I’m not going to announce my retirement this week, but I may just declare myself old.
There aren’t many professional athletes who were throwing footballs or hitting baseballs when I was in high school still reporting to camp these days.
Who knows? Bartolo Colon or Manny Ramirez may report to spring training for some pitiful team in a few weeks.
But as it stands today, Tiger Woods may be the only one still swinging from the old, old days.
I graduated high school in 2001. That was the year a rookie named Albert Pujols burst onto the baseball scene, seemingly out of nowhere, and began clubbing his way to a Hall of Fame career for the Cardinals.
There was not a lot of interest in Pujols when it came to the draft in 1999. St. Louis eventually selected him in the 13th round as the 402nd overall pick that year.
Pujols retired at the end of last season, having hit 703 homers, with over 3,000 hits.
A few months after Pujols made his MLB debut, I was sitting in my dorm room watching the evening AFC football action. That was when a young quarterback few people had heard of at the time named Tom Brady came into a game to replace Drew Bledsoe for New England.
Brady, like Pujols, wasn’t a highly-touted prospect.
The Patriots took Brady as the 199th pick in 2000, a compensatory selection in the sixth round.
Over the next two-plus decades, Brady and Pujols would solidify themselves as the best in their respective sports.
Despite being a Saints fan all my life, there’s no question that Brady is the best quarterback in NFL history.
He amassed nearly 90,000 passing yards during the regular season over his career, with 649 touchdowns. Tack on 13,000 more yards in postseason play, along with 35 more wins (251 regular season) and 88 more touchdowns.
Brady, along with the likes of Peyton Manning and Drew Brees, led a special era for professional football that we likely won’t see again anytime soon.
Quarterbacks are just different these days. They are faster, and even perhaps more athletic (seemingly), but I don’t think we’ll see the longevity out of this crop that we saw with the former studs.
The same can be said about baseball.
Pujols was probably the last of his kind in a lot of respects.
We’ll see players far more athletic come through the ranks, but the bursts of statistical domination will be more short-lived.
Pujols, like Hank Aaron, was a model of consistency. He never hit 50 or 60 homers. He just hit 30 to 40 a season for a very long time.
Pujols and Brady were able to stay consistent by staying healthy. They took care of themselves on and off the field.
Both are now over the age of 40, with Brady hitting the 45 mark this year, but these two could probably still go out and play another round if they wanted to.
Despite Tampa’s embarrassing loss to Dallas a few weeks ago, Brady’s arm still holds up, certainly better than Manning’s or Brees’ at the end of their respective runs.
When protected, Brady can throw it as good as anybody, which means he did not go out on the bottom.
Neither did Pujols, whose team suffered a similar first-round loss in October.
He was still clubbing homers by the end of the 2022 season.
The only thing I have in common with Brady and Pujols is that I believe I was picked least likely to succeed around the turn of the century as well.
All three of us have spent the last twenty or so years trying to “prove them wrong.”
Brady and Pujols did so. I’m still trying.
