Why Do Most Professional Athletes Wait so Long to Retire?

13, 662 rushing yards and one Super Bowl victory later, Jerome Bettis said, "You know it's time to put The Bus in the garage. You know it's been an incredible career. It's time to call it quits."

Announcing his retirement, the Pittsburgh Steelers running back proved that the hardest thing to do in sports isn't hitting a 90-mile-an-hour fastball or racing in the Indianapolis 500 or making the game-winning basket with 1.5 seconds left on the clock. In making his bittersweet and graceful exit from tennis, Jerome Bettis joined that short list of athletes (Rocky Marciano, Jim Brown, John Elway) who knew when it was time to go.

Maybe what helped Bettis make up his mind was seeing what an ugly train wreck Michael Jordan made of his retirement years ago. God, it was ugly.

When His Airness announced his intention to play for the Washington Wizards, I was honestly caught in an uncomfortable ambivalence trying to decide whether it was a good idea or not. It's really difficult trying to be objective about a phenomenon.

So when Jordan said he was coming back, confident he could once again be a dominant force in the NBA, we obediently ignored logic and nodded our collective heads in agreement. After all, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "To achieve the impossible, we must first attempt the absurd". Michael Jordan's brilliant career was a triumphant illustration of beating the odds again and again. Why shouldn't he be able to do it again?

Unfortunately, Emerson never played professional basketball. When Shaquille O'Neal was asked his opinion about Jordan's comeback, he simply replied, "39 ain't 29, bro".

Once we removed the lenses of rose-colored nostalgia from our eyes, the man who we saw playing with the Washington Wizards was the Ghost of Jordan Past, a good-but no longer great-athlete who was slower, prone to injury, missed crucial shots late in the game, and argued openly with teammates. When we look back at the end of his career, Michael Jordan won't be on the list with Jerome Bettis. Instead, he'll be on that other list-that long, sad list of athletes with diminished skills who didn't know when to go.

Hey look, there's Eric Lindos, Muhammad Ali, Joe Namath, Willie Mays, Patrick Ewing, Emmitt Smith, David Cone, Wayne Gretzky, Martina Navratilova-uhh, let's stop here. As I said earlier, it's a long list.

When it comes to reading the handwriting on the wall, so many athletes remain stubbornly illiterate. I never used to understand why until I saw a interview with the blues guitarist Johnny Winter on television one day.

Winter was promoting a new CD and he looked tired and bored as he answered questions he probably heard hundreds of times before. But then, by accident, the reporter asked him the right question: "So, Mr. Winter-how do you feel about what you do for a living?" It was as if she flipped a light switch on inside him. A bright happy smile lit up his face and he replied, "Well, it's a job-but it's a good job."

Forget about rich idiots like Dave Chapelle who blubbered on Oprah about how his fame turned him into a "prostitute". For blue collar guys living in America these days, a "good job" with a decent salary, medical benefits and a pension is getting harder and harder to find. I think Winter smiled because he knew his talent bought him the karmic equivalent of a million-dollar lottery ticket and he was damned lucky.

Besides, provided he stays healthy and people keep buying his CDs and going to his shows Winter can do his job as long as he wants. Much longer than the guys wearing jockstraps, that's for sure. And I bet that drives retired athletes like Michael Jordan crazy.

Call them wrinkled anachronisms in spandex from the Jurassic era of rock and roll, but the Rolling Stones still sell out across the country. No kid himself, Stephen King's latest novel, Cell, is parked into his usual reserved spot on the New York Times bestsellers list. And 69-year-old Morgan Freeman won an Oscar for Million Dollar Baby (directed by Clint Eastwood, by the way, another gifted old fart). But poor Michelle Kwan, after struggling with injuries that wouldn't go away, is retiring from ice skating competition because she's too "old". She's 25.

Tragically, when you're an athlete, the window where you can do your job productively is temporary; it's only open for a short period of time. If you're not careful and stay around too long, Father Time will slam that window shut on your fingers . Hard.

But Jerome Bettis knew better than that. At his press conference he said, "I am the luckiest football player ever to play the game. I've been waiting for this day for 13 years, and for it to come in my hometown, with the team I love, in front of so many of the fans I love...You send this script to Hollywood, they'd say, 'This is too fake. '"

And sometimes Hollywood won't give you a happy ending when the movie is done. Great athletes don't always win championships. Ask Ernie Banks or Patrick Ewing . So, after winning everything he ever wanted in his professional career, Bettis wisely decided to quit his job before the job quit him.

To paraphrase an old Gatorade ad, Jerome Bettis didn't "want to be like Mike."