Culture

Pain and Resentment and the Inspiring Retirement of Andrew Luck


At first, the sound was discordant, a mixture of yells and whistles and the general chaos of the crowd. But, as the Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck, wearing a T-shirt and a grim expression, walked down the sideline toward the tunnel, during the fourth quarter of a preseason game between the Colts and the Chicago Bears, on Saturday, the anger toward him coalesced. Moments before, the news had broken that Luck would shortly announce his retirement from the N.F.L. Some of the Colts fans in attendance at the game apparently believed that he had betrayed them. By the time Luck reached the end zone, the booing had become like the wind, a low, cold sound.

“I’d be lying if I didn’t say I heard the reaction,” Luck told reporters afterward, as he answered questions about his decision to retire, at the age of twenty-nine. “Yeah, it hurt.” Luck spent his entire N.F.L. career with the Colts, who selected him with the first pick of the 2012 draft. He led the Colts to the playoffs in each of his first three seasons, and, in the 2013 season, orchestrated the second-largest comeback in a playoff game in N.F.L. history. He missed much of the 2015 and 2017 seasons with a series of injuries; in between, he signed one of the most lucrative contracts in the league. Last year, he had one of his best seasons. The Colts were sleeper picks to make the Super Bowl in 2019, and that hope depended on Luck.

“I’m in pain,” he said at the press conference. “I’m still in pain. It’s been four years of this injury-pain-rehab cycle.” Lately, the pain was in his leg. Earlier in his career, the pain had come from a lacerated kidney, an abdominal tear, an injured labrum, a damaged shoulder. He had suffered torn cartilage in his ribs. There had been at least one concussion. There was also the mental and emotional pain that had gone with the constant beating to his body—the costs to his family, to his sense of self-worth. “I haven’t been able to live the life I want to live,” he said. “After 2016, when I played in pain and was unable to practice regularly, I made a vow to myself that I would never go down that path again.” Luck did not make clear at the press conference how severely he is injured right now, or what, exactly, his worst injuries currently are—he mentioned a calf strain, a posterior ankle impingement, a high ankle sprain—but his anguish was obvious. He apologized as he choked back tears.

“The reality is everybody plays through pain in the N.F.L.,” Luck once said, back in 2016. “Football is about dealing with pain,” the former N.F.L. guard Rich Ohrnberger, a fourth-round pick who played in thirty-nine total games, wrote on Twitter, in a thread prompted by Luck’s retirement. This has always been true. Johnny Unitas, the great Baltimore Colts quarterback of the sixties and seventies, who died in 2002, had both knees replaced, and, in the last years of his life, could not close his right hand. That sort of toll has never stopped men from loving the game. But the ways in which people talk about the game have changed. As the news of Luck’s retirement—and the boos—spread, there was an outpouring of gratitude, support, and respect from Luck’s past and present teammates and from other players. There were few prominent voices of dissent, most of them radio hosts who trade in provocation.

Other football stars have retired from the game in their prime: Jim Brown, Barry Sanders, Calvin Johnson. But it was something new to see a star widely celebrated for it. Social media has something to do with that, and so does the extensive reporting that has been published during the past decade and more about the long-term physical effects of contact sports, especially on the brain, and also an increasingly candid public conversation about mental health.

But there was still that clip of the booing in the stadium, which went viral. It was so visceral. And it called into question how broad the shift in the ways that we talk about pain really is. Of course, it’s possible to dismiss much of it as the unfortunate but predictable result of fans’ disappointment, with an eagerly anticipated season so close at hand. But it was hard not to sense, also, an undercurrent of resentment, first in the boos and later in the sniping online, however limited or overshadowed. After all, though football players routinely suffer excruciating levels of pain, even when they are technically uninjured, they hardly have a monopoly on it. Pain is the most common of denominators. Right now, in the United States, it is endemic. “Americans appear to be in greater pain than citizens of other countries,” a working paper published in November, 2017, by the National Bureau of Economic Research, concluded. It lies beneath the opioid epidemic, and the rising suicide rate. No one is immune, but it is worse for those who are poor. Luck was paid nearly a hundred million dollars in his career, and he had the power to walk away from the source of his pain. Many people don’t.

Some of the edge one could hear in the boos seemed traceable to that disparity. Football is one place where people look for examples of resilience in spite of great pain. Players are often celebrated precisely because they endure it. Luck was, too. He really was one of the toughest players in the N.F.L., famous for praising the opponents who hit him. Part of what made it inspiring to watch him lead the Colts to the playoffs last year—the team won nine of the final ten games of the regular season—was that he did so after coming back from devastating injuries. But his decision to walk away is not less inspiring than that, and it is almost certainly more important. It modelled a different kind of strength. He faced his pain. And he is now doing what he can not to dull or deny it but to make a life that is not defined or deformed by it.





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