Make no mistake, Johnny “The Jet” Rodgers still has some rocket fuel left in his tank.
When the 73-year-old Nebraska football legend chooses to hit the afterburners—the ones that famously left defenders grabbing handfuls of nothing but fall, prairie air during his playing days—Rodgers can still get where he wants to go, when he wants to go there.
But if you’re looking to the sky to track the current flightpath of “The Jet,” well, you might need to adjust your radar a bit. These days, Rodgers has found a new passion—one that blends his ferocious competitive spirit with his love of family and one that allows him to keep right on winning.
Rodgers might need to make room in his stretch-limousine-length trophy case, because he might be adding a few pickleball trophies to his collection.
“My daughter (Jewel) introduced me to it. I had never even heard of it, and so she took me out, and we had hit it a couple of times, and went down to the park, Kountze Park,” Rodgers said.
In the very park where Rodgers had played football as a child all those years before, he was suddenly back to being a student of a new kind of game, learning from his own daughter, who had picked up the sport from a coworker.
“I was sort of telling my dad about (playing pickleball) and he’s like, ‘Well I want to come,’” said Rodgers’ daughter, Jewel, who is also Nebraska Poet Laureate. “So there we are, we started out at a community center, and by the end of that first sort of league, we ended up doing really well. We might have won straight out the gate, which was honestly kind of hilarious, because we started off not very good and improved.”
And, for the Rodgers family, “improved” typically means “excelling.”
“I played, and I kind of got the hang of it, and I told her that I thought that we probably could win the whole league. And she thought we were just joking around, but it ended up, I think we must have won about three or four times—the whole thing,” Rodgers said.
While his exploits on the turf at Memorial Stadium are well-documented, Rodgers’ acumen in virtually all sports is something of a local legend as well. He may not have grown up with a pickleball paddle in his hands, but if there is a competition with a winner and a loser, Rodgers is certainly willing to attempt to become the former.
“I was the first four-sport letterman in the Omaha Public Schools,” Rodgers said, detailing how he got his start as an all-around sportsman. “During track season, I would usually take a couple of jumps in the long jump and in the triple jump while I was wearing my baseball uniform, and then they would drive me straight to the baseball game, and I played baseball. Then I'd read the paper next day to see who I'd beat (in the track meet). I also played basketball and I played football.”
In his post-football career, Rodgers has always been looking for ways to stay active in any way that he can.
“I just believe in trying to be in condition. To be in condition, it's basically for your health. I mean, if people ask you, ‘what are you dying from?’ then you can say ‘nothing,’” Rodgers said, laughing. “I try to stay in fairly good condition…for my age. But I kind of do that to overkill.”
Rodgers uses a variety of activities to stay in condition and move around. An avid racquetball player at his local YMCA, pickleball seemed like a natural progression for someone who had both his desire for excellence and a competitive flame still crackling in the four chambers of his competitor’s heart.
When asked if a college football hall-of-famer like himself can go incognito into any kind of sporting challenge, it becomes very clear Jewel and “The Jet” are immediately recognizable by their opponents. Even a man as shifty as Nebraska’s greatest-ever wingback can’t dodge the target that has landed on his back.
“I can’t sneak in anywhere,” he said, laughing. “I can’t sneak in anywhere where people don’t know me. Yes, people know who they’re playing, they want to play with you and they want to play against you. It's been fun. Yes, everybody kind of pretty much recognizes who I am, and now that my daughter has became the new state poet, they're recognizing her, too.”
This level of fame and the inherent challenge that comes from every man, woman, and child wanting a piece of Rodgers—getting the opportunity to say that they paddled a legend on the pickleball court—does little to worry such a competitive duo.
“They're playing hard. They're not giving us any breaks. We don't give them any breaks. It's just quite competitive, and we have fun,” Rodgers said. “I think a lot of the younger people enjoy playing with us and against us. Everything has been just very respectful and a lot of fun because they're not giving us no break because I'm Johnny Rodgers.”
While Jewel is quickly becoming known for her own off-the-court legacy as a writer and poet, she was an excellent athlete in her own right at Omaha North High School, and it is abundantly clear that the apple doesn’t fall far from the rocket engine with this father-daughter duo.
“I think what I can say about doing sports as a young person, and as Johnny’s daughter, you very clearly understand what it takes to be excellent at something,” Jewel said. “He instills in you what it means to really work harder and be dedicated.
One of the phrases I always remember from growing up is literally, ‘Never give up.’ Eventually, I was less and less interested in rising in the ranks in sports, but the benefit of him being my father was, no matter what I was doing, I understood very clearly the kind of dedication and time that I would need to put into something to be rising to the top, because he showed that by example.”
"The Jet" may have had two knee replacements, and has dealt with as many finger injuries as he has fingers—he wasn’t quite sure whether it was more than four broken fingers on one hand—but he brings more than just an old-school toughness to the pickleball courts. He sees some of the skills that made him a cyanide-lethal punt returner giving him a leg up on some of the much younger competition he faces in his leagues.
“One thing that’s really helped me out, being a wide receiver and punt returner, is that you got to keep your eye on the ball. This ball’s coming so quick that you don't really have time to think and you just react. And I think my football skills and receiving skills and things of that aspect helped me keep track of the ball,” he said, finding unexpected but clear parallels between past and present.
“I really wasn't what I would call really super-fast,” Rodgers said, humbly asserting what 3,224 yards of offense and 37 touchdowns in three years of college ball would likely refute. “I was always super quick, and so it kind of matches the skills that I do have because of my eye-hand coordination and keeping my eye on the ball. I seem to be able to do it to get a lot of balls as we normally get back and we get them back, and to be able to put the ball in places that I just got a natural feel.”
When asked if there is any of the standard familial, parental tension that so many people have when competing on the same team with someone who shares nearly identical DNA, Jewel Rodgers made the answer clear. “I think the only tension we have is if I start thinking I need to take it easy on someone,” she said, laughing. “He’s like, ‘what are you doing?’. He does not like that. He’s very much like, ‘no matter who it is, what we’re doing, we need to be giving it our all.’”
So, with two high-level, competitive people Rodgers on one pickleball court, the question naturally becomes: who would win in a closed door, one-on-one battle?
“On the record?” asked Jewel,. “I would say you should always put your money on Johnny Rodgers.”
This article originally appeared in the May 2025 issue of Omaha Magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
