Andrew Luck and the Afterburn of Early Retirement
The 29-year-old Colts QB isn’t the first to step away in his prime, becoming the latest member of an alternately doomed and dazzling groupAndrew Luck and the Afterburn of Early Retirement
The 29-year-old Colts QB isn’t the first to step away in his prime, becoming the latest member of an alternately doomed and dazzling group
In the winter of 1973, the novelist and sportswriter Jack Ludwig profiled Montreal Canadiens goaltender Ken Dryden for Maclean’s magazine. At 25 years old, Dryden was already extremely decorated: Over the past two seasons he’d won a Stanley Cup, a Conn Smythe Trophy for postseason MVP, and a Calder Trophy for rookie of the year, in that order.
But Dryden, according to Ludwig’s descriptions, was Not Your Typical Hockey Guy. He was a horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing Ivy Leaguer from Cornell who “looked something like Clark Kent” and “was shockingly grammatical in speech.” After Dryden won his first Stanley Cup, Ludwig wrote, the goalie spent the summer studying the effects of pollution on fishermen in Virginia with Ralph Nader. Before Ludwig met Dryden, an NHL goal judge prepped him: “He’s so unlike a hockey player—you’ll see.”
That spring, the Canadiens won another title, Dryden’s second. The goalie then spent the entire 1973-74 season employed by a white-shoe Toronto law firm, of all places, holding out from Montreal for higher pay while preparing for his non-hockey future. Having secured both, he returned to the team for five more seasons, winning four more Stanley Cups; at the age of 31 he up and retired in his prime, saying he wanted to write a book and take the bar and get on with the rest of his life. He compared his emotions to “the way you feel when you’re going to get married.”
Forty years after that Maclean’s story, in a 2013 piece for Grantland, my colleague Robert Mays wrote about another compelling if slightly unorthodox young athlete, Andrew Luck, the then-24-year-old Indianapolis Colts quarterback who had gone first overall in the 2012 draft and was considered the future of the NFL. Like Dryden, who earned the starting job from longtime stalwart Rogie Vachon, Luck had replaced a franchise legend, Peyton Manning. Luck’s physical attributes were a bit jockier than Dryden’s—a “once-in-a-generation specimen,” Mays wrote of Luck, with a forearm that “looks like the barrel of a Louisville Slugger”—but his wonkish aura was much the same.
He used modus operandi in conversation; he was really, really into Settlers of Catan; he and his then girlfriend (and now wife) had both studied architecture at Stanford, where he led the Cardinal to their first bowl game in years. He may not have enjoyed Dryden’s improbable early successes once he turned pro, but by his third NFL season, in 2014, the Colts had made it to the AFC championship game and fallen to the Patriots in what felt like a rite of passage and the beginning of a new era. Instead, that would prove to be the furthest Indianapolis would advance during Luck’s career.
Beset by injuries ranging from a lacerated kidney, to a torn labrum in his shoulder requiring surgery, to more recent calf and ankle problems, Luck missed half of the 2015 season and all of 2017. Still, he returned last year to play the best football of his career, completing 67 percent of his passes for 4,593 yards and 39 touchdowns and somehow powering the Colts to the playoffs despite a 1-5 start, earning him Comeback Player of the Year honors in more ways than one and leaving fans rightly jazzed about the team’s future. This summer, FanDuel SportsBook’s MVP odds put Luck second behind only Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes, while its Super Bowl odds saw the Colts tied for fifth.
All of which is why it was such a shock on Saturday night to learn that Luck, not yet 30 years old, was retiring from football, smack dab in the prime of his life, becoming the latest in an alternately doomed and dazzling group of athletes whose careers ended not with the fireworks of celebration but with an afterburn of a lost star. Like Dryden, Luck used the language of marriage in his farewell announcement, and not just because he thanked his wife. He also talked about a commitment he had made to himself as he navigated, more than once, the demoralizing purgatory between the sideline and the spotlight. “I’ve come to the proverbial fork in the road,” Luck said. “I made a vow to myself that if I ever did again, I would choose me.” On Saturday night, he kept the promise he’d made.
“The predicament of a dedicated athletic prodigy washed up at 21,” David Foster Wallace wrote in a 1994 essay about the tennis player Tracy Austin, who won her first grand slam at 16, “differs in nothing more than degree from that of a dedicated CPA and family man dying at 62.” It may sound extreme, but his point is clear: Both are cases of a human getting separated from their life force; both are instances in which everyone left behind can only say, over and over, What if?
In Austin’s case, a car accident was what effectively ended her career, and by the time she was in her early 20s she was playing in “legend tournaments” usually meant for a more senior population. In the case of Bjorn Borg, another young tennis sensation, the reason for early retirement in 1983 at age 26 was more internal. While some wanted to blame his wife, Borg dismissed that notion. “It can’t be that I don’t enjoy tennis,” he griped to Jane Leavy of The Washington Post in 1983. Borg won 11 Grand Slam titles, but completism was not his priority: He retired never having won a major tournament on a hard court.
In the NFL, the retirement of Detroit Lions running back Barry Sanders in 1999 at age 31 left some business tantalizingly unfinished too. Sanders, who broke the news via fax to his hometown paper in Wichita, finished his career just about 1,500 yards shy of eclipsing Walter Payton for the all-time rushing record. This was eminently within reach, the equivalent of an average rushing season for Sanders, but he had no interest in unseating Payton, despite protestations of publications ranging from the Chicago Tribune to the Christian Science Monitor. (Sanders also finished with 99 rushing touchdowns, like a dinner companion who leaves just one untouched bite on their plate.) Sixteen years later, Lions wide receiver Calvin Johnson hung it up early at age 30, later explaining that “it wasn’t worth my time to keep on beating my head against the wall and not going anywhere.” His rationale for retiring was similar to that of Sanders: a sense that the Lions’ grim potential was not aligned with the extent to which he had been sacrificing his body and mind and effort and time. In his 2003 memoir, Sanders described taking it hard when he saw that management wasn’t as focused on winning as he was. The realization “slammed me harder than any linebacker had ever hit me in my entire career,” he said. Why gamble one’s future over a clearly nonexistent now?
Early in Luck’s own career, a porous Colts offensive line left him vulnerable to being absolutely shellacked on the regular: In his first five NFL seasons, he was sacked 135 times. He suffered a concussion; he pissed blood. He picked up injuries that, even when rehabbed, still lingered. (Not every bump and bruise came from the gridiron: Last fall, Luck finally confirmed rumors that he’d hurt his shoulder in an offseason snowboarding mishap following the 2015 season, but said that it hadn’t made his other shoulder injury, the football one, worse.)
When the Colts opened training camp in late July, coach Frank Reich was asked about whether what happened to Kevin Durant in the NBA playoffs this spring—returning from a troubling calf injury only to go down with a much worse and potentially career-shortening Achilles tear—had informed or spooked the Colts when it came to their handling of Luck’s calf/ankle ailment. “When you see something like that happen, you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s why you do what we’re doing,’” Reich said then. “It was kind of like unspoken truth. That’s why we’re being cautious.”
Over the years, Luck learned what it took to come back, and what coming back took away. “I’ve been in this cycle of injury-pain-rehab, injury-pain-rehab,” he told the press on Saturday night, “and it’s been unceasing, unrelenting, both in-season and offseason, and I felt stuck in it.” It was over the past few weeks, he said, that he finally came to understand that nothing changes if nothing changes. “The only way I see out is to no longer play football,” he said. “And it’s sad, but I have a lot of clarity in this.”
There are basically two ways to react upon learning the news of an athletic retirement: aww or whoa! The first reaction goes out with love for the world’s graceful agers like Jaromir Jagr, or with condolences to the perpetually injured Grant Hills of the world who never really got to show their best stuff, or with righteous nostalgia for crowd favorites like Andy Roddick, who is two years younger than his longtime foe Roger Federer but retired seven years ago with only one Grand Slam title to his name after determining that the realities of his talent no longer matched the aspirations of his competitive drive.
Others—like Sanders and Johnson and then-28-year-old no. 1 women’s golfer Lorena Ochoa (and, as the old-timers tell it, like Sandy Koufax back in the day), or Pittsburgh running back Rashard Mendenhall, who retired at 26 and is now a writer and producer on HBO’s Ballers, becoming a what-if in one professional realm by virtue of pursuing the question of “what if … ?” in a new one—are the unexpected departures, the whoa!s, the goodbyes that seem like a glitch. There’s been a lot of judgment levied over what happened at Lucas Oil Stadium on Saturday night when the news hit the net that Luck had slung his last gun: The boos were loud enough that Luck had to acknowledge them in his impromptu press conference. (That hurt, he admitted. Who leaked?! I obsessed.) But if I’m being charitable, I actually get the reaction, however hurtful it may have been: These people love the Indianapolis Colts so much that they still hang around late in the second half of a preseason game, and here they are absorbing nuclear NFL news that rocks worlds (in addition to certain cursed celebrity fantasy football rosters). Their jeering could feasibly be cathartic and pure. The same can’t be said for the dirty online waters that some scheming merchants immediately and successfully trawled with their predictably wormy takes. Imagine owning an affable and earnest generational talent like Andrew Luck by ferociously typing the phrase “my backside.”
Ken Dryden would never. His own preemptive leap of faith into his own future worked out as well for him as his hockey career had: That book he planned on writing turned into a number of works, one of which, The Game, is widely considered to be one of the best sports books of all time. He passed the bar exam, dabbled in NHL ownership, and became an elected politician. These days, he is one of the loudest and most well-respected critics of the NHL’s ongoing blithe ignorance to the traumas of head injuries. He’ll forever be both one of the greatest players of all time and also a guy who Ludwig described in 1973 as looking like “someone who had just happened upon a rink and asked: ‘What’s this game you’re playing fellows, hockey?’”
I love that description, in all its goofy glory; it reminds me of something about Andrew Luck that I’ll continue to think about long after I have no memory of his passes and touchdowns and comeback seasons. As my colleague Kevin Clark wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2014, one of Luck’s biggest NFL reputations—and thus one of his most enduring legacies, surely—was his reaction to all those hundred-plus times that he got slammed to the ground by an opposing player. “Nice hit, big man!” he would yell to his tormentor. “Good hit, big boy!”
It would be so unexpected, except that it’s also so very Luck. And probably, it’s a preview of how he’ll handle this next phase of his life: well aware that the play is painfully over, and finding the brutal good in it all the same.
An earlier version of this piece incorrectly implied that Bjorn Borg won the Australian Open.
