His retreat, his escape from the guilt and pressure and “shame” of it all — his word — arrived halfway across the world. Andrew Luck spent Thanksgiving and Christmas in the Netherlands, carving a turkey he bought from the local butcher, poring through books, trying to learn Dutch. It was there he finally started to see it, this reality he'd long resisted. Hope withering, pain persistent, he realized he might never play football again. Worse yet, he wasn’t sure he wanted to.
He was 28 years old.
It sent him into a dark place, a place where hope was hard to see. He’d been lying to himself for months, believing he’d wake up one morning and — poof! — the pain would vanish. It never happened. The pain stayed. The nightmare dragged on. He grew impatient. Angry. He kept throwing, and some days after he was finished, he could barely move his arm. “I was a sad, miserable human,” he remembers. “I was not nice to myself, nor was I nice to anyone else. I was a miserable SOB to be around. I was nervous. I was scared.”
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Torn cartilage in two ribs, a partially torn abdomen, a lacerated kidney that left him peeing blood, a bum ankle, an injured thumb, a concussion — name the body part and the Indianapolis Colts’ franchise quarterback has played through it. But this was different. This was a wrecked throwing shoulder, bludgeoned by years of abuse, the discomfort for so long crammed to the back of his mind, often numbed by pain-killing injections. The NFL winnows life into a weekly war, and those wars must be won. A “binary” existence, Luck calls it. Sundays were all that mattered.
Now the price was more than he could bear.
He played hurt for two years, and somewhere in between the ribs and the kidney and the shoulder, Andrew Luck lost his football innocence. The game used to be so much fun. Now it was so much agony. Would it ever be fun again? Would he ever throw without pain again?
What if he just walked away?
“There was an uncertainty, an apprehension,” he says. “I was scared, scared in my core, in my insides. There was a time I was very scared about football, and about my place in football.”
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