Warner: Rare Great Who Shouldn't Retire

Normally, I run the Legacy Protection Program, urging premier athletes to retire so our fondest memories don't fade on a tear-drop canvas of creaking bones, senility and Viagra ads. Among them was Michael Jordan, who used to scold me in the parking lot of the Chicago gym where he was preparing his comeback with the Washington Wizards. "I put your articles on my refrigerator door so I can prove you wrong," he'd say, tossing in f-bombs where applicable.

I was right about Jordan, who accomplished little in downtown D.C. beyond helping the arena-area develop with chain stores and bars. I'm right about most others, too. But this time, I'm sensing that a 38-year-old quarterback named Kurt Warner actually has two excellent years left in him, if not more, and that he shouldn't retire from the Arizona Cardinals.

He's going to anyway, it appears, having announced a Friday news conference in which family members will be present. One doesn't invite the wife and kids and all the relatives merely to announce, "Get your tickets now, fans, for the '10 season!" But while Warner worries about his faith, concussions, seven children and living a long, healthy life -- heartfelt concerns, all -- I'm fixed on his performance of only 2 1/2 weeks ago. In one of the magnificent quarterbacking shows in NFL postseason history, he completed 29 of 33 passes for 379 yards and five touchdowns. Indeed, he had more scoring passes than incompletions, and he led the Cardinals to a 51-45 overtime victory over a Green Bay team with a defense that had been ranked among the NFL's best.

"I don't think you ever want to stay too long," he said after the game, "but you never want to go out before it's time. The hard part is trying to figure that out."

Warner sided with caution. And while it's hard to do anything but applaud a football player able to walk away from a violent sport on his terms, I value the art of quarterbacking enough to revere Warner's production the last two seasons. If the Cardinals had any sort of defense, the man might have won a Super Bowl ring last year and reached the big game again this year. Clearly, he is armed with the kind of potent receivers and newfound running game that would have made Arizona an NFC contender again next season. Once owned by dimwits and cheapskates, the Cardinals have become a respected destination with a state-of-the-art, retractable-dome stadium -- the carted-in grass even grows now -- that allows management to spend on free agents. With the promise of defensive help, Michael Bidwill, son of Bolo Tie Bill, could have convinced Warner to make one more run. Didn't he throw for 3,753 yards and 26 TDs in the regular season? Wasn't his passer rating a crackling 154.1 against the Packers, second highest in a postseason game to Peyton Manning's perfect 158.3 in 2004?

In fact, in his 13 postseason games, hasn't he thrown for 31 touchdowns and averaged 304 passing yards? Isn't his career postseason passer rating of 102.8 second-best of all-time? Hasn't he won nine of those games? And what did he say only a couple of weeks ago about the thrill of playoff football? "When it comes playoff time, you don't get to say, 'It's OK, we lost that one, but we'll get the next one.' I think that's what I love so much about it,'' he said. "It's the ultimate competition. To me, that's fun."

But Warner is a different cat. As his wife, Brenda, said of his decision, "That will be between Kurt and God," which means God apparently doesn't care that Warner is leaving $11.5 million on the table for what would have been his final season under contract. Last we heard from him, Warner left some hints that he was retiring. "I don't want to come back just to get the paycheck or just because I've signed that contract if I can't do everything that I would want to do or if I'm not willing to do everything that I've done in the past," Warner said. "That's the bottom line."

Also looming as factors, as we've heard from forty-something Brett Favre in his waffling periods, are the physical and mental demands. "The farther I've gotten into this, the more and more I demand of myself,'' he said. "Physically, that's staying in shape because I'm older; mentally, that's in preparing and putting in work and time to trying to help put this thing together the way that I want it put together."

Close as he is to going out on top, I'm surprised Warner won't try one last time. Rarely does an athlete bow out with so much left to offer. In any grappling of thought, ego usually wins out over common sense. If Warner had a regular jock ego, he'd be back. Consider all the praise he won at season's end. "For a guy that's played the way he's played for us this year, it's hard to think about him not continuing to play," said Cardinals coach Ken Whisenhunt, who calls Warner the best postseason quarterback of all time. "Just his ability to see the field, to anticipate, to be accurate with his throws, move around in the pocket, which he's worked very hard at; those are all things that don't let me think he's ready to stop yet."

"When Kurt is playing at this kind of level -- seeing the field and being able to diagnose what the defense is doing to him, getting the ball out of his hands so quickly -- he's hard to deal with," said Larry Fitzgerald, who became an All-Pro receiver with Warner throwing to him. "He's a special player, Hall of Fame-caliber."

Actually, Warner will be a first-ballot Hall of Famer. His story is unprecedented in its Disney-fied charm, the miraculous ascent of an undrafted free agent from Northern Iowa who originally was cut by the Packers and went to work stocking shelves for $5.50 an hour at a Hy-Vee grocery store in Cedar Falls, Iowa. He starred in the Arena League and landed a tryout with the Chicago Bears, but he had to miss the session after a spider bit him on his throwing elbow during his honeymoon. Only after playing in NFL Europe, where he led the league in touchdowns and passing yards, did the St. Louis Rams make him a backup. You know the rest. Trent Green blew out his knee, Warner took over, and he capitalized on slippery weapons that included Marshall Faulk, Isaac Bruce, Torry Holt and Az-Zahir Hakim -- "The Greatest Show on Turf" -- to throw for 4,353 yards and 41 touchdowns. When the Rams won the Super Bowl, Warner became one of the unlikeliest heroes in American sports history.



And though he struggled with fumbles and other issues with the New York Giants, Warner also will be remembered for helping resurrect two tattered franchises -- the Rams and Cardinals -- and lathering them with pride and more than 100 scoring passes apiece. Anyone who thinks he rode the coattails of "The Greatest Show on Turf" wasn't watching him in Arizona, where he turned receivers into stars. That he is retiring with only one Super Bowl title shouldn't diminish his body of work. He is, unarguably, the ultimate rags-to-riches story, leaving $11.5 million behind when he was scraping to make $5.50 an hour just 15 years ago. Rather than be greedy with the twilight of his career, he is appreciative and thankful of one championship, two MVP awards, five Pro Bowl berths, 32,344 passing yards, 208 touchdowns and a 93.7 career passer rating.

As he told ESPN.com's RIck Reilly, "The three hours on Sunday are still fun. But it's the whole week, the whole commitment, the ability to sustain it to your fullest, day in and day out. You feel the pressure. You have a game that isn't that great, and people are like, 'What's wrong with Warner?' That wears on you. You don't have the joy and the fun and satisfaction of having one of those great games because everybody expects you to have one of those games. You never get to exhale."

Unlike Favre, who will make the Minnesota Vikings wait again for his answer about 2010, Warner was quick with his decision. We should admire him for that urgency, too, as it shows respect for a franchise that has to pursue a title-caliber quarterback and can't possibly consider Matt Leinart in that category. "I would never want to do that to an organization," Warner said. "I want to let them know as soon as I know for sure." Now, the Cardinals are in position to trump the Favre-paralyzed Vikings in the chase for Donovan McNabb, who needs a change of scenery after too many years in Philadelphia, lives in Arizona in the offseason and would thrive throwing to Fitzgerald, Steve Breaston and Early Doucet and handing off to Beanie Wells and Tim Hightower.

Warner insists he wouldn't retire because of his three career concussions -- or is it four or five? Even after being pummeled in the chest in the divisional round by New Orleans defensive end Bobby McCray, who rocked him with a clean hit while running in the open field after throwing an interception, Warner said the play wouldn't enter his thought process. But it's well-established that he was deeply disturbed when his teammate, receiver Anquan Boldin, had his jaw broken with a devastating hit last season. He texted his wife that day and told her he was retiring. Turns out he waited another season and a half before finally pulling the trigger.

I wish he would have waited another year, too. But how can we not understand? And how can we not be thrilled for Kurt Warner when he stands at a desert podium Friday, healthy and satisfied, and concludes the remarkable story that had me at Hy-Vee.