Aaron Rodgers has become a new type of athletic celebrity: the non-playing MVP

It took a while for Aaron Rodgers to grow a personality.

His first 10, 15 years in the NFL, he obeyed the old rules of quarterback celebrity. Fist-pumping on the field, head down and mouth shut off it.

Every generation of sports stars looks to a contemporary alpha for guidance on comportment. Tennis players are worldly and cordial because Roger Federer was that way. Hockey players speak like they’re in the witness box reading aloud from a deposition because that’s the way Sidney Crosby does it.

If Connor McDavid wore his hair in a beehive and came to the arena on a unicycle, people would laugh, and then other players would start doing the same thing.

Despite his best-ever-level talent and championship pedigree, Rodgers never got his alpha moment. Tom Brady chop-blocked him on that score his whole career. That may help explain the weirdness of his past year.

Once Brady left, Rodgers graduated to big man on national campus. The moment coincided with another one of his regular breakups with the Green Bay Packers.

Rodgers would start getting shifty and going out after work. The Packers would draft a quarterback. Rodgers would give them the silent treatment. They’d give him a hundred million dollars. Rodgers would say, ‘You think money’s all I care about?’, and tell his agent to go out and find someone with more money.

Some athletes leverage their advantage. Rodgers just went around whacking people with a metaphoric crowbar.

But now here he was, alone at the top, surveying the known world. He’d just come off two years as the least frightening face of the anti-vax movement. That taught him that as long as he was a viable football commodity, nothing he said could shake him from his perch.

What he had to do now was escape Wisconsin and find a real market to rule over. So off he went to New York.

Rodgers took a pay cut to get out of his Green Bay deal. But the money was never the thing. He’d found something more valuable – an audience who didn’t just want to watch him, but also to listen to him.

In Green Bay, Rodgers could have driven naked down to Outback on a Friday night and people would have said, ‘Let’s keep this to ourselves.’ In New York, where he arrived to save the Jets, every twitch made Page Six.

He began a weeks-long, paparazzi-assisted tour through the city. Rodgers became a sort of muscly Michael Musto – friend to A-listers, nightclub doormen and assorted beautiful people.

He was already the main feature of former punter Pat McAfee’s bro-tastic talk show when McAfee signed a new deal with ESPN. ESPN was in the midst of laying off on-air talent. Those departures made fiscal room for McAfee.

It wasn’t hard to believe that ESPN’s parent company, Disney, was just as interested in hiring Rodgers as it was the man behind the microphone. It was later reported that McAfee had paid Rodgers many millions for his appearances.

This is the new media. It looks a lot like the very old media. Rodgers is one of the first to figure it out.

Now that he had his platforms, all Rodgers had to do was win a few games. He managed four snaps.

There is a publicity script for how things work once you blow out your Achilles. You are an object of intense fascination for two or three days. Then you get your surgery and you disappear.

You may start popping up months later in the coach’s pre-game chats (‘Aaron’s doing real good.’) or shot on the sideline in a cast. But you do not put yourself front and centre. That would be a distraction to the men who are still working. You have the decency to absent yourself until you are ready to punch back in.

Rodgers didn’t do that.

He started with selfies from his hospital bed. Not just one. A few. He kept talking and texting.

As soon as he was ambulatory, he was back in the Jets camp, also talking. After a while, he was on the sidelines in a headset looking more like the head coach than the head coach. Without him, the Jets were terrible. Standing there watching his understudies lob another one into double coverage, his facial expressions did a lot more talking. You could not peruse the sports pages without reading a piece reacting to something he’d said or done.

Having spent so long with no discernible personality, Rodgers was now nothing but personality.

After a couple of months, he began to hint that he was in the midst of making a four-month recovery from an injury that keeps much younger pros out for six at a minimum.

“I don’t feel like I’m competing in science when it comes to rehab,” Rodgers told reporters in early December. “I’m competing against conventional rehab protocol. But until someone breaks that protocol and shows you can do it a different way, you know, the impossible stays the impossible.”

Aaron Rodgers: iconoclast.

Except it didn’t happen. The Jets were eliminated from the playoffs and now Rodgers won’t play. Whether he is capable of playing will be left mysterious. To spare his blushes, the Jets have activated him.

Credit where it’s due – this year, Rodgers created a new category of athletic celebrity: the non-playing MVP.

Others have tried this trick, but in retirement. Brady has gone the TMZ route, using celebrity tittle-tattle as a medium to stay relevant. It’s working, but not well. Brady has become a punchline.

Tennis greats such as Federer and Serena Williams seemed to think they would remain central for years after leaving, but all they do now is sell expensive junk. It’s hard to seem vigorous when there is no longer any televised proof that you are.

Rodgers still has that advantage. He doesn’t have to play to be a player. He just has to stand on the sidelines looking buff. As long as he does that, people will want to hear from him, and see him, and be around him.

Rodgers always did seem smarter than the average bear. Maybe he’s figured out what so many of his peers haven’t. That this isn’t meant to go on forever, and that today’s main character is tomorrow’s ‘Hey, whatever happened to …?’

So grab hold with both hands while you still can, and keep squeezing no matter what.

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