Colts’ Luck hopes healthy off-season leads to better results
INDIANAPOLIS - Andrew Luck spent three offs-easons fighting his way back from injuries. Now he can reap the reward.
After returning to the field, making it back to the playoffs, regaining his Pro Bowl form and collecting The Associated Press NFL Comeback Player of the Year Award, a healthy Luck now intends to take a rare and welldeserved break from football.
“I’ll be honest, I probably won’t throw for a while,” he said before cleaning out his locker. “There will be tweaks, there will be changes to what I do (this off-season) but all of it is geared to one, make me as happy as possible and two, set me up to improve as a quarterback and improve as a person.”
How Luck will spend his downtime is unclear.
Peyton Manning broke the monotony with hunting trips. Brett Favre worked on his ranch. Tom Brady won a Super Bowl after changing last year’s offseason routine to spend more time with his family and less on football. They all learned throwing more balls doesn’t necessarily make a better quarterback.
Matt Hasselbeck, a three-time Pro Bowler who backed up Favre and Luck during his 17-year career, became a believer. So after hearing a story about Manning meeting a former U.S. president one off-season, Hasselbeck accepted an offer from assistant coach Clyde Christensen to spend time with a Navy admiral.
“He talked to us in our quarterback meeting one day about protecting the football because we’d had some issues and he used this analogy of what they tell Top Gun pilots,” Hasselbeck said. “It was basically that you have this great plane you get to fly and it does not belong to you. It belongs to the government, it belongs to the people. Clyde said we should take the admiral up on spending some time with him. So I did that one off-season.
“That’s an example of something that’s not necessarily X’s and O’s but it’s a form of leadership training or just working on you and if you’re working on you, you’re improving everything about you.”
It was a message Hasselbeck relayed to Luck after joining the Colts in 2013. But it was a hard sell to a young workout warrior with the pressure and expectations of a No. 1 draft pick.
While Luck enjoyed vacationing in Europe, where he spent part of his childhood reading books, following soccer and riding bikes, the desire to improve drove him to work out.
In time, Hasselbeck’s message sank in.
“When we were first teammates, I told him there are going to be some years that are fun and they’re easy and you’re healthy the whole year,” said Hasselbeck, who now works for ESPN. “There’s going to be other years when it’s miserable and you’re dealing with something the whole year and you’re in the training room all the time. You’re there early and you’re there late and you’re in pain and you’re on drugs.
“That conversation came up when I was talking about how long I wanted to play. This year we were talking and Andrew said ‘I remember you saying it and it didn’t make sense then.’ He said now it totally makes sense.”