Out of the Darkness by Ian O'Connor

Author:Ian O'Connor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

10

The Island

JORDAN RUSSELL WAS right there on draft day, sitting by Aaron Rodgers’s side, the only person not related to the quarterback—outside of his agent—who had a place at the table in the green room.

Russell was right there as Rodgers’s teammate and punter on the Pleasant Valley High School freshman team. He was right there with Aaron on a San Diego beach during spring break, blasting him from behind and bragging that the tackle was among his finest athletic feats.

He was right there as his roommate and personal chef at Cal, in their duplex apartment on Tyler Street, off of Ashby. Years later, he was right there in the foursome when Rodgers made his first hole-in-one at Canyon Oaks Country Club, hitting a 6-iron over a lake and into the cup tucked in the back right corner of the sixth green, 170 yards away, mere weeks after being named Super Bowl MVP.

They played nickel-dime-quarter poker as ninth graders, and they played $2 and $8 online-poker tournaments into the early-morning hours after Rodgers’s football games at Cal. Russell loved how his roommate did not fit the Big Man on Campus archetype that suggested a major-college quarterback should be partying at a frat house deep into the night. Rodgers wanted to win those low-stakes poker tournaments as badly as he wanted to beat USC.

Over the years, Russell enjoyed pole-position status among their group. He was effectively Aaron’s best friend. Russell had not fancied life as a PV punter, so he quit football and joined the school’s golf team and bonded with Rodgers over rounds at the Bidwell Park course.

Rodgers had complete faith in Russell, or else he never would have had him there at that draft table for the most stressful day of his football life.

“It was me sitting there almost feeling like I was there to comfort him,” Russell recalled. “He’d get up and walk around and . . . grab a bottle of water and just take a lap, and the whole time he was like, ‘This is bullshit. I don’t know why this is happening.’ . . . It was like this fuck-the-world mentality. ‘I’m going to show everyone that they’re wrong.’”

They had been through a lot together, so when Rodgers heard that Russell was about to buy a Honda Prelude, it came as no surprise that the quarterback offered him a loan because he felt his boy should be driving something more luxurious—like a used BMW 328i Coupe. Russell borrowed about $15,000 with a better interest rate than he could get at a bank.

“He’s got the biggest heart of anybody I’ve ever met,” Russell said years later. The cash offer, Russell added, “was the true spirit of him wanting to prop me up.”

But over time, the chef who was not making much money while studying his craft fell behind on his loan payments. He met Rodgers for breakfast and asked if he could cut those payments in half and extend the loan, and the quarterback told him he needed to take up the matter with his marketing agent at the time, H Koal.

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