It’s inspirational to hear somebody like 54-year-old Milt Stegall say he’s making a comeback. It’s also delusional. He reported to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers’ rookie camp last week to show that he still has it, inspiring people his age and older — football players or not, athletes or not — because maybe they still have it, whatever their “it” is.
Stegall’s comeback lasted one day. It wasn’t a “so-he-can-retire-in-that-uniform” comeback, it was a training camp comeback. He was a Winnipeg receiver again, for a few hours…wearing number 85, running a few reps, trying to catch a pass. That’s all it was intended to be.
A publicity stunt, sure. A Fantasy Football outing (before “fantasy football” meant gambling), but where ordinary people paid big bucks to throw passes to, field ground balls hit by, or take shots at their retired athletic heroest.
For whatever reason, Stegall needed to do it. Such is his sizeable ego. And while he isn’t the only ex-athlete who ever tried re-winding the tape, he is likely the oldest.
It used to be boxers were the sports heroes who just couldn’t walk away without walking back, over and over again, until mashed brains made them candidates for death by dementia. Yet this is not a market cornered by boxers. Athletes from all sports find it difficult to cope with their lives after the cheering stops, in many cases because the cheering and adulation have been there since they were pre-teens.
Take a look at some of the big names who couldn’t stay retired.
Also in football, Tom Brady was 44 when he quit the first time but his retirement ended before the next season started. He played one more year before he was able to read the writing on the wall. Another quarterback, Brett Favre, came back to play — twice — after retiring “for the winter.”
In baseball, Satchel Paige returned from being retired 12 years, when he was 59, to pitch three innings. Another pitcher, Dave Stieb, returned to the Toronto Blue Jays after four years of inactivity. He made three starts.
In hockey, Gordie Howe quit at 43, then ended a two-year retirement to play with sons Mark and Marty in the World Hockey Association. Howe hung around until he was 52 before retiring, again from the NHL. That retirement lasted 17 years until, at 69, he came back to play one last shift with Detroit — in the International League.
The most successful second career belongs to, of all things, a boxer. Heavyweight champion George Foreman had the cleanest and most-balanced of careers. He quit at 28, un-retired at 38 and quit at 48. He lost two fights in his first decade and three in his second decade, and was “a” heavyweight champion in both. When he left to (among other things) sell grills for a living, Foreman walked away with a pre-historic-like 76-5 record.
Milt Stegall, arguably the best Blue Bombers receiver of all time, had no such delusions this month. He does have a king-sized ego that needed one last cheer, a cheer he would only get in Winnipeg.
“Once I cross that border and go back to Atlanta,” he told Global News, “nobody’s screaming for Milt Stegall number 85.”
