The marketing plan for the new unauthorized biography regarding Aaron Rodgers is on hyperdrive.
The strategy, which consists of leaking specific nuggets to build buzz and boost pre-sales (and I have no problem with that, at all), includes a snippet from Rodgers regarding his notorious verbal shell game regarding compliance with the NFL’s COVID vaccine mandate.
“Yeah, I’ve been immunized,” Rodgers said in July 2021, after reporters asked whether he’d been vaccinated. He deliberately used that word as part of a chess match aimed at forcing reporters to spot it on the fly and to ask a followup question as to whether immunized means vaccinated.
It made him look like a liar at worst, a disingenuous game-player at best.
In the interview he granted to Ian O’Connor for the book, Rodgers said he regrets using the I-word. But not because it was wrong to create a false impression to reporters and those they serve. He regrets it because it made it easier for the haters and trolls to have a reason to hate and/or troll him.
“If there’s one thing I wish could have gone different, it’s that, because that’s the only thing [critics] could hit me with,” Rodgers says in the book, courtesy of an ESPN.com item that contains no byline — lest the writer risk ending up on Rodgers’s personal shit list.
He should regret it, but not because it gave folks like me reason to question the credibility of someone like him. He should regret it because he deliberately misrepresented the situation, hopeful that it would keep him from ever having to admit he wasn’t vaccinated.
And he would have gotten away with it, if he hadn’t tested positive in November 2021.
So he doesn’t regret saying “immunized.” He’s smart. He knew what he was doing. He didn’t want to admit that (for example) he was ignoring the rules for unvaccinated players. He regrets that he tested positive. Because, if he hadn’t, we never would have known he was lying.
Rodgers has no real regrets about how he handled the pandemic. He remains strident about it. He tried to re-litigate the issue earlier this year with Pat McAfee.
“Do they still not understand why I said ‘immunized’”? Rodgers said on January 9. “Do they know that I was in an appeal process? Not to mention, like, I don’t know what you would call it if you go to a homeopathic doctor and you get taken to an immunization process, what do you say you are?”
Aaron, we understood why you said “immunized.” You said it because you didn’t want to say “not vaccinated” because then you would have had to follow specific rules for unvaccinated players that you didn’t feel like following.
He made a strategic calculation. If he’d truly been immunized and hadn’t caught it in November 2021, he would have gotten away with it.
His regret is that he handed to those who would say “don’t ever believe this man on anything important” enough evidence to justify always wondering whether he’s telling the truth or whether he’s playing Scrabble with semantics, as he did three years ago.
Credibility is everything. In that one moment, Rodgers permanently destroyed his own.
And he knows it. Otherwise, he’d still be doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on the word game he played with reporters.