Perspective | In sports, as in politics, stepping away can be a monumental task

Some sage once told me that the hardest thing to do in sports is to manage the career of stars in their declining years, when they are no longer as swift and strong and sharp. Such as great Baltimore Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas, who wound up floundering in San Diego. Or future hockey Hall of Famer Jaromir Jagr, who rather than leave the NHL went to Calgary and suffered being waived. Or Willie Mays, of course. Or just about any champion boxer.

But watching the final run of President Biden reminds that the same can be said of legendary politicians. Like Coach Rob, Biden has been at his passion for more than half a century — or just about all his adult life. It is his life. He served on the New Castle (Del.) County Council starting in 1970. He won election to the U.S. Senate in 1972 at 29 as one of the youngest senators in history. He went on to win reelection six times before becoming a two-term vice president.

And now, just as Coach Rob refused the overtures that he step down — pleading for one more run, to finish what he started on his terms — President Biden, who is misspeaking more often and looking fatigued and fragile, is doing the same. Admittedly.

“I always have an inclination, whether I was playing sports or doing politics,” Biden said at a news conference last week, “just to keep going, not stop.”

It is difficult to watch. And it reminds of how journalists described Mays, the baseball great who died last month, in his final season. He couldn’t stop going, either, at 42 — maybe 81, Biden’s age, in baseball years.

Mays was well past his prime then, batting .211 for the New York Mets. But they made it to the 1973 World Series. And what was most memorable, unfortunately, was Mays missing second base trying to go from first to third on a single by Rusty Staub in the ninth inning of Game 2. He then stumbled and fell. “Rather than embarrass myself, I stopped,” Mays said afterward. “I don’t know how it happened that I missed the bag. I guess it was trying to do two things at the same time — watch the ball and touch the bag.”

In the bottom half of the ninth — in center field, the position he defined — Mays lost sight of a flyball, slipped and face-planted trying to make the catch. He didn’t. It turned into a double. “Ten years ago, he would have put that ball in his back pocket,” Curt Gowdy told the television audience.

Biden is Mays in center field with the Mets now.

“It’s devastating to say it,” actor George Clooney wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece last week, “but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”

“Halting” was one word used over and over to describe Biden’s debate last month with former president Donald Trump, himself two years shy of an 80th birthday.

The thing is, Biden isn’t the first elected official who appears to have stayed for one term or campaign too many. Trump has misspoken in public, too, and lost his train of thought, whatever it is. There was Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who before she died last fall at 90 in her sixth decade in office often sounded confused on the floor. There is 82-year-old Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who announced in February, after two public episodes in which his face froze before cameras as he was speaking, that he is stepping down as the longest-serving Senate leader in history. He’s one of four octogenarians in the Senate. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is 90. There are at least half a dozen U.S. representatives in their 80s.

As the curtain on the last century was falling, Coach Rob was the winningest coach in college football history. He started coaching in Louisiana at historically Black Grambling in 1941. He won Black college championship after Black college championship. He saw 11 presidents inhabit the White House. He put more than 100 players in the NFL and several in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

But none of us can elude Mother Time. By the mid-1990s, in his late 70s, Coach Rob was losing more games than he was winning. His program was being investigated, too, by the NCAA for recruiting violations. Four players were charged with rape.

Even the governor suggested it was time for Coach Rob to retire. But Coach Rob successfully lobbied for one more campaign in 1997 to go out as a winner. His Tigers won three games, the same as the season before.

His most decorated player, quarterback Doug Williams, was chosen as his replacement. And still Coach Rob, 79 then, tried to run out the clock.

Coach Rob continued to come to work. Williams was given a trailer behind the building where Coach Rob had his office. Williams told me last week he didn’t harbor any animosity toward the legend for whom he played, who didn’t avail him of his desk for months. Williams said he understood how hard it was to leave behind something you had worked at your entire life, especially on others’ terms rather than your own.

One season after Coach Rob relinquished his title to Williams, the Tigers managed a winning season. Then they went 31-5 over the following three seasons, in which Williams restored the championship luster to what Coach Rob built.

You can only imagine the momentum Grambling wouldn’t have lost had Coach Rob acceded earlier to the counsel of those around him. The growing chorus of those around President Biden sounds as if they are worried now about one day wondering the same.