Looking at Life in the Rear-View Mirror

Bruce Springsteen’s classic “Glory Days” played on the radio the other day and it got me thinking about athletes who spend their post-playing days looking — and living — in the rearview mirror.

Such as New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath who coolly guaranteed, and more coolly delivered, victory in Super Bowl III against the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in 1969. Three decades later, Namath told me: “It was the pinnacle of my life. It was a high I haven’t felt or equaled since. If I could be any age again, I would want to stay 25.”

And, yet, staying forever 25 would mean he would have missed out later on having his two daughters.

Another Hall of Famer, Bill Bradley, once wrote of retiring from the NBA: “What’s left? To live one’s days never able to recapture the feeling of those few years of intensified youth.”

In other words, even being a U.S. senator was a letdown from being a young shooting star with the New York Knicks.

“What’s left?” How sad to ask this at age 25 — or even 35, dotage for most pro athletes.

In “Glory Days” Springsteen sings: “I hope when I get old, I don’t sit around thinking about it / But I probably will / Yeah, just sitting back trying to recapture / A little of the glory of, well time slips away / And leaves you with nothing, mister / But boring stories of glory days.”

Fifteen years after his glory days as an All-American high school quarterback, Neely Crenshaw, a character in John Grisham’s novel “Bleachers,” returns to his small hometown to visit his old coach who is dying.

Crenshaw suffered a career-ending knee injury in college and tells his former teammates: “When you’re famous at 18, you spend the rest of your life fading away. You dream of the glory days, but you know they’re gone forever. I wish I’d never seen a football.”

How tragic. Can you imagine a gifted teacher wishing she’d never seen a chalkboard; an astronomer lamenting ever touching a telescope; a concert pianist ruing a keyboard?

The night he lost his heavyweight title to Rocky Marciano, Joe Louis was asked whether Rocky punched harder than Max Schmeling had 15 years earlier, the only other time Louis had been stopped.

“The kid,” Louis said of Marciano, “knocked me out with what — two punches? Schmeling knocked me out with — musta been a hundred punches. But I was 22 years old then. You can take more then than later on.”

“Later on” comes far sooner for athletes. A writer, teacher or architect may not reach the zenith of his or her powers until age 50 or 80. Physicians, too, for as Benjamin Franklin noted: “Beware the young doctor.”

My dad is not a young doctor. Now 86, he is still enjoying his glory days saving lives by assisting on cases in the operating room.

“I feel I’ve always kept improving as a surgeon,” Pop shares. “My hands are as steady as ever. What I’ve lost is the stamina to do long cases. I used to be able to operate all day long, get called back into the hospital that night to do an emergency operation, get two hours of sleep and come back and do it all again the next day. Not anymore. My eyesight is still there, my technical skills are still there, but I don’t have a young man’s stamina.

“On the other hand, I have continued to gain knowledge so my decision-making is always improving. Maybe when you are younger, you are more aggressive — sometimes too aggressive. So I think as an older doctor, I’m also a wiser doctor.”

John Updike, a highly successful author right up to his death at age 76, once noted, “We all, in a way, peak at 18.”

My dad disagrees. “I don’t think I peaked at 18 or 25 at all,” he allows. “I couldn’t chose one favorite age I’d want to be because I wouldn’t want to have missed everything that came after it. At the time I’ve lived it, every age has been the best.”

That’s a glorious attitude.