How to Retire from a Sport

You’re a kid.  You get your first glove.  Summer comes.  School’s out.  When you’re not trying to get your friends to play ball with you, you’re watching the game on TV.

Your parents try and engage a variety of interests in you, but it’s s too late.  You and the game are fused, like a lab rat and a human ear.  Like such an abomination, its hideous at times, but it serves its purpose.  Everybody with one ear wishes they had two.

And then, suddenly, you are at the end of your journey.  The career you’ve built is highlighted by several key moments, the feeling of making solid contact with the ball, that time somebody told you “You know, you’d make a good coach yourself,” and oh yeah, when you turned a hexed franchise back toward the playoffs for the first time in a god awful number of years.

But it is, in fact, the end.  And Sports Center uses your emotional goodbye as B-roll fodder for most of the week.  Your long and storied and partially rage-fueled career is over and without a uniform to put on, there is a meaningful chunk ripped from your bowels that isn’t going to be easy to get over.

Today was Lou Piniella’s retirement:  Day 1.  He left his game to take care of his sick mother and yesterday’s teary good bye was heavily indicative of a man who has been embedded in baseball for 23 years.  He retired for a respectable reason, he said his farewells, and finally, he will have more time to do what Lou Piniella likes to do in his free time, which I can only assume involves screaming and punching and the Montgomery Biscuits.

It must be such a thought out, emotional decision, wrapped in decades full of memories and a lifetime of passion, to choose to hang it up, that one would have to question how somebody could really do it wrong.

So, let’s review for just a second.

Lou Piniella

• Be born
• Have illustrious 23 year career
• Retire to care for ill mother

Brett Favre

• Be born
• Have illustrious 16 year career
• Hint at retirement
• Don’t retire
• Hint at retirement
• Don’t retire
• Actually f*cking retire
• Don’t retire, vilify his team for “forcing” him into it
• Confuse fan base by going to play for other team
• Actually f*cking retire again
• Don’t retire, go to play for original team’s arch nemesis
• Sports Center announces retirement, miss most of training camp
• Don’t… retire… ?

Here’s the thing.  Retirement is a hefty decision.  I don’t know, I’ve never retired.  But it is one of those things that people are often doing with tears in their eyes, after a significant amount of thought on the topic.  It is the end of a career, which is what you spend the first part of your life training, schooling, and preparing for.  You are at the end of a long and dusty road, and there is no one, especially pro athletes, who has made the decision to put their game behind them in a manner of minutes.

Retiring in this era, however, carries a certain stigma with it, thanks to Brett Favre.  It means almost nothing.  If you can make a decision, or not make it, like retiring, and then come back and say “No, that didn’t count because I said it didn’t,” then what the hell is the point?  It cheapens the whole idea because, like a child choosing between Harry Potter movies as the video store is closing, he not only feels as though he has the right to keep changing his mind, but he does in fact keep doing it.  By the time he actually does retire in 2018, will anyone care?  Will anyone be able to tell?

Meanwhile, the last of the classic baseball voices, Vin Scully, was toying with the concept of his retirement as well.  Scully has a recognizable voice that goes beyond the Los Angeles Dodgers into all of baseball, and at 83, has clearly been forged into the lore of baseball for the rest of time.  His retirement would be a nostalgic, yet not totally unexpected, changing of the guard.  Yet, in the end, he chose to remain in the booth.

“But wait!” you’re saying.  “He’s yanking us around!  How’s that different from Brett Favre?!”

Well, shut up.  Because it is totally different.  Scully is a beloved old man, and announced his decision in a timely manner, without going back on his word and without leaving to go be an announcer for the Giants.

Some guys get it.  Some guys don’t.  They say Brett Favre looks like a kid out on the football field, playing with childlike enthusiasm and fervor.  This carries over to his life as well; he’s just a kid.  He’s a confused kid who clearly doesn’t understand what “retirement” means.  There are guys out there who can come to the end of their road without expecting/getting an endless hand job from the media, without day long coverage of their every move, without 30 press conferences and guerilla interviews taking place inside a pick up truck.

You love the game.  You play the game.  You die.

And while we live in an age of flashing lights and bright colors, where when the right people do any measure of “thing,” its labeled news and deemed fit to come out of Josh Elliot’s mouth, harnessing these frantic frenzies and swallowing chunks of time with utterly pointless horse shit about a fake retirement is so dumb you’ve got to wonder who exactly is clamoring for it.  There is class brought to a game by those who aren’t playing it for themselves, and when their time is up, when they’re hanging up their cleats, we hear their reasons, we applaud, and we remember.

To subject us, the sports fans, to anything else, is incredibly obnoxious and totally superfluous.  So maybe Sweet Lou retired before the Cubs were a World Championship team, maybe he swore a lot, maybe he’s only 14th on the all time managerial win list, maybe the Cubs couldn’t even get not blown out on his last day as their coach.  But he’s certainly done, and there’s a sense of finality that comes with a guy like Lou Piniella leaving the game.

In the near future, desensitized by the faux-retirements of Favre and the imitators sure to follow, we may not have the luxury of “actual decisions.”

Thanks, Lou.