It took a few days, but Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk has finally apologized to Aaron Rodgers for his knee-jerk reaction to video of Rodgers walking by a cancer patient who was looking to get her hat signed.
When I saw the video for the first time, I cringed. Many of you did the same. But then I did what we bloggers (or whatever we are) all too often do — I fired off a rebuke of Rodgers without considering anything else about the other things he has done, both publicly and privately, over the years.
Gregg Doyel of CBS has provided an excellent look at Rodgers’ good deeds, including his work for Midwest Athletes Against Childhood Cancer. You should read Gregg’s article. It’s an eye opener. And I commend Rodgers for his efforts. In many respects, he has shown his appreciation of and concern for the citizens of Green Bay and Wisconsin. If Packers fans hadn’t previously embraced him like they’d embraced Brett Favre, their reaction to the criticism of Rodgers from me and others shows that they now have.
I apologize to Rodgers for painting him with an unjustifiably broad brush based on a very brief slice of his life. It was wrong to jump to conclusions about whether he treats fans properly, and whether he understands the connection between the fans who support him and the money he makes. Though some have argued that true character is revealed in those fleeting moments, the whole truth about a man falls somewhere between his best days and his worst days. For Rodgers, there’s no reason to believe that the truth isn’t a lot closer to the best than the worst.
It sounds like Doyel’s article is what turned Florio around, although Rodgers’ charity work was brought to his attention prior to his second scathing post and he dismissed it saying that what people do when the cameras aren’t around is a reflection of their true character.
Well, there was a camera there and that may have been the reason Rodgers didn’t want to stop, fearing he might get roped into an interview. Or maybe he just zoned out listening to his favorite song while getting ready to fly to Atlanta for the biggest game of his life to that point. Athletes are human and sometimes they just need time to themselves.
I don’t particularly like the way that Florio begins with “we bloggers,” implying that he’s only guilty of what we’re all guilty of…even though we’re not all guilty of skewering a man’s character over two seconds of video with no knowledge or research into the person’s backstory. He also admits that he’s mainly apologizing to make himself feel better, and later implies in the final paragraph that others are still in the wrong (presumably Rodgers), but hey, at least he apologized. Sort of.
