Whatever is said, the dark side has a lot of pull.
Without that hidden part of the human condition there would be no religions, nor Goethe’s Faust or Bulgákov’s The Master and Margarita, nor the Star Wars saga or even Barça after discovering that the Catalans were going Skywalker on the pitch, but in reality they reincarnated Darth Vader in the offices.
Aaron Rodgers is another character loaded with morality between good and evil, as if there were no crossroads and inns in no man’s land.
The still quarterback for the Green Bay (Wisconsin) Packers is, at 39, the last dinosaur in the American football ecosystem.
He has spent four days in the dark, in the literal sense of his language.
What he has done there is still not very clear. Rodgers, anti-vaccination and distrustful of being a good person, acts as a conspiracy theorist. He is one of those who is convinced that the recent shooting down of UFOs by the US army was only a ploy to cover up other alleged issues that run through the networks of ultra-rightists, of which they talk but nothing is ever specified. Matter of faith.
Rodgers’ darkness consisted precisely in this. In spending four days locked up in a kind of monastery, in the dark, to look inside and see if he’s still with the Packers, if he changes teams or retires. Back in his world as a podcaster, he continues with the conspiracies, although no one yet knows what he has seen.
One of his problems, like so many who don’t know how to age, consists of not accepting the fall into irrelevance.
The opposite happens with the light of the tennis player Matija Pecotic, 572 in the ATP ranking and an absolute unknown to the vast majority. The ignorant are forgiven because you have to be a maniac of the sport of tennis to know about his fairytale story.
The southpaw Pecotic (a Croatian born in Belgrade, raised in Malta and living in Florida) recently defeated a former top ten player for the first time (Jak Sock, number eight in 2017). As Jason Gay remarks in The Wall Street Journal, he achieved his greatest triumph at age 33, at an age when “players not named Roger, Rafa or Novak are beginning to decline or are on their last legs.”
Pecotic doesn’t care. He says that he is a part-time tennis player. With a master’s degree from Harvard, he works at a real estate firm. Encouraged by his recent victory, this season he will participate in more championships, without leaving the company. They have given you permission. They know he won’t be in the office much but they can’t deny him the chance to see the light. And if he beats Djokovic?
