One of my favorite lines from “Ball Four” is the last one. “You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball,” Jim Bouton wrote, “and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”
Which brings us to Jerry Rice, who in his 20th NFL season has been raging at being rendered irrelevant by the Oakland Raiders. In the team’s first five games, he has snagged a mere five of Rich Gannon’s and Kerry Collins’ spirals. Week 2 brought an even greater indignity: His record streak of 274 games with a reception was snapped. Now there’s talk he’ll be traded before Tuesday’s deadline — perhaps to the Lions, where he could reunite with old 49ers coach Steve Mariucci.
For those wondering why, for even the great ones, it always seems to come to this, the answer is right there in Bouton’s kicker. We might have thought that Rice has spent the last two decades grasping a football, but it was actually football that had him in its clutches.
Rice is the Wilt Chamberlain of receivers. He hasn’t just shattered all the records, he’s atomized them. When he came into the league in 1985, the standards for catches, yards and touchdowns were 657 (Charlie Joiner), 11,834 (Don Maynard) and 99 (Don Hutson). At the moment, Rice’s career totals stand at 1,524, 22,533 and 194.
But Jerry wants more. And he’s willing to be a second or third option, if that’s what it takes, to keep the passes coming his way. He just doesn’t want to be an afterthought, a veritable casino greeter, like he is in Oakland. With him, it isn’t “Show me the money!” He’s got plenty of that. It’s “Show me the pigskin!”
We witnessed the same sad scene with Art Monk at the end of his days with the Redskins. He wasn’t ready to hang ’em up when the club released him in 1994, so he caught 46 meaningless passes for the last-place Jets that season and then hooked on with the Eagles late in ’95 and added six more receptions to his bottom line. Only then did football release its grip on him. Only then, at 38, did he get on with his life.
The last few years, it was Bruce Smith who was shamelessly hanging on, determined to claim the all-time sack record even though he’d become little more than a toreador on run defense. Bru-u-u-ce got his record, all right, but only because Reggie White, the previous holder, knew when to quit.
The same day the Rice trade rumors surfaced, the Cincinnati Reds informed Barry Larkin that, after 19 years, his services were no longer required. Larkin didn’t have a bad season, actually. His batting (.289), slugging (.419) and on base (.352) averages were all about what they usually are (.295, .444, .371). But the Reds are “going young” — don’t you love that term? — and have a couple of kids they want to try at shortstop. So Barry got to end his career-long association with his hometown team with a phone call from his bosses that, as he put it, “wasn’t pleasant.”
This is what happens, almost inevitably, when a sport gets hold of you and won’t let go. If you don’t file for a divorce yourself, your get a call from the GM one day telling you, only slightly more gently than Donald Trump, “You’re fired!”
The poster child for this pestilence is probably Rickey Henderson. In recent years, between stints in the minors, Henderson has squeezed in 123 games with the Padres, 72 with the Red Sox and 30 with the Dodgers, never batting above .227. (And if your club has an opening next season for a 45-year-old outfielder who used to steal a lot of bases, Rickey will be there on the next flight.)
Providing these pour souls with encouragement are people like Julio Franco. Franco, picked up for the 2001 stretch drive by the Braves after four years in the wilderness of Japan, Mexico and Korea, just hit .309 for the National League East champs at 46. If Julio can be reborn so late in the game, why can’t, well, just about anybody?
Then there’s Roger Clemens. After “retiring” on top last season with the Yankees — and throwing his “final” pitch in the World Series — Clemens had a change of heart, signed on with the hometown Astros and, at 42, has a chance to win his seventh Cy Young Award and throw his “final” pitch in the Series again.
Returning to Mr. Rice, Jerry is only two years removed from the Super Bowl himself. Maybe he has fantasies of getting there one last time with the Lions.
Or maybe it’s something else that drives him. I’m reminded of another famous line, this one from “Chinatown.” “Why are you doing it?” Jake Gittes asks Noah Cross about a shady deal that figures to make the aged millionaire richer still. “How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can’t already afford?”
“The future, Mr. Gittes,” Cross replies, “the future.”
Perhaps Rice looks at Randy Moss, with his 549 catches, 8,680 yards and 84 touchdowns through 100 games (Jerry’s numbers were 492, 8,556 and 87 at the same stage) and wonders whether his records really are that safe. Perhaps he continues on, in obvious decline, because he’s trying to buy something that can’t be bought — the future, Mr. Moss, the future.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.