Junior Seau: Hard To Say Goodbye

Word came out earlier this week that Junior Seau is still interested in playing in the NFL again and now it looks like Bill Belichick and the Patriots may be interested in adding the 40-year linebacker to shore up their depleted defense. 

It sure seems like Seau has retired more times than Brett Favre. Yet every year he ends up back on the field at some point. Last year he played four games for the Patriots late in the season.

Much has been written about how professional athletes, especially Hall of Fame caliber players like Seau and Favre, need to know when it is time to quit and ride off gracefully into the sunset.

However, given the competitive drive that made these guys stand out above the rest, it is hard to ask them to suddenly turn that off just because they have reached a certain age.

Sports is just about the only profession that I know of where you are at your peak in your early to mid 20s and then tossed out like yesterday’s garbage by the time you get to your middle to late 30s.

In all other businesses, kids in their 20s are still sitting in cubicles and getting coffee waiting for a chance to show their stuff. It typically isn’t until you reach your 30s and 40s that opportunities for top management positions and higher salaries appear.

In sports it is the exact opposite, which makes it hard for many greats to say goodbye.

It also makes it all the more peculiar when someone with the same kind of athletic greatness as Favre and Seau walks away so early and never looks back.

I was working earlier this week on my Sports Then and Now Classic Rewind for this week. The game I selected was the 1997 meeting between the Packers and Vikings where Favre threw five touchdown passes.

Also starring in that game was Robert Smith as a running back for the Vikings. He gained 132 yards and scored a touchdown.

In 2000, at 28-years of age and the height of his career, Smith spurned the opportunity for a lucrative contract and retired to pursue a career in medicine. He has since become a semi-regular face at ESPN as a football analyst.

Smith was a great NFL running back (6,818 career yards, 1,512 in his final season) and had he played another 4-5 years may have earned a spot in the Hall of Fame. But, unlike Favre, Seau and some others who played until they had to tear the uniform off them, Smith always saw football as a means to an end and not as his final calling. He had done all he felt he could do in football and left before he endured any permanent physical injuries.

Of course, another example of a player with amazing ability that just walked away was Barry Sanders. My colleague Joe Gill wrote a great piece about Sanders a couple weeks ago that reminds us of his greatness.

Many long-time fans will also recall that Jim Brown left the NFL at the peak of his career, but I think his situation was a little different.

Brown played before NFL players were making life-changing money and recognized that in the long run he could probably make more money as an actor than as a football player. He ended up having a B movie career, but because he left football while still at his top form is always remembered for his greatness and not for being carted off the field after taking one too many hits.

Though not a football player, this week (October 2, 1980) marks the 29th anniversary of when Muhammad Ali took a horrific beating for 11 rounds from Larry Holmes.

While Ali had so many fights that it is hard to say that one specific fight triggered the condition that he has struggled with for the last 20 years, most who know Ali say that he was never quite the same after that fight.

Ali couldn’t quit and evidently neither can Seau. Let’s just hope that if Seau does come back that he eventually is still physically able to walk away.

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