Andrew Luck will throw a football in anger tomorrow night for the first time in more than 500 days, and yet he's never looked more joyous. The Mystery Shoulder Disease is gone, apparently. He's flinging the ball well, finding the deep seams he used to find, making all the throws. He professes to be both giddy and nervous about tomorrow night, which is exactly the way a kid should be on Christmas morning.
Because this is Christmas morning. And because he admits that sometimes he never thought he'd see another.
This week he said there were times these last 20 months when he came close to giving up the game, which accounts for the giddiness now. Football is a strange creature, after all. Very few sporting endeavors exact such a grievous toll on the human body and brain. And yet very few sporting endeavors have its pull.
Even a man of Luck's celebrated smarts seems helpless against it, and so he is back for more at the age of 28. That so many players are now leaving the game at Luck's age or near it attests to the damage it does. That Luck rejected that option attests to its irresistible attraction.
Cooler heads would have looked at the beating he's taken in a Colts uniform -- which includes not only the Mysterious Shoulder Disease but a lacerated kidney and assorted lesser damages -- and concluded his first impulse was the right one: Hang it up, walk away while you still can. But cooler heads are helpless against the sort of passion football evokes.
It is a game for gladiators. It is a game for masochists. And it is a game for incurable romantics.
It's why you can sit in the hotel lobby in Canton on Hall of Fame weekend and watch all manner of football's human wreckage drift past, and yet very few of those proud men in their gold jackets would tell you it wasn't worth it. That's frequently used as an argument against player lawsuits over CTE, the brain disease inflicted by frequent blows to the head.
These guys knew what they were getting into, the argument goes. Therefore they have no basis for legal action.
This is both true and not true. The ravages of the body, sure, everyone understands that's the hard price football exacts. But the brain damage that has helped put so many in the ground before their time?
No one who played knew that could be the end game. And the reason they didn't is because the people running the game told them it wasn't, long after it became apparent otherwise. Nope, nuh-uh, nothing to see here. You got nothing to worry about, Dave Duerson and Junior Seau and Andre Waters.
Hence the lawsuits.
And Andrew Luck?
Who knows where 500-plus days off have left him? We likely won't know that until the first time some edge rusher comes flying in and lays the wood to him. How many more of those hits can he take before he can no longer make the throws he used to make? And can he even do so now, in game mode, when the ammunition is live?
At 28, on the far side of the Mystery Shoulder Disease and so much else, is he still the Andrew Luck he was at 23? Or 24? Or 25?
Luck says he feels better now than he has in years, so maybe so. If football will have him, he'll have football again. And maybe the Colts will finally reward his loyalty to the game with loyalty to him, instituting better schemes and a better O-line that better protect their most important investment of the last decade.
In the meantime, all over Indiana, high school football starts up again a week from Friday.
On the practice field, the pads are cracking. Footballs are sailing or wobbling or spinning across the summer sky. Whistles are screeching through the thick air.
And before the TV cameras, the players -- some of whom look alarmingly small -- take off their helmets and grin and say they're ready. They are joyous. They are giddy. They say they can hardly wait for August 17 to get here.
They are kids on Christmas morning.
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