Luck’s journey back:
Recovering from a shoulder injury, the Colts’ franchise QB rises from a dark place to find a bright perspective on his comeback season.
INDIANAPOLIS – His retreat, his escape from the guilt and pressure and “shame” of it all — his word — arrived halfway across the world. Andrew Luck spent Thanksgiving and Christmas in the Netherlands, carving a turkey he bought from the local butcher, poring through books, trying to learn Dutch. It was there, while he slogged through rehab sessions that felt like they were going nowhere, when he finally began to wrap his head around his reality. Hope withering, pain persistent, he realized he might never play football again. Worse yet, he wasn’t sure he wanted to. He was 28 years old.
It sent him into a dark place, a place where hope was hard to see. He’d been lying to himself for months, believing he’d wake up one morning and the pain would be gone. It never happened. The pain stayed. The nightmare dragged on. He grew impatient. Angry. He kept throwing, and some days after he was finished, he could barely move his arm. “I was a sad, miserable human,” he remembers. “I was not nice to myself, nor was I nice to anyone else. I was a miserable SOB to be around. I was nervous. I was scared.”
Torn cartilage in two ribs, a partially torn abdomen, a lacerated kidney that left him peeing blood, a bum ankle, an injured thumb, a concussion — name the body part and the Indianapolis Colts franchise quarterback has played through it. But this was different. This was a wrecked throwing shoulder, bludgeoned by years of abuse, the discomfort for so long crammed to the back of his mind, often numbed by painkilling injections. The NFL winnows life into a weekly war, and those wars must be won. A “binary” existence, Luck calls it. Sundays were all that mattered.
Now the price was more than he could bear.
He played hurt for two years, and somewhere in between the ribs and the kidney and the shoulder Andrew Luck lost his football innocence. The game used to be so much fun. Now it was so much agony. Would it ever be fun again? Would he ever throw without pain again? What if he just walked away? “There was an uncertainty, an apprehension,” he says. “I was scared, scared in my core, in my insides. There was a time I was very scared about football and about my place in football.”
‘Went through hell’
For so long, there was something refreshing about Andrew Luck, the privileged son of an NFL quarterback who never acted like he was a bigger deal than the backup left guard. He coolly replaced the most iconic athlete in the city’s history (Peyton Manning), then made no mention of it. He won 36 games his first three years with a shoddy offensive line and no run game, then praised his teammates and coaches. He celebrated a $140 million contract extension by attending a fundraiser at a children’s museum. He rides his bike to the Indy 500. He’s been dating his college girlfriend for 10 years. He’d be the last NFL player to join Instagram.
“A lot of guys love being in the NFL, not a lot of guys just love football,” his former backup, Matt Hasselbeck, once said. “Andrew Luck just loves football. There’s a difference.”
But fat contract or not, Luck wouldn’t be doing this if he didn’t love it, and he didn’t love football in 2017. He hated it. Hated himself at times, too. “If I wasn’t having fun playing football, I’d quit, I’d retire,” he says flatly. “I wouldn’t do it ... if I didn’t love team sports, I’d do track and field.”
It started on one of those Sundays where a game had to be won. The Colts were a quarter from 0-3 early in the 2015 season, on the road in Tennessee, until Luck lifted them to a stunning 14-point comeback in the fourth. His heroics came at a tremendous cost. His shoulder was beat to a pulp that day. The pain wouldn’t go away for almost three years.
After deciding against surgery after that season, he had no choice a year later. He spent half of 2016 in the training room, crawling his way to Sundays, somehow carrying the Colts to eight wins. All the while the shoulder grew worse. Loathe to talk about himself, all Luck will concede on the matter is that the year was “taxing.”
Colts owner Jim Irsay offers a clearer view: “He really went through hell.”
But 10 months after the surgery, the shoulder still wasn’t working, the losses were piling up and time was running out. A cortisone shot did no good, so the Colts shut him down. Luck blamed himself, then questioned himself. Tired of being the story, he hopped on a plane bound for Europe, unsure if that shoulder would ever let him play football again.
The joy that seemed stamped across his face his first few years in the league, the joy that first sprouted when an 8-year-old popped a scratchy tape into the VCR of his dad, Oliver, playing quarterback for the Houston Oilers, was fading.
Andrew Luck’s love for football blossomed on the playground at the American School in London, where he drew post patterns on his palm for his Swedish, Italian and Korean classmates.
He never imagined the game could be taken from him before he turned 30.
But slowly, the pain had robbed him of that joy, stolen something from him he wasn’t ready to lose. This wasn’t one of the physical hurdles Luck so routinely cleared early in his NFL career. The brainy kid out of Stanford could take the punishment with the best of ’em, rise to his feet, toss a compliment to the defensive end who’d just turned his body into a piñata, and fire a touchdown the next play. “He’s got grit,” said Chuck Pagano, his head coach of six years. “He’s not soft like everybody else.”
But this wasn’t about grit or toughness or how much pain Luck could swallow. For months, this was about patience, and Andrew Luck didn’t