Are We Missing Out When Athletes Retire on Top?

A hero’s journey, ending in a wrenching farewell — sports historians will debate whether Roger Federer was the greatest men’s tennis player of all time, but few will deny that he was among its most dignified. Last month, the 41-year-old, 20-time major champion made official what had felt inevitable for some time: The ravages of age, culminating with a recent knee surgery, finally persuaded him to retire. A hastily arranged final appearance at the Laver Cup in London quickly morphed into a send-off for the Swiss superstar, a Festival of Fed. He teamed up with his friendly rival Rafael Nadal for a doubles match, a contest that felt mostly like an excuse to watch a legend take the court one last time. The raucous aftermath included an emotional on-court interview with a fellow great, Jim Courier. Federer’s current peers were there, all reverential, as was a teeming audience, eager to see him off.

Was this the end, or merely the end of the beginning? Sportswriters are required to use phrases like “ravages of age” when discussing an athlete in decline, but truth be told, it’s a bit of a reach when describing Federer’s goodbye. Trim and suave in a royal blue zip-up and a signature Rolex (one of his longtime sponsors), he scarcely gave the appearance of a man facing down senescence — just a man acknowledging the fact he can’t go five sets deep with Novak Djokovic the way he used to. And while much of the celebration felt delightfully genuine and spontaneous, that’s not the same as saying it wasn’t calculated. To be an icon in the modern sports firmament is to give as much consideration to narrative as your average Shakespeare scholar, and scripting your career to a happy ending serves many purposes.

A similar curtain call occurred a few weeks earlier, when the 23-time major champion Serena Williams finished her storied career with a spirited run into the third round of the U.S. Open, a tournament she first won in 1999. Williams and her older sister Venus have been fixtures of the American sports landscape for so long that it is at once impossible to imagine it without them and head-spinning to contemplate the length of their dominance. When Williams addressed the stadium after her last appearance, the assembled crowd responded with an operatic outpouring that exceeded even Federer’s rapturous farewell. (If your heart did not proceed directly to your throat when Serena wept and said she would be no one without her older sister, you either don’t love tennis or need to see a doctor.)

For the aging athlete to continue grinding away is in some ways a noble act.

Serena, like Federer, is 41 and considered by many to be the sport’s greatest of all time. Their playing days might be behind them, but each remains a global icon, and status as a global icon is a bit like a Supreme Court appointment: Once you have it, it’s your job for life. It’s also a lucrative one. The idea that a star athlete might be worth more money retired than active isn’t exactly new — Arnold Palmer’s career golf earnings were $2 million, while the bulk of his estimated $700 million estate was earned through endorsements long after his competitive days were over — but in a world crazed for both content and heroes, the stakes of making a narratively canny exit feel higher than ever. Legacy-building cannot be left to chance. Federer has already been the focus of multiple documentaries; Williams has been chronicled in a five-part HBO series and had her youth depicted, alongside her sister’s, in last year’s Oscar-winning dramatization “King Richard.” The incentive to make the leap from player to personality while still adjacent to the winner’s circle is immense.

This was not always the case — far from it. The edges of sports history are littered with specters like the aging Johnny Unitas, fecklessly playing out the string as a San Diego Charger, and Willie Mays, slumming as a past-his-prime New York Met. No complete biography of either man will ever be written without some significant reference to those sad and flailing years, in which they burned off parts of their legacy for a few final paychecks and a chance at adulation — the part where the great man, taking the field, commands his body to perform the old heroic acts and is betrayed, again and again, by those “ravages of age.”

Personally, I am ambivalent about the much tidier exits of today’s greats. I sort of miss the tragic model. For the aging athlete to continue grinding away, even as their physical prowess begins to fail them, is in some ways a noble act of self-effacement, an abandonment of personal vanity, a repayment of the karmic debt of their natural abilities. We as a society currently stand at the intersection of modern medicine, baby-boomer vivacity and magical thinking, indulging in adult-adolescent fantasies of eternal youth, waving away the menacing creep of time. If sports is a metaphor for life — and it better be, for all the time it takes — I wonder if on some level we don’t do ourselves a disservice by watching our heroes bow out on a grace note. Parts of life’s ride are going to get ugly; injury, loss and defeat are coming for us all. To witness, in real time, the humbling of great athletes — and to see them endure it with dignity and grit, even as the outcomes carry them further and further from former glory — might be one of the great things sports has to teach us.

Over these last few months, a miracle occurred that split the difference. Albert Pujols is 42 and in his 22nd season playing major-league baseball. For the first 10 years of that career, he was basically Babe Ruth — a hitter of such generational talent that it strained credulity. Over the second 10 years, he went from pretty good to mediocre to downright bad, and many a commentator remarked on how sad it was to see a once-perfect hitter break down. And yet Pujols persisted, catching on as a bench player with the Los Angeles Dodgers after being released by another team, and finally rejoining his original team, the St. Louis Cardinals, for one more year. It was, essentially, a sentimental gesture.

But then something weird happened: He got really, really good again. His swing locked in. He started hitting home runs at his early career rate, passing 700 for his career, a huge benchmark in baseball. He led his team to a division title. It all came out of nowhere, the most romantic possible outcome for a player who had — in many people’s eyes — come to serve as a cautionary tale, an argument for getting out while the getting’s good.

That’s one last thing about sports, and life: The difference between demonstrating resilience and toiling in self-delusion is not so easy to parse. Pujols recently revealed that as late as this June, he had become so dejected about his play that he nearly quit. It turned out, happily, that there was one last chapter to be written. It reminds me of a favorite lyric, from the band Drive-By Truckers: “There’s something to be said for hanging in there/Past the point of hanging around too long.”

Source photographs: Matthew Stockman/Getty Images; Stacy Revere/Getty Images; Paul Crock/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images; Greg Wood/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images; Getty Images.