Insider NJ Special Edition: Gaming, Sports and Entertainment 2024

Football hero Aaron Rodgers’ less-than-promising debut with the New York Jets in the 2023-24 season ensured rock ‘n’ roll poet Bruce Springsteen’s Meadowlands dominance for at least another year. Now, after months of recovering from a torn Achilles tendon, Rodgers claims he can play and start at quarterback for the Jets, while the New York media insists that the perennially unlucky team at least give it a try in its first Super Bowl appearance since 1969 can .

Let’s face it, it’s a tough task for the 40-year-old Rodgers, whose fluctuating off-field energy coupled with the Jets organization’s subservience to the sports legend creates more of an appearance of sustained torment than Lombardi Trophy-winning ecstasy. We’ll see.

As this drama unfolds, some of the wharf rats who grew up with Springsteen are fuming about his politics. We are racing towards November 5th along with the rest of the country^Th Presidential date with fate, The Boss hasn’t changed his mind about The Donald since he said this in 2019: “It’s scary. We live in frightening times. Responsibility for the nation has been handed over to someone who has no idea what that means. We have someone who doesn’t understand what it means to be an American.” The only difference between then and now is that Trump is a convicted felon who in 2021 exhorted a mob to lay siege to the United States Capitol to… to disrupt the president’s peaceful transfer of power.

While we are unable to free ourselves from the inevitable turmoil of politics (of course, as noted in our Labor special this year, Trump bailed out casino workers in New Jersey, so there is a crucial story here), we still want to highlighting the Garden State’s critical role in our great country’s culture, particularly in sports, entertainment and gaming. To that end, the following pages feature 50 New Jersey influencers in these key areas, including everyone from high-profile hotel and casino owners to the lobbyists closely involved in the legal protocols of sports betting to the boxers who run the Shoelaces tying gloves, the football athletes shouldering the pads, and the tireless entertainers exploring their passions.

Who will New Jersey’s next geniuses and blues purveyors be? In the words of Hawthorne’s Debbie Harry, frontwoman of Blondie: “A neo-mist from under the sun/ I formed, some say I had my chance…” How does a future Hall of Famer take the football advance in the future? Meadowlands? Will American politics shift its chains or face catastrophic dismissal? Whatever the outcome, as always, in Harry’s words, “Long live innocence.”

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Gaming, Sports and Entertainment 2024

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