Football hero Aaron Rodgers’ less than auspicious New York Jets debut in the 2023-24 season ensured rock and roll poet Bruce Springsteen’s Meadowlands dominance for at least another year.  Now, after months of nursing back to health a torn Achilles Tendon, Rodgers claims he can play and start for the Jets at quarterback as the New York media insists the perennial hard luck team can at least take a stab at its first Superbowl appearance since 1969.

It’s a heavy lift, let’s face it, for the 40-year-old Rodgers, whose flaky off-field energy coupled with Jets organization obsequiousness around the sports legend conspire to give the look of prolonged agony more than Lombardi Trophy ecstasy. We’ll see.

As that drama plays out, some of the wharf rats who grew up listening to Springsteen rage about his politics. Hurtling along with the rest of the country toward a November 5^th presidential date with destiny, The Boss hasn’t changed his opinion about The Donald since he said this back in 2019, “It’s frightening. We’re living in a frightening time. The stewardship of the nation has been thrown away to someone who doesn’t have a clue about what that means. We have someone who doesn’t have a grasp on what it means to be an American.”  The only difference between then and now is Trump’s a convicted felon who in 2021 exhorted a mob to lay siege to the United States Capitol to disrupt the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

Unable to untangle ourselves from the inevitable roil of politics (of course, as noted in our Labor Special Edition this year, Trump bailed on NJ casino workers, so there’s a critical history here), we nonetheless also want to highlight the Garden State’s vital role in the culture of our great country, especially in the areas of sport, entertainment, and gaming.  To that end, in the following pages you will find 50 NJ influencers in those key areas, including everyone from high-rolling hotel and casino owners, to the lobbyists intricately involved in the legal protocols of sports betting, to the boxers who lace up the gloves, the football jocks who shoulder the pads, and the indefatigable entertainers who put their passions under the lights.

Who will be New Jersey’s next ingenues and purveyors of the blues? In the words of Debbie Harry of Hawthorne, frontwoman of Blondie, “A neo-nebular from under the sun/ I was forming, some say I had my chance…” For now, how will a future Hall of Famer drive the football in the Meadowlands? Will American politics move the chains or get disastrously sacked? Whatever the outcomes, as ever, in the words of Harry, “long live innocence.”

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