Hustling through the Atlanta airport to make my flight to the next camp (Miami's, in this case), and on the phone I've got one of the very good guys I've covered in my career, Pats/Eagles/Steelers/Cardinals/Seahawks special-teamer Sean Morey. He's explaining his post-concussion-syndrome-prompted retirement, and I ask him: "What do you feel like right now, physically?''
"Like I just finished playing a tough game,'' he said, speaking softly from a Starbucks in Seattle. "Like I'd just made six or seven tackles.''
And, of course, it's been almost eight months since the 34-year-old Morey played. In the past couple of years, it had taken him longer each offseason to get back to his baseline, to feeling well with no lingering headaches from the season. This year, that time never came. And though he signed a multi-year deal with Seattle in the offseason to rejoin
Pete Carroll, coach of the team that drafted him from Brown in 1999 (New England), he couldn't live a lie and pretend he was OK. Over the weekend, he was making arrangements to pay back the signing bonus the Seahawks gave him in March.
At least two independent doctors told him he shouldn't play. And as co-chair of the NFL Players Association's concussion and traumatic brain injury committee, Morey knew he couldn't be a good union leader if he swept such an important injury under the rug.
"He's unlike any player I've ever met,'' said NFLPA executive director
DeMaurice Smith Sunday night. "In a game known for passion, Sean surpasses that with his dedication to players past, present and future. He's doing more than his part to make the game safer. He has an intensity for all that is right that is, frankly, all-consuming.''
Morey has walked a tightrope as a player trying to be one of the best special-teamers of this era (he was my special-teamer of the decade for 2000-09) and as a union man trying to get his peers to respect the brain trauma that so many players try to hide. "In many ways,'' he told me, "all the education I've gotten on the subject is a curse, but it also gave me the proper perspective to be able to make a decision like this one. I am held to a higher standard, and I should be. I owe it to the players in the game to help make changes that will help players going forward.''
Carroll told his first Seattle team about Morey's decision at his first team meeting the other night. He said Morey scratched and clawed to make the NFL, that his way to the league was paved with hardship and being cut multiple times. He even drove to Foxboro once in a furniture truck for a company he worked for, trying to get the Patriots to take another look at him after he'd been cut. That, Carroll said, is the kind of player he wanted with the Seahawks, and the room broke out in applause for Morey.
When Morey knew he had to tell Seahawk GM
John Schneider and Carroll his decision last week, Carroll took it well. He picked up a football, and the two men went out to the field. They played catch.
"You know,'' Carroll said to Morey, throwing the ball in a tight spiral, "people ask me the best part of my job. I tell them, 'I get to go out and play catch.' ''
A couple of days later, the memory made Morey go quiet.
"That,'' he said, "was a nice touch. Football's the kind of game you love so much that you want to hold on 'til it throws you off. Because someday, for all of us, it will throw you off, no matter how tight you try to hang on.''
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Originally Posted by st33lersguy
