Andrew Luck finally reveals why he walked away from the NFL
ESPN PLUS $ MATERIALTHE DAY AFTER he retired, Andrew Luck reached into the shower in the bedroom at his Indianapolis condo and turned the knob. He stepped back and waited for the water to get hot. It was the afternoon of Aug. 25, 2019, and he was in a fog over what he had done. When Luck had told Indianapolis Colts executives that he was going to walk away from football, they didn't believe him. Couldn't fathom it. "When you going to turn it on?" they asked two weeks before the season began. "I'm not," Luck said. When he had told his teammates he hadn't been able to live the life he wanted to live, they said they understood. Didn't argue. They said they'd seen his pain and now sensed his relief. But his eyes dampened and his face reddened when he told them. He knew they wanted him for a shot at a Super Bowl, and he knew he wasn't going to deliver. He also knew, no matter how guilty he felt, that he wasn't going to change his mind.
When it came time to tell the rest of the world, Luck wrote it down. He sat at the counter in his kitchen and composed a retirement speech. He wrote longhand on a notepad and then typed parts and pieces into his laptop, polishing and rearranging as he went, titling it: ALUCK - FIRST DRAFT. It was strange to write. Usually, retirements are celebratory events at the end of storied careers. Nobody, not even Luck, would be celebrating this one. He used phrases like "I have a lot of clarity in this" and "it is the right decision for me." The cycle of getting hurt, rehabbing, getting hurt again, had brought him to this place, he said. A place where it was time to "remove himself from football."
The sports world was stunned. This was a generational quarterback. A quarterback on track for the Hall of Fame. A quarterback who'd just won the Associated Press NFL Comeback Player of the Year Award. A rare quarterback who seemed born to do what he was doing. This was Andrew Luck.
How could he walk away?
He delivered his speech, with trembling conviction. And the next day, at home, he couldn't pick an emotion. They were all tangled together, relief mixed with mourning, guilt mixed with a profound unburdening, a dozen thoughts and feelings that he couldn't name or even really describe. He had no idea what came next, or how hard it would be to find out. All he knew was that he didn't have to pretend anymore. He stepped into the shower and stood under the water, and with the steam rising started to cry.
ALMOST THREE YEARS later, on a May morning in Indianapolis, Andrew Luck is holding a fishing rod and sliding into waders in a dirt parking lot a few miles from his house. He's 33 now. He just said goodbye to his wife, Nicole Pechanec, and dropped off their 3-year-old daughter, Lucy, at preschool. Another daughter, Penelope, is due in two months. After Luck retired from the Colts, he tried to find new outlets for his obsessions. He makes a perfect cappuccino, the whole beans purchased from a local shop where he always tips generously. Skiing fills his need for an outdoor physical act that requires total concentration, with speed and danger. Cycling provides the rush of skiing but in warm weather, and is easier on the joints. Rowing is something Nicole encouraged. And he loves fishing for all the usual reasons: the quiet and detachment, the hope and adrenaline, the fact that he can go alone or with friends.
He stands outside his black Audi sedan, fiddling with gear, and threads his line. A group of kids watches him from a distance. Luck is slimmer and more defined than he was in his playing days. His eyes are under a heavy brow, conveying little and absorbing everything. He is still famous around town, for the hope he once provided and the fading hope that he could still one day provide it again. He snakes through woods, down to a quiet river. There are some small rocks set up on a bank, where Lucy arranged them a few days ago when she came here with her daddy. That makes him smile. He steps into the water, cold and clear and perfect for trout, and lets out line in quick movements.
Time stretches out in front of him as it has stretched out in front of him since he threw a football better than almost anyone on the planet; strange and confusing, liberating and exhilarating, as he tries to understand how a game turned into an obligation and into a corruptive force.
"How do you fall out of love with something you loved?" he says.
He reels in his line and casts again and stares at the shimmering surface of the water.
"Elements of decisions of why I did it that I'm still processing," he says.
"I think ..."
He feels a tug.
"F--- yeah, dude!"
His line tightens.
"Haha!"
He sets the hook.
"Dude! Hahaha. Dude, it's such a good feeling. Yes! Oh, it's such a good feeling."
The struggle lasts seconds before Luck pulls the trout from the water. He cradles it in his hands, which are gangly and huge, big enough to swallow laces or a fish. "Hey, buddy," he says, as he gently pries the hook from the fish's mouth and lets it loose. A silver flash disappears beneath the surface. He casts again, waiting for another tug on the line, over and over again, cast after cast, fish after fish, his best morning ever at this hole, until Lucy is due to be back from school, and it's time to go home.
"YOU KNOW WHY you're here, right?" Luck asks me in the kitchen of his house just north of Indianapolis on a quiet morning this past spring. It's the first in a series of days we'd spend together over five months this year, the first time he has spoken at length publicly since he retired.
"No," I say.
"Because you ski."
He's only half-joking. I had written him a letter in October 2019, months after he walked away. He replied that he wanted to talk to me, but only when he was ready. Might be two months or two years, he said. He researched me and learned that I extreme ski. So does he. He has maps of resorts framed around his house and says there are days when he actually has considered going to work on the ski patrol.
He pulls out a dozen eggs and some bacon while talking on the phone. It's amusing to watch him cook for Lucy, measured against what he could be doing today. If he had wanted to, Luck would be entering his 11th NFL season, probably with a contract worth double the $139 million deal he signed in 2016. Who knows, he might have a Super Bowl ring or two. He also might be single and angry, leaving himself to wonder if it was worth it.
This is his routine on most days, while Nicole works as a television producer. He holds a tiny cast-iron skillet, focusing on the egg he cracks. He watches it sizzle, the only noise in the room.
"Perfect size," he says.
His house is bright and spacious, nestled on a lake just north of Indianapolis. He designed it before he retired, deploying his Stanford architecture degree to create a place "built for a quarterback," he says. Its physical therapy room is now a guest room. A film room is now an office. The house is five minutes from the Colts facility. He drives past it almost daily. Only recently has he decorated the house with football stuff, and most of it from Stanford. There is only one item from his pro football days on display: a framed painting that he received for winning Comeback Player of the Year in 2018. In it, he is in full uniform, standing on a boat in a calm sea, no expression on his face, with a life preserver floating alongside him if he wants to jump.
MOST DAYS AT sunrise, with life still and coffee hot, Luck sits at one of the two desks in his study and writes down his thoughts, always in longhand on yellow legal pads. He read a self-help book that advocated journaling before the day begins in earnest, stream of consciousness stuff, and he says "it feels good to do something for yourself." Sometimes he journals about his daily tasks, sometimes it's deeper. The subtext is often football, and how a scripted life didn't fulfill the script. He rarely goes back and rereads them. He says he doesn't consider himself a strong writer. He journals to journal, not only helping him sort out his thoughts and clear his mind, but to feel closer to clarity.
"What story am I telling myself?" he says.
On a spring morning, as we sit near a garden and sip cappuccinos, he wants to arrive at a story he can live out. Conversations about his future usually turn into reexaminations of his past, of why he was initially drawn to a game that nearly ruined him.
"Well, shoot. I don't think I had a choice. Haha," he says.
He's not referring to his family somehow steering him into football, although his dad, Oliver, was an NFL quarterback for five years and was Andrew's hero. When you're expected to be not only a great quarterback but a transcendent one, when you come to love the addictive nirvana of fitting the ball into narrowing windows and also providing something to friends, helping their lives, when you are the consensus first overall draft pick two years running, and when you have leverage in every room you enter, he felt he had an obligation to see where it took him. Life moved at warp speed, from Stratford High School in Houston to Stanford and then the draft, with no time to consider or process.
"What I didn't allow myself to explore enough was how much I loved football," he says.
Did he love football? He says he did. But all of the attention made him squirm, made him want to break out of a "story that felt written," he says. There was a media narrative that he led a limitless life -- that he could have been an architect, or engineer, or scientist, if he wanted -- when his life was actually fiercely limited.
How much of your self-identity was tied to being a quarterback? I ask.
"A lot. A lot. A LOT. And I didn't realize that until after the fact," he says.
Luck has told himself a lot of stories over the years, trying to measure -- or discover -- the distance between his own narrative and his reality. He arrived in the NFL in 2012, with little idea that the greatest quarterbacks are often selfish and fragile, controlling and pouty, both the only adult in the room and a grown child. Peyton Manning had run the Colts building for 14 years, expanding the influence and impact of one player, and there was an expectation for Luck to do the same. He was 22. He had no idea how to run a professional football team. Early in his career, Luck chatted with left tackle Anthony Castanzo about the requirements of great quarterbacks. "You have to believe that you are God's gift to the world, or else doubt will start to come in," Castanzo said.
Luck's most natural version of himself was to be one of the guys, he says. But what worked at Stanford didn't work in the NFL. He felt too much pressure, and had to convince himself that he had "some level of control over the outcome" of a random game. So he became someone he didn't want to be -- or, specifically, he tapped into a part of his personality he didn't always relish. He ran offensive meetings. He was so involved in blocking and route-running techniques that players nicknamed him the assistant tight ends coach. When people visited his downtown condo and it was getting close to his 9:52 p.m. bedtime during the season, Luck would disappear to the bathroom, brush his teeth, strip to his boxers, tell the group good night -- and kill the lights. He simplified his life to extremes, using a flip phone. He and his agent and uncle, Will Wilson, turned down most endorsements until he felt that he had accomplished something in the league. Trying to control every variable extended to dinners out with teammates, where he'd order for everyone without being asked. "To play quarterback, you're not allowed to worry about anything except the task at hand," Luck says. "And that seeps into other areas of life. It's not the healthiest way to live."
Nicole witnessed it all, his longtime girlfriend who sometimes felt reduced to a silo in a siloed life. They had met at Stanford, after Luck got her number by pretending to have lost his cell phone and asking her to call it. She was independent and focused on her own aspirations, first earning her MBA at Indiana University and later working as a television producer. But Andrew simply decided her role and decided that she needed to be out of the spotlight. "I had no place," she says. Nicole got used to people acknowledging her only to ask for a photo of her boyfriend. "I didn't want to be a public figure, but that was part of the job," Luck says. "So why would I subject her to it? But we never had that conversation. I made the decision for her."
Those decisions, his survival mechanisms, his "design," as he calls it, worked, both professionally and culturally. He became one of the best quarterbacks in football. He delivered in critical moments, helping to rally the Colts from a 38-10 third-quarter deficit to beat the Kansas City Chiefs in the playoffs in his second year. In his third season, the Colts reached the AFC Championship Game. A Super Bowl seemed inevitable. "We were progressing," he says.
Then, on a third down in the second quarter of the third game of the 2015 season, Tennessee Titans defensive end Brian Orakpo hit Luck from behind, driving him into the ground. Luck hopped up, but he winced. Something was wrong.
"It hurts," Luck told his uncle that night. "But I think it'll be all right."
LUCK HAD NO practical choice but to be all right. He had torn his right labrum, but he had what he calls a "deep, deep, deep, deep, DEEP" code within himself to never cede to pain, and especially to not discuss it. "If you're playing scared in any way, shape or form, it does not work," he says.
Luck took that ethos to an extreme. During the 2016 offseason, after he missed nine games in 2015, with his labrum injury, a partial abdominal tear and a lacerated kidney from another hit, his shoulder simply wasn't working. He refused to level with anyone, leaving the team to believe that he was fully recovered. He had separated his AC (acromioclavicular) joint snowboarding in Colorado, flying back to Indianapolis that night for tests with the team. It didn't end up affecting the labrum but did further destabilize that entire region of his body. His new $139 million contract, making him the league's highest-paid player, provided security and increased pressure.
When training camp began, Luck's shoulder was a "subtle" rather than "obvious" injury, Wilson says. Muscles and joints that once worked smoothly now didn't. Luck's mind started to anticipate torment as he threw, and he wondered if it was his brain preemptively shutting down his body in those split seconds between spotting an open receiver and delivering the ball. Watching other quarterbacks throw sometimes made Luck cringe. The Colts' preseason opener that August against the Packers was cancelled due to poor field conditions, and Luck was secretly relieved to not have to throw in warmups. When the regular season arrived, he was on a pitch count during the week, practicing every other day, embarrassing him so much that he'd tell teammates, "I'm not throwing it as hard today."
A trainer named Willem Kramer started to visit Luck. They had met years earlier. Kramer's wife, Jill, had been the volleyball coach at West Virginia when Oliver Luck was the athletic director. Kramer viewed both his practice and the human body holistically, and he had operated a rehab center in his native the Netherlands called Veel Beter, where soccer players would heal and return to the pitch only when ready. He would massage Luck's shoulder, trying to get him to game day. It worked, barely. Passes that Luck was accustomed to making now fluttered, accompanied by a stabbing sensation in his shoulder.
He retreated even more inward. After the season ended, in January of 2017, Luck had labrum surgery at Stanford, by Dr. Marc Safran. The surgery was successful, but his shoulder was still weak -- and still causing him pain, leaving Luck to wonder if he had overdone it in rehab. Colts owner Jim Irsay told reporters in August that Luck's "progression could not be better," but when the season started, he still couldn't go. "His muscles weren't firing," Kramer says.
Luck blamed himself, feeling like a "failure for the first time in my life." Every daily act, from his posture as he sat, to how long he stood, became measured in terms of whether it helped or hurt his shoulder. "The relationship between pain and rational thought got all crossed," Luck says. All of the neuroses and habits that had helped him to become a great quarterback, or that he believed helped, conspired against him. "He couldn't shut it off," says Jack Doyle, a former Colts tight end and one of his best friends.
Midway through the 2017 season, Luck, Colts general manager Chris Ballard and team doctors went on a secret tour of a handful of surgeons. At one point, Luck threw gentle passes on the top floor of a parking garage, his shoulder flaring up and doctors and trainers trying to pinpoint what was wrong. All told him something different, and all wanted to cut into him. But Luck also visited Safran, who told him that what the shoulder needed most was what he wanted to hear least: time. Luck hadn't taken a snap all season. He had no idea what to do, scared when many teammates assumed he was in total control. "He was Andrew Luck," Doyle says. "He had it all figured out. He was the man. That's all anyone ever told him, and that's what he believed."
Luck asked Kramer to start visiting Indianapolis again for rehab. This time, though, Kramer said, "I'm not doing that. It's a waste of your time and a waste of my time."
That surprised Luck; he didn't hear no often. Kramer told him that he was under too much pressure in Indianapolis, and that he needed a new environment. "Just you, Nicole, and your shoulder."
He wanted him to go to Veel Beter. Or, specifically, he wanted Luck to want to go to Veel Beter, so that Luck felt agency over his own decisions, something he strangely felt bereft of, despite his stature both in the culture and within the Colts building. It was an odd feeling, not always logical, but so many choices in his life felt like false ones, obligations more than actual decisions, his life as a quarterback owned by so many entities, from the team to the city. "He just had a really hard time saying what he felt, what he wanted," Kramer says.
Kramer made clear to Luck that they would go to the Netherlands with one goal. It wasn't for Luck to throw again. It was for him to have a chance of a pain-free, functional shoulder -- for "an aspiration of a foundation," Luck says. He had to convince the team of his plans. Team doctors were polite but suspicious of Kramer, tolerating him only out of respect for the franchise quarterback. Irsay decided to loan Luck his plane to fly to Amsterdam. Luck arrived at the gym the next day, Nov. 2, at 8 a.m., with no idea what to expect.
THE FIRST DRILL was called Snow Angels. On his back, Luck had to lift 2.5-pound dumbbells an inch above the ground and motion his arms above his head. Luck tried -- and could do it with only his left arm. Luck glared at Kramer, so angry and dispirited that he couldn't process.
"I can't do this," Luck said later that day.
"You can," Kramer said.
"It is too tough."
"It's supposed to be tough. Was it painful?"
"No."
That's progress, Kramer said.
That night, Nicole asked Luck how he felt, that day and overall.
"I don't know," he said.
But Luck knew. He was in a silent hell, scared and panicking. And Nicole was losing patience, tired of years of Andrew putting emotional guardrails around her. "I didn't have a place to contribute because Andrew wouldn't communicate," she says. Nicole felt uniquely equipped to help. She had been a gymnast in her native Czech Republic, and her childhood was spent in various training facilities across America, sometimes for years. She became so prolific at Stanford that she invented her own move on the uneven bars, called the Pechancova. And before she was 21 years old, she had broken a shin, an ankle, her back, and torn up her knee, forcing her to consider life beyond gymnastics.
"I've been injured my whole life," she told him.
At first, Luck wasn't in the mood to hear it. He couldn't hear it. He wasn't sleeping well, he was in pain, he was fighting with Nicole, the team was halfway across the globe without him, and if he stopped to examine his life, the entire world he had constructed might start to unravel, perhaps revealing it to be fatally flawed all along. "I understood myself best as a quarterback," Luck says. "I felt no understanding of other parts of myself at all."
Nicole was prepared to leave him if nothing changed. Then one night, he broke. He cried, he cursed, he vented, he confessed, and most of all, he leveled with Nicole in a way she thought he was incapable of. "There were some things that when I looked in the mirror, I did not like about myself," he says. "I was self-absorbed, withdrawn, in pain, and feeling pressure."
After about a few weeks in Holland, Luck started to see a professional therapist. And Kramer started to serve not only as a trainer but as a couple's counselor of sorts, trying to teach Andrew and Nicole about communication and identity, both as individuals and as a unit. One day, Kramer asked Luck, "Aren't you more than a quarterback?"
"Huh?" Luck said.
"I mean, that's fine -- I guess. What you do on the field is amazing. But aren't you more than that?"
Luck thought so, but maybe not. It took weeks, but Luck was at the early stages of trying to shed his former self -- his quarterback self -- in favor of a person he didn't know yet. One night in the Netherlands before he returned to America, Luck took a few people out for pizza. He started to order for the table. "You're getting the Margherita" he told Kramer.
"No," Kramer said.
"You're getting it," Luck said.
"No, I'm not," Kramer said. "Why would you order for people?"
Everyone laughed, but Luck got the point.
