Taylor Swift’s 2017 album Reputation, as all good Swifties know, came about as a response to a lengthy period of bad press for that pop star, with the album cover assembled from a series of tabloid headlines about Taylor’s music, relationships, and public controversies.
Aaron Rodgers, the veteran NFL quarterback, would appear to not have much in common with the world’s biggest pop star except for worldwide fame, an uncommonly long time in the spotlight, a penchant for dating other famous people, and the presence of lots of cameras every time they arrive at an NFL stadium. (Plus, one former Taylor boyfriend, Jake Gyllenhaal, so resembles Rodgers that he has at times been mistaken for him.)
But, Aaron Rodgers: Enigma, a new three-hour documentary that debuts this week on Netflix, bares more than a striking resemblance to Swift’s Reputation project: The clear purpose of the documentary is to allow Rodgers to give his side of about 20 different major public controversies that have arisen over the last 15 years, against the backdrop of tabloid newspaper headlines that say mean things about him.
The documentary is a project of Religion of Sports, the production company that specializes in sports documentaries that are, shall we say, friendly to the athletes who are the subjects of them. The same team was behind the ten-part Tom Brady career retrospective The Man in the Arena, although I give them credit for making this one only three hours, as opposed to ten.
Aaron’s Side
Enigma is also structured much like The Last Dance, following a main story — Rodgers’ quest to come back from the injury he suffered in the opening series of the 2023 season — while also flashing back to various important moments from throughout his career. The main difference, of course, is the main thrust of The Last Dance was the Chicago Bulls’ final championship, whereas Enigma builds toward Rodgers’ sad final chapter with the New York Jets. The framing device also gets confusing at a point- it’s hard to keep track of which offseason was the darkness retreat and which one was his trip to Egypt.
Aaron Rodgers: Enigma has a lot to cover, including every public controversy of Rodgers’ career: His unexpected drop in the 2005 NFL Draft, his clashes with Brett Favre during their time as Packers teammates, Rodgers’ frequent early playoff exits throughout his Green Bay career, the quarterback’s flirtations with woo-woo pseudoscience, his famous girlfriends, his continued estrangement from his immediate family, his public embrace of COVID denialism that included lying about his vaccination status, his departure from the Packers, and his reported offer earlier this year to become Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s running mate.
Sure, if you’re a fan of Rodgers, the Packers, or the NFL in general, looking back on these things has a certain nostalgic value. But when it comes to each of these things, we get Rodgers’ side of the story, and that’s about all we get. We see him on the ayahuasca and darkness retreats, providing some context to those very unusual-for-an-NFL-quarterback activities.
Rodgers has very little to say about the famous women he has dated (Olivia Munn, Danica Patrick, Shailene Woodley), except for sharing that he doesn’t much like the spotlight. He still appears perturbed by his family rift coming to light in the course of his brother competing on The Bachelor. And while we see footage of Rodgers as a contestant on Jeopardy!, there’s nothing about the period in which he guest-hosted the show, and was bandied about with some seriousness as a possible successor to Alex Trebek.
We see Rodgers meeting with Favre at the latter’s home in Mississippi, although this discussion doesn’t yield anything memorable, unlike the bizarre confrontation between Favre and Mark Gastineau in ESPN’s recent New York Sack Exchange doc, or any of the numerous summits between quarterback legends in Michael Vick’s recent Evolution of the Black Quarterback series.
As for the ayahuasca retreat segments, if this works for Rodgers, more power to him. I am always interested in hearing about a prominent person living a unique spiritual journey. But the actual depiction confirms one of my strongest instincts as a media consumer, which is that I don’t enjoy watching other people take drugs.
Kennedy/Rodgers 2024?
We see him hiking with RFK, Jr., and Rodgers reveals that he was, in fact, offered the chance to serve as Kennedy’s running mate. But later on, we see Rodgers attacking the media for… reporting that this true and newsworthy thing happened. We never get much sense of how seriously he took the offer, or whether abandoning his playing career for a political one was ever a live possibility. (Since Kennedy later dropped out to back Donald Trump, it would have been for nothing, and we don’t get Rodgers’ take on that, either.)
As for the COVID stuff, your mileage may vary depending on where you come down on those things. But there’s no disputing that Rodgers lied about his vaccination status in 2021. And when we see a woman, clad head-to-toe in Chicago Bears stuff, going up to Rodgers on a golf course and thanking him for being an anti-vaxxer, I found it hard not to retch.
Headlines
Then there’s the other thing that Aaron Rodgers: Enigma has in common with Reputation: It frequently presents news stories from throughout the years about Rodgers, styled as tabloid headlines. I started looking the headlines up, and it appears they’re all real, although they’re presented out of context — there’s usually no outlet listed, nor any indication whether they’re news items, opinion columns, or something else.
And sometimes they’re misleading. The documentary spends a lot of time on an episode from the 2011 season when Rodgers was accused of snubbing a woman with cancer at an airport. This does appear to be an instance in which Rodgers was treated unfairly, and almost 14 years later, he still seems pretty angry about it.
One of the headlines we see is, “Aaron Rodgers Has a Lot to Learn About Where His Money Comes From,” which comes from the website ProFootballTalk. But we also see what looks like a tabloid headline that says “Aaron Rodgers Hates Cancer Patients.”
No real newspaper ever ran this headline; it was a partial headline of an SB Nation piece by Andrew Sharp, whose real headline (“Aaron Rodgers Hates Cancer Patients, According To One Angry Columnist”), was a reference to PFT’s headline above. And if you read the piece, it actually defended Rodgers, presented the exonerating context, and took shots at PFT’s Mike Florio for framing the story that way.
The Jets crash
Meanwhile, the documentary conveniently ends with Rodgers’ triumphant return from injury at the start of the 2024 season. We’re therefore spared the story of one of the most calamitous seasons (and that’s saying something) in New York Jets history, which has included the firing of the coach and general manager, and a great deal of evidence that the now 41-year-old Rodgers is done being an effective quarterback in the National Football League. And in retrospect, perhaps New York wasn’t the right landing spot for someone as thin-skinned as him.
Sure, there’s no doubt that Rodgers is one of the most talented quarterbacks of his generation, who will easily make the Pro Football Hall of Fame and go down as a historically significant figure in football history. By all indications, he has worked hard, been a good competitor and leader, and has fought back from multiple scary injuries.
But for a guy who’s been part of so many controversies over the last 20 or so years, the biggest takeaway from Enigma is that Aaron Rodgers is… kind of boring. And say what you will about the ten-hour Tom Brady documentary, but it didn’t dwell on how angry Brady was at the media for reporting about him accurately.
