This is just the beginning — of a slow, painful death: realizing you’re done.
It is often said that athletes die twice. Not so. You, the professional athlete, only die once. Usually around age thirty-five. Your actual death later on doesn’t count, since the world will have long forgotten about you by then. In between, there lies the enormous expanse of time that is your retirement. If your life were a book, retirement would be the five-hundred-page epilogue that nobody reads. It is a long, agonizing period, where your past looms ever larger as it grows more distant. It is the time of life when your dreams are fulfilled but your expectations are not. You always dreamed of having all this free time to yourself. But you’ll be shocked at just how dreary life can be sitting at home at 3:00 p.m. on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. I’m telling you, man, there ain’t shit to do.
That is why I say to you: never retire. Ever. Media people love to urge athletes to retire “at their peak” and lament the ones who hold on to their careers well past their prime: Willie Mays, Johnny Unitas, Michael Jordan, etc. Fuck the media. You’re a professional athlete. Only a tiny fraction of people on this Earth ever get to call themselves that, and the rest would kill to be included in such company. You’re an icon. A rock star. A fucking demigod. Who gives that up voluntarily? Idiots, that’s who.
Smart athletes are the ones who stay in the game until they have to be pried away with the jaws of life. I’m not being sarcastic. If there is one genuine piece of advice in this book, it is this: voluntarily walking away from your childhood dream is insane. Don’t listen to the media. Don’t listen to your wife. Don’t listen to your neurologist. Play the game until no one wants you. Even if you aren’t as good, you’re still pretty goddamn good. And you’re still living more of a life than some fuckstick walking around a golf course.
Hanging on to your career is also an excellent way of coping with the deterioration of your skills. Retire early, and you’ll never know if you still had some gas left in the tank. But if you hang around for years, bouncing from team to team, you’ll know that you suck. And you’ll have learned how to come to grips with that fact. Unless your name is Evander Holyfield.
Once you begin your decline, you’ll start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Cocky new draftees will show up on the scene. At first, you’ll say to yourself, “Pfft. These rookies don’t know shit. They’re all young, dumb, and full of cum.” Then you’ll watch them leap eighty inches up in the air and dunk with their feet. You’ll hate them, and you’ll hate the fact that they take it all for granted. But, secretly, you’ll envy them, wishing you could be them. Congratulations. You now know how it feels to be a sports fan. Why, you’re just like me now! Welcome to the Dark Side.
Eventually, your team will approach your agent and ask that you take a pay cut. You’ll balk. “Fuck that!” you’ll say, or words to that effect. Then, you’ll have your agent put out feelers to other teams around the league to see if any of them would be interested in your services. When they all say no, you’ll go crawling back to management and accept their pay cut. Only now, they’ll demand you take an even steeper pay cut. Fuckers, I know.
Once you take your pay cut, you’ll soon find yourself eased out of the starting lineup. At first, this will come as a shock to you. But don’t fret. After about thirty years, that shock kinda wears off. After that, you’ll start to see the writing on the wall. Reporters will stop flocking to your locker. Your national endorsements will dry up. Younger players who once pretended to listen to your advice will, at long last, feel free to ignore you completely. And all the groupies that hit on you will be on the plus side of forty, and have that wrinkled upper lip that only comes from decades of fellating four packs of Parliaments a day.
Once the season is over, your team will cut you loose. In the ensuing couple of years or so, you’ll sign with a handful of other teams, playing for the league minimum if you aren’t cut in training camp. You may even do a stint or two in the minors. During this time, you’ll grow increasingly disenchanted with your sport: how they build up young men only to discard them like used tissues once their skills have diminished.
Now you’re ready to “retire.” See how easy it is now to give it all up? And how dumb it is to retire from your sport when you’re still good at it? No one walks away from a job they enjoy. You must first grow to despise that which you once held so dear. That way, retiring is a snap. That’s how the rest of America does it, and that’s how you should do it.
Ah, but what to do now that the end has begun?