Author Ian O’Connor has taken a close look at the life of Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers. Even the advertising before publication made it clear that the biography was unauthorized. And whether that is the case can be answered quite easily with a yes or no.
Of course, when Rodgers was asked this simple yes-or-no question by WFAN on Tuesday morning, the answer was not easy.
Question: Is the biography authorized or unauthorized?
“That’s a rhetorical question, isn’t it?” Rodgers said of AwfulAnnouncing.com. “Isn’t it?”
It’s not. It’s a real question. And it’s obvious that it’s unauthorized. But Rodgers sat down for an interview with the author of the unauthorized biography anyway.
This gave him the opportunity to add his two cents, but at the same time reserved the right to challenge anything in the book that he didn’t like.
“He did a lot of research,” Rodgers said of O’Connor. “It has nothing to do with me. But he did a lot of research himself. He’s done other books with other famous people in sports. I think he contacted 500 people and talked to maybe half of them.”
“In the end, even though I think he had already written a first draft, we talked and sat down. It was more about him asking a few things. A lot of what was in there is over 20 years old. And I commend him for the time he spent on it, but it’s not a book that I asked him to write for me. He wrote it himself, and there will be some interesting things in it based on perspectives, and certainly some things that are true…
“I commend him. He did a really good job of getting the big picture. But you have to put everything in context.”
O’Connor did a good enough job of teaching Rodgers things he didn’t know about his own grandfather, including the fact that his grandfather attended the University of Texas at Austin. (How he didn’t stumble upon that particular fact in nearly 41 years of his life is another question.)
The book seems to have a lot of good stuff in it. And Rodgers seems to be mostly interested in embracing the good and ignoring the bad.
