“He’s someone doing something that conventional wisdom says is not the thing to do,” said David Shaw, a Stanford graduate who was named the Cardinal’s football coach last month. “But the people here say, ‘I understand.’ ”

If I told you the above quote was about Andrew Luck, it would probably not surprise you at all. What may surprise you is that this comment came back in 2011 when Shaw was being quizzed about Luck’s decision to defer his draft declaration in order to complete his degree in architectural design.

Luck shocked the sporting world with the announcement of his immediate retirement. But once everyone got over that initial stupefaction, the consideration of Luck’s background and personality made his decision to retire more digestible. With the exception of some pockets of fans that maybe hadn’t yet had time to properly come to terms with things (the boos were unsurprising in today’s climate of immediate and vocal public outrage), the consensus mirrored the reaction to his non-decision back in 2011. People understood.

It is interesting to look at another quote from 2011 to help get down to the crux of why the decision was ultimately understandable and one any reasonable person could easily relate to.

(back in 2011) Luck recalled that Manning told him, “If you’re not ready to move on with life, it’s the best choice.”

In 2011 it made perfect sense for Luck to remain where he was at the time – sticking with college and seeing through his degree to completion may have meant sacrificing potential millions in the short term, but for Luck at that time, it was the best choice for him then and for the future he saw for himself.


Back in 2011 it was the right life choice to stay where he was at the Cardinal. In 2019 it was the right decision for Luck to move on from his time in the NFL. In 2011 he wasn’t ready to move on, in 2019 he absolutely was.

I feel that it is important to have these moments of punctuation in the stream-of-consciousness that is our consumption of sport that allows us to re-evaluation our perspective on our favourite sports stars. Our own idolisation combined with media coverage tends to paint them as something approximate to superhuman. It is easy to forget that they are all fallible, fragile humans. It is easy to forget that at some point the cost is not outweighed by the millions earned. It is easy to forget that their life does not start and end on the pitch.

I began a renaissance of my sporting life in my late 20s. Having played football pretty constantly for the better part of a decade, I ended up taking something of a hiatus until a friend invited me to join a 5-a-side team. Having never experienced any injuries in my younger years, I was shocked by how fragile I had become entering my thirties. In the three years I’ve been playing, my injury history is pretty extensive:

  • Ankle ligaments x2
  • Knee ligaments x2
  • Fractured ribs x3

Added to this, because our pitches are surrounded by a cage, I come into work most Tuesdays (we play on Monday nights) with heavily bruised hands that I have to gingerly tap away on mouse and keyboard with.

I have no delusions of grandeur of my own sporting life, but I have felt stronger and stronger empathy for sporting starts bitten by the injury bug with each of my own sidelinings. I remember the 2nd time I fractured my rib I knew it was worse than the first, and that had kept me from playing for around 2 months. At the time I had recently got into a good run of scoring in a few games and looked forward with anticipation to each Monday that rolled around. The moment I felt that sharp sting in my side, I felt the sense of deflation that I would not be able to feel the exhilaration of stepping onto the football pitch for a fairly long time.

At this time, I was somewhat of a figure of fun amongst my friends and teammates, but when Monday evenings rolled around, I felt some seriously dark thoughts creep into my mind – self-punishing thoughts or just downright straight self-pity. Luckily I was cognisant enough that not being able to play 5-a-side football is an insignificant enough thing that I could quite easily shake myself free of these thoughts and turn myself to other positive things in my life. But being able to dip my toe into the pool of despair that sporting layoffs can form gave me a real insight into the sports stars that give me so much joy in my life.

As a Tottenham and England fan I have experienced my fair share of footballers who have had careers blighted by “what-if” questions caused my injuries. Most famously, Spurs’ captain Ledley King had a chronic knee problem that meant he couldn’t play more than once a week, needed his joint draining after most exercise, couldn’t train and eventually retired with no cartilage left. There was an extremely telling quote from King in the build up to the 2010 World Cup. King was then a first-choice center back for his country alongside John Terry going into the tournament despite his injury being common-knowledge.

“Coby [King’s Son] loves football and there’s plenty of times when he’s trying to get me out in the garden or in the park to play and it can be tough,’’ King reflected on Sunday at England’s World Cup base. “I have to say ‘no’. He’s heard enough to know there’s some kind of a problem with the knee but as a kid you can’t really understand that. It’s difficult as a dad to say, ‘I can’t come and play’.’’ 

I can remember hearing similar stories about King, and the impact that continuing to play was having on the rest of his life. It sounds ludicrous to write down, but I genuinely don’t think that we think of the legs that footballers play on as being the same as those which they and we use to walk to the shops, or to run around with our family. There is something heartbreaking about reading that King would have to tell his son that he couldn’t play with him because his legs were all used up playing football.

To go back to my own personal injury history – I know that I rushed back from each of my ankle ligament injuries, and that I didn’t rehab correctly. Having gone to A&E the first time and being dismissed when it was found to not be broken, I was back playing football pretty much as soon as I could run OK on it. Now, my right ankle is still very sensitive to any lateral pressure – I cannot sit cross-legged for any length of time without being in pretty serious pain. It is these small doses of the full-blown experience the professionals must go through that puts things like the Andrew Luck announcement in a really clear light.

Let us take a moment to pause and look through Luck’s injury history:

  • September 2015 – Sprained shoulder
  • November 2015 – Lacerated kidney plus multiple muscle pulls in his abdomen
  • September 2016 – Frayed labrum in preseason
  • January 2017 – Shoulder surgery
  • March 2019 – Calf strain/mystery ankle injury

For such a short career, that is a pretty extensive list, and these are only the ‘headline’ injuries that made it out into the public realm. I have absolutely no doubt that between these other injuries there are various pulls, strains, bruises and more that were treated behind closed doors, played through or flat out ignored in order to keep Andrew Luck on the field. Not listed in the above are the various mis-steps and false starts from those injuries when the Colts botched attempts to get Luck back playing again.

Given my own experiences, Luck will have gone through highly contrasting emotions throughout the years of his NFL career. His brain will have been bombarding him with the two sides of the coin. Whenever he wasn’t playing, I am sure he was desperate, craving to be back out on that pitch where he could do the thing he loved. He would be ready to say “fuck it” to rehab, to caution and to reason and to get back to getting the thrill from doing the thing he loves. And yet possibly in the same moment, there would be those padding thoughts, pacing around his head that none of it is truly worth it, that he has a life outside football and that each time he went back out there he could be sacrificing many years of happiness down the line for mere moments of happiness now.

For many sports professionals, this conflict will likely be one where one line of thought shouts much louder than the other. Many of them only make it to the big time because of their single mindedness, their focus on achieving sporting greatness to the detriment of everything else in their lives.

Not so Andrew Luck.

It is fascinating looking back through past interviews with Luck now. What may have seen throwaway comments that made Luck more interesting that the run-of-the-mill football obsessive, or served for poppy fluff pieces during pre-season, now come across as so much more significant. Take this quote from an IndyStar article back in 2015:

“Coach (Chuck) Pagano always tells us not to let football define our life,” Luck said. “And I think it was (former offensive coordinator) Bruce Arians who told me once, ‘Football is what you do. It’s not who you are.’ I’ve taken that to heart.”

Luck’s comments about not wanting to continue going through the endless cycle of injuries and rehab has shone a rare light on the uglier side of the sport that is so often obfuscated. The likes of Bryce Harper in baseball and Raheem Sterling in football have been held up in recent times as pillars of showing the ‘human’ side of sport stars. But I feel that even in these examples, it is still an imitation of humanity – we still don’t think of them as like you and me, they may just be exhibiting relatable personality traits.

That is why the example that Luck has set here is so fascinating for me. Most sports fans would give just about everything they care about away, just for a chance to swap places with Andrew Luck as of a month or so ago. But while we all think we know Andrew Luck the quarterback, we know nothing of Andrew Luck the man. Whatever the ultimate reason, Luck has decided that he would be sacrificing too much to go on being Andrew Luck the quarterback, and that he would rather give himself more time to be Andrew Luck the man.

While sports stars are no doubt in rarefied company and enjoy a lifestyle that is truly special, we should always make sure that as fans we take a moment to appreciate the person that is hidden away behind the uniform. Whether that is choosing to not send that hate-filled tweet, or even to shout that abuse in the comfort of our own home, or whether that is accepting our superstar quarterback wants to live his best life. We must learn to understand.

I’ll leave the final words to Andrew Luck himself, from 3 years ago:

“Football is incredibly important to me. … I realize it’s a special thing that’s allowed me to do great things.

“It’s just not the end-all, be-all. There’s more to life.”