—but the singer-songwriter himself. He
had something in common with the person whose life is deftly chronicled in Out of the
Darkness: The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers. Like the former Packers quarterback, the
Belfast-born musician has taken heat for his Covid views.

I was curious to see how veteran sportswriter Ian O’Connor handled that part of the
story. And then there was the estrangement angle—the fact that Rodgers has ghosted
his family for a decade. As a Packers fan, I also knew something else would get my
attention if it came up. Would New York-based O’Connor, who’s written biographies of
Derek Jeter, Bill Belichick, and Mike Krzyzewski, render judgement on the Rodgers-led
Packers, those 15 seasons with a pass-throwing virtuoso but only one Super Bowl
appearance? He does weigh in, succinctly, and we hear from a couple former
quarterbacks on the matter as well, at more length and memorably.
I had it easy when I wrote about Rodgers for a book on the 2008 season, his first year
as a starter. The family fracture—the not speaking to his parents Ed and Darla, his
brothers Luke and Jordan, the maternal grandparents he used to call before every
game at every level, aunts and other relations—was off in the future. As was the
journalistic necessity to mention Dr. Anthony Fauci, and Jimmy Kimmel, and Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. for views Rodgers holds and things he’s said.

He hadn’t yet begun regularly jettisoning people from his life, including old friends and
acquaintances, if he felt they were taking advantage of his money and celebrity, or
wronged him in some other way. Chapter ten is called “The Island,” a name used by a
group of his old westcoast buddies and buddy-wannabes for when Rodgers sends you
into exile. Few return from this zone after communication ends, though one of those
who did make it back, fully, Jordan Russell, a great friend from high school and
roommate of Rodgers at Cal-Berkeley, spoke to O’Connor in detail about his quarter-
century relationship with Rodgers, providing much insight.

In 2008, I interviewed a player who was close to his family, not yet dating Hollywood
actresses, and who said he’d probably be in the military like his Air Force grandfather
Ed Sr. if he didn’t play football. He was years away from tripping out on ayahuasca in

Peru and going on a “darkness retreat” in Oregon. He described his approach to both
football and guitar-playing as “studious,” said he liked to “beat up every aspect of a play”
when learning it, and hoped to take music-theory courses.

When I asked for his favorite throw of the year, he cited a one-yard scoring pass to
fullback Korey Hall, his cribbage partner, against the Vikings at Lambeau.
“I’d never thrown one where my stance was that contorted,” Rodgers told me as I stood
at a window in my Quality Inn room, this end of the hotel once the Packers offices
during Lombardi’s first four years. “Korey flashed across the middle. A guy was trying to
wrap up my legs.” Rodgers had already danced out of the way of two other rushers, his
helmet tapped by one. Hall was his third read. “The dynamic of the pass was I threw
across my body, torquing my shoulder around, and just squeezed it in there.”
It was some early Rodgers magic—or at least early in his career as a starting NFL QB.
Drawing on a vast amount of interviewing (250-plus conversations), research, and film
analysis, O’Connor finds examples of Rodgers working football wonders all the way
back to eighth grade, when Ed and Darla overcame concerns about the effects of youth
football on body and mind and greenlit the playing wish of their middle son.

Football was Aaron’s foremost passion from the start. Riveted by the NFL on TV at age
two. Spending hours, age four, drawing up plays and moving helmeted figurines around
a game board his dad, a former Chico State offensive lineman and semi-pro player,
crafted from plywood. Organizing schoolyard football games during kindergarten recess
(his teacher, according to Darla, said Aaron got a little bossy, always making himself the
quarterback). O’Connor’s coverage is fine-grained: We hear from a high-school
economics teacher who still remembers seeing Rodgers throwing to receivers in the
offseason, a daily sight from his classroom window. And we hear from an advanced
placement U.S. history teacher who caught Rodgers diagramming plays in class.
“I’m going to play in the NFL,” Rodgers told his high-school girlfriend Micala Drews after
she asked, one postgraduation summer day, about his plans for the future.

Early Rodgers is easy to root for. He quarterbacked Chico’s Pleasant Valley High junior
varsity squad as a 110-pound five-four freshman with size-13 feet and huge ears on an
outsized head. He looked like a bobblehead doll, one coach said. Classmates
nicknamed this quietly confident, quirkily funny, non-partying homebody “Feet.” His JV
football coach described him as a “tiny little puke.” But he had freaky throwing accuracy
and exceptional onfield vision—quarterback gifts that matched his 3-point basketball
sharpshooting, court awareness, and mobility as a middle-school pointguard.

These aptitudes and others, physical and mental, strike observers again and again, and
justify the title of chapter two: “The Prodigy.” “He knows at all times what’s going on,” the
teacher of a gifted and talented class told Darla in a meeting when Rodgers was a
grade-schooler in Ukiah, California. An elite state test score got him into the class and
then, when the teacher tested her students’ information-processing styles, she
discovered Ed and Darla’s son had a kind of panoptic ability when it came to evaluating
movement across geographic space—a wideframe “aerial” perspective.

“He’s up above seeing everything,” the teacher added.
Remembering this, Darla tells O’Connor, “We’d have multiple coaches in his travel
soccer and in basketball say, ‘Aaron has an uncanny ability to know where everybody is
and their assignments, almost as if he’s above it.’”

This nugget and others making the same point about a Rodgers knack for big-picture
surveyal pays off a content risk O’Connor takes in chapter one when he devotes nine
pages to the WWII heroism of Air Force bomber pilot Ed Rodgers Sr.

The quarterback’s grandfather piloted massive B-24 planes and twice reacted in all the
right ways, winning medals for doing so, when enemy fire riddled the wings and
fuselage of his aircraft, an engine igniting both times. When hit over Austria, Lieutenant
Rodgers, responsible for the lives of ten crewmembers, somehow managed to fly his
damaged plane to an airbase in Italy. The second time he and his crew had to bail and
parachuted into Hungarian enemy territory. The airman was captured, beaten, and
endured multiple Nazi POW camps and brutalizing marches before being rescued by
the U.S. Army in April of 1945. The war stories are superbly told and will stay with me

as unexpected bonus material. And O’Connor doesn’t force a straight line connection to
the grandson. He lets the material sit in readers’ minds as they learn about this kid with
a rare ability to process a spatial field “from above” who grew into an NFL star brilliant at
reading defenses and judging pass trajectories, and cool under pressure, even when,
as Darla pointed out to O’Connor on September 11, 2023, her son has a “target on him.”
That date—you might recognize it as the one when Rodgers tore his Achilles tendon
four snaps into the Jets season after holding onto the ball a tick long (receiver Garrett
Wilson was open for a short pass underneath) and Bills linebacker Leonard Floyd
wrapped him up and took him to the turf in New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium.
When Darla spoke that day, she, her husband, and O’Connor were sitting in the
biographer’s SUV with a “Life is better with a beagle” bumper sticker in a MetLife

parking lot waiting for a lightning storm to end so they could head inside. Rodgers’s
parents had driven crosscountry from the million-dollar house their son had built for
them in Chico to see his Jets debut, despite knowing the odds of exchanging even a
single word with him were slim to none.

They stayed at an Airbnb in Montclair, New Jersey three and a half miles from their
son’s $9.5M Montclair mansion. O’Connor, who’d sat with Ed at a Chico coffeeshop in
July and later conducted a lengthy FaceTime interview with Darla, mentioned he could
give them a ride to the game. After the car edged into a wet parking space a good
distance from the stadium, Darla peered through the rain toward her son’s image on a
pair of stadium billboards. “Is that him?” she asked Ed. Later, as lightning flashed,
O’Connor asked the quarterback’s parents about their son’s first year of tackle football,
in eighth grade. That’s when Darla mentioned she still worried about her boy getting
injured, since “the whole defense is after Aaron.”

Though there would be no reunion with their son during this trip east—their last view of
him, from thirty rows up from the Jets sideline, would be when he was carted from a
blue medical tent toward a stadium tunnel—Ed, unlike Darla, did have a brief, in-person
encounter with Rodgers earlier that summer, at the Lake Tahoe celebrity golf
tournament.

Given a ticket to it by one of his chiropractic patients, Ed drove to the Edgewood Tahoe
course hoping he might cross paths with his son. As the polo-shirted quarterback came
up the ninth fairway, he needed to take a bathroom break. Ed happened to be in the
gallery nearby. They intersected in a clearing. “Hi, Pops,” Rodgers said. They
embraced, and then, nearly nine years after they’d last spoken to each other, Aaron
said, “I love you.” Ed responded with the same words. Tears filled his eyes. This scene
arrives on page four of the book.

Why so much estrangement? How come Ed and Darla don’t even have their son’s
cellphone number? Why, in 2015, when he learned his family would be present at the
wedding of two longtime friends his age, did Rodgers skip it? He missed the weddings
of both brothers. He wasn’t present in 2016 when they buried his grandfather Chuck.
Instead he called and emailed Chuck’s widow, Barbara, who told O’Connor, “It really
touched me.”

We don’t get an answer to the estrangement question because Rodgers would have to
provide it and doesn’t. The rift’s cause is “deep-rooted,” he tells O’Connor during their
February 2024 fact-check meeting at his $28M Malibu mansion. He denies that actress
Olivia Munn, his girlfriend in 2014 when the fracture began, and who did advocate for

Rodgers to distance himself from his clan, is the culprit, since problems were there
before she arrived on the scene, he says, and continued after she departed in 2017.
An aunt speculates religion might be the cause—by his mid-twenties, Rodgers no
longer had any use for the stricter forms of religious faith, like his family’s evangelical
Christianity. “I think organized religion can have a mind-debilitating effect, because there
is an exclusivity that can shut you out from being open to the world, to people, and
energy, and love and acceptance,” he told Mina Kimes for ESPN The Magazine in 2017.
But Ed Rodgers told O’Connor he’s positive religion is “not part of the divisiveness,”
adding, “We’d be totally accepting of whatever he’s got going. We’re not rigid.”

Another aunt says the way “fame and fortune” can change a person is the most
“plausible reason.” Friends Jordan Russell and Craig Rigsbee, Rodgers’s head coach at
Butte Community College, suggest money played a role. Rodgers, we learn, was, on
the family front, extraordinarily generous with the millions he made, giving significant
amounts of cash as gifts, extending loans, bankrolling cars, apartments, trips, college
tuitions, business startups, and charging no rent when a brother (or friend) lived with
him.

O’Connor asks, “Did Aaron sense his generosity was being taken for granted?”
Rigsbee says, “When you’re super successful, everybody wants a piece of you.
Everybody wants you to give them shit. Everyone says you owe them shit.”
We’re left with a kind of “Rashomon effect,” with multiple perspectives on the same
topic, depending on the observer, with the truth hard to discern. Same goes for Aaron
Rodgers the human being, that “complicated fella,” as the late Packers GM Ted
Thompson once called him, a tag revived by team president Mark Murphy in June 2021.
O’Connor offers his own tag, citing “the dichotomy of Rodgers.” As I neared the end of
this book, I thought of Winston Churchill’s famous 1939 line about the Soviet Union: “A
riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” And then I thought of John Madden’s
favorite Thanksgiving meal, a turducken. A chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a
turkey. Complexity. Three layers to work through. The turducken of Aaron Rogers.
Friends (including former Packers lineman David Baktiari), coaches, business
associates, others, highlight his “big heart,” his generosity, his thoughtfulness. The book
provides numerous examples of Rodger’s charitable giving, most of it done quietly. A
million and a half here. A hundred-thousand-plus there. Wildfire relief. Covid support.
The Green Bay Salvation Army.

When San Francisco passed over Rodgers in the 2005 draft, SI’s Peter King reported
the team viewed the Cal quarterback as having something of a BMOC attitude. But later
we read, “[Jordan] Russell loved how his roommate didn’t fit the Big Man on Campus
archetype.”

Mike McCarthy tells O’Connor the QB “wears his emotions on his sleeve.” Later a sports
photographer says, “He’s a very interior person who certainly does not wear his heart
on his sleeve.” This chimes with the assessment of Packers fan and friend of CHTV
Kyle Cousineau, who has some of the book’s best quotes. Kyle, who went to a Foo
Fighters concert with Rodgers and Packers tight end Tom Crabtree in Madison in 2017,
calls Rodgers “very guarded” and “the most calculated person I’ve ever talked to, even
in private settings. When you talk to him he studies every syllable, and he knows what
his answer will be and he will never miss a beat.”

As I tried to decipher Rodgers I kept coming back to a couple quotes, one from his
brother Jordan and one from the guy who made it off the Island, Jordan Russell.
When Jordan Rodgers appeared on The Bachelorette in 2016, he said of his brother’s
distance from the family, “It’s just kind of the way he’s chosen to do his life…. I can’t
imagine what it’s like to be in his shoes and have the pressure he has and the demands
from people he has.”

Meanwhile, Russell stresses the quarterback’s pursuit of perfection, the craft mastery, a
goal defining his personality from early on. “Part of what it takes to be a master is to be
myopic,” Russell tells O’Connor. “To say to hell with everyone else…who isn’t mission-
aligned.”

* * *

This book could be a movie or streaming series and probably will be.
As O’Connor points out, the Rodgers story is an improbable one. The underdog aspect
remains terrific and is richly, expertly sketched. The semi-dorky little puke with the
golden arm who literally tripped over his huge feet early on. The hyper-focused
teenager: instead of partying or hanging with his girlfriend after Friday night games
Aaron, along with his dad, would pop in a VHS tape of the action and analyze until bed.
After he tore his ACL at 16, a doctor told him to give up football. He had the knee
stabilized but not fully repaired and played with a brace. Not a single Division I football

program wanted him. Division III Occidental proposed he sit out a year. Craig Rigsbee
recruited Aaron by simply walking to the Rodgers home—he lived that close.
The Butte football field adjoined a wildlife refuge and the mosquitoes were hellacious.
His teammates included an ex-con and guys kicked out of bigger-name programs. The
Rodgers cockiness flashed early. “I just wanted to meet the guy I’m going to be torching
every day in one-on-ones,” he told Butte’s best cornerback J.J. Stallings during
preseason day one.

Packers fans will recognize the guy throwing up his hands in disgust when a receiver
botches a route. That started in high school. “You’ve got to cut your break at 3.5 or 4
yards!” he yelled at young running back Keola Pang. It kept up at Cal, when Rodgers
used to chuck the ball at freshman receivers even if they weren’t looking—if that was
the play’s correct timing.

Cal offensive linemen said a Rodgers throw made a distinct sound as the ball flew by
their helmets. This from tackle Andrew Cameron: “It’s hard to describe. It’s a rush of air
that’s clean and efficient-sounding. You can sense it, feel it, hear it…every time.” One of
those whistling throws broke a Cal player’s arm when it wrenched the receiver’s limb
into his pistoning knee while running a route.

The astonishing accuracy feats started early, too. Repeated 30-yarders into trash cans.
Crossbar doinks from distance. At Cal, he hit the crossbar seven times in a row from 50
yards away. Goofing around on a visit to Butte, he connected with the crossbar from 60
yards away. And then he did it again on his next throw.

Which brings us to Tom Brady and Chris Sims. In 2016, O’Connor points out, Tom
Brady told an NFL head coach that if Rodgers played in the Patriots’ system and had
their intel on opposing defenses, “he’d throw for 7,000 yards every year.” On a later
date, Brady said, “His ability to throw the football is unlike anyone in probably the history
of the league.”

Chris Simms, former QB, son of a QB, NBC analyst, and ex-Belichick assistant agrees
with Brady and then some. “I think Aaron is the greatest thrower of the football ever,” he
tells O’Connor, “though Patrick Mahomes is starting to challenge that.”
Simms went on to say he thinks the Patriots could have won the Super Bowl ten straight
times with Rodgers as quarterback. He says much more to O’Connor about how
Belichick’s offenses and defenses would have benefited Rodgers, and how the Green
Bay offense under McCarthy lacked imagination, lacked creativity.

More Simms:
“Me and Dad would be watching Packers film during the season and going, ‘This
offense couldn’t be any more basic.’” Mixed into this extended riff is a one-sentence
dagger portion: “Has there ever been an organization that has failed a guy more than
the Green Bay Packers have failed him?”

An opinion. We all have our opinions, on this stuff and related matters, as CHTV fans
well know. There’s much much more for Packers fans in this book, some of it painful
(the close playoff losses), some of it entertaining (quote machines Bakhtiari and Brady
Poppinga represent well, as does A.J. Hawk and Joe Philbin), some of it illuminating.
O’Connor interviewed McCarthy in depth. He talked to Jermichael Finley, Andrew
Brandt, Bob Harlan, others. Ryan Grant tells O’Connor he stayed in touch with Rodgers
after retirement, loved him as a teammate, and unlike Finley and Greg Jennings, he
didn’t think his “leadership” came up short. But Grant says he can understand the
perspectives of Finley and Jennings:

“All of us would say that hands down we had the best quarterback in the league. But in
the same breath we also knew we made him better. We also understood he was able to
be Aaron Rodgers because we were actually really good at what we did…. I think that
was the message they were trying to get across…. Brady is the GOAT, the greatest of
all time, but the best quarterback is Aaron Rodgers. Get the fuck out of here with Brady.
But we all wanted that acknowledgment that yeah, we were badasses too.”

All the momentous, fantastic game throws by Rodgers are here. The 2017 playoff throw
to Jared Cook with three seconds left against Dallas. The moonball Hail Marys. The
2013 game against the Bears when Rodgers hit Randall Cobb for a 48-yard touchdown
pass on fourth-and-8 with 38 seconds left.

“In-arguably Rodgers’s all-time finest regular-season play,” O’Connor writes.
There’s plenty of insider stuff about drafting Rodgers, his beefs with McCarthy’s
playcalling, his overlap years with Brett Favre. There’s a fascinating section on the 2012
divisional playoff loss to the Giants—defensive coordinator Perry Fewell dishes to
O’Connor about how they schemed against Rodgers, falsifying their alignment coverage
by remaining in disguise positions until there were just seven or eight seconds left on
the play clock.

And there’s this from Mike Nolan, head coach of San Francisco in 2005, on not drafting
Rodgers and where his offensive coordinator, Mike McCarthy, soon ended up.
“There are things on my mind that bother me to this day,” Nolan tells O’Connor. “Mike
was with me just one year and he got the Green Bay job. We were thirty-second in
offense…. Mike had a lot to do with picking the other one [Alex Smith], and in the end
he got the one [Rodgers] that he didn’t pick, and elevated his career.”

O’Connor does render a verdict on the Rodgers-era Pack, though it’s not in any way
belabored. A couple sentences. Rodgers, he believes, would have won more big games
if he had more weapons at points, better defenses and special teams, and perhaps an
HC other than McCarthy, who the biographer ends up calling “unexceptional” and “not a
bad coach.”

Better luck in overtime coin flips would have helped too, he notes. He dissects a number
of McCarthy’s decisions in the 2015 championship game against Seattle and reminds
readers that Rodgers on an aching calf marched his team 42 yards in 44 seconds to
give Mason Crosby a chance to tie the game in regulation with a successful 48-yarder.
“One of the most impressive drives of his career,” Rodgers’s friend from childhood Joey
Kaempf tells O’Connor, “but nobody remembers it.”

After lamenting the way McCarthy was fired in December 2018 rather than being given
“the courtesy of a full season,” O’Connor, assessing McCarthy’s “good run in Green
Bay,” with eight straight playoff appearances and a 125-77-2 record, writes, “Many
football coaches would kill for those numbers, especially if they came packaged with a
Lombardi Trophy.”

As for Rodgers, the QB had thoughts as he sat with O’Connor on a Malibu deck:
“I can’t complain a whole lot about Mike because I had so much freedom at the line of
scrimmage. Even if he called something that I didn’t like, we had a ton of stuff we could
get to…. You can nitpick all you want. We had a lot of success, we butted heads from
time to time, but you look back at it, I can’t complain about the freedom I had. And we lit
it up for a lot of years.”

* * *

In the Rodgers movie or series, we’ll see the football program rejection letters from
Illinois and Purdue mounted above a lithograph of Joe Montana in the walk-in closet of
the Green Bay place he shared with Luke in the summer of 2005, when he kept his arm
in shape by chucking 200 passes a day to his brother. We’ll see him training with

Wisconsin-raised Packers fan Thomas Weatherspoon, a 1983 national champion long
jumper and triple jumper at UW-Stevens Point turned elite California-based trainer
whose specialty was improving your vertical leap and 40-yard dash for the NFL
Combine. “You’re going to another Chico,” he said of Green Bay. “There’s nothing to do
in Green Bay but football. They love their quarterbacks in Green Bay and you’re going
to be there forever. They’re going to name streets after you.”

We’ll see Rodgers studying game tape for ten hours at a time in the office of Cal coach
Jeff Tedford during spring break while still a student at Butte.

We’ll see him training with Angelo Poli in Chico in a facility adjacent his dad’s
chiropractic office in 2011, after the Packers won the Super Bowl. Poli taped potato
chips to the backs of the quarterback’s heels to keep him on his toes. He had him fire
spirals at a raised net attached to a motorcycle he drove through the parking lot. Poli’s
brother Gino, an IT manager, still has a mark in the middle of his chest from a Rodgers
pass he caught on a Chico football field. “I’d never heard that sound from a football….
Just whistling all the way to the point where it drilled me. It was glorious.”
We’ll see Kyle Cousineau serving Rodgers and 25 other Packers drinks during a
December blizzard on the quarterback’s birthday at the Abbey Bar & Grill where he
used to work.

How does this football story end? Remains to be seen. O’Connor has concerns that
Rodgers the lightning-rod, the collector of conspiracy theories (Covid, 9/11, Sandy
Hook, the Moon landing, a rigged NFL, and more), with platforms like Joe Rogan’s
podcast and ESPN’s Pat McAfee Show, might prove a team distraction for the Jets.
NFL Network analyst Marc Ross, a former Giants executive during years when “drama-
free” Eli Manning led the team to a pair of Super Bowl wins, agrees this is a risk, saying,
“If you have to deal with that high-maintenance stuff every day, you can’t win like that. If
he brings that here to New York, it’s going to be really bad.”
On the other hand, maybe Rodgers leads the Jets to a triumphant season.

Hopes are high. It’s going to be “all or nothing for the quarterback in his twentieth NFL season,”
O’Connor writes.