Golf
This PGA Tour story starts with a celebrity golfer of some distinction, Aaron Rodgers, and the 2011 NFL season. Rodgers was the reigning Super Bowl MVP back then, and the quarterback of a Green Bay Packers team that had won 21 of its last 22 games, including 19 in a row.
Rodgers was not simply a regular-season juggernaut who was about to win the first of his four league MVP awards. He was also a lights-out postseason quarterback with a 4-1 record.
But in his one and only playoff game as a defending champ — the 15-1 Packers against a New York Giants team with a 9-7 regular-season record — Rodgers didn’t start with a 14-0 lead on the Lambeau Field scoreboard. The Packers had to beat the Giants fairly and squarely to reach the next round of the playoffs, and they face-planted instead. They lost, 37-20, because the visitors’ defensive coordinator, Perry Fewell, had a plan to contain a superstar distributor he likened to Magic Johnson. Rodgers is 7-9 in the postseason since taking the field that day.
The playoffs are supposed to make or break franchise-player legacies. They are defined by high stakes and dire consequences, and that’s what makes them such compelling theater. A whole season’s worth of brilliance can go up in smoke in one bad week, or on one bad night, or on one bad pass.
