Learn about professional athletes' amazing second acts.
By Alison Ford for Divine Caroline
Nobody ever said a sports career lasts forever. Athletes continually retire or retreat from their games due to age, injury, illness, incarceration, or just plain exhaustion. But after a while, many just can’t stay away. Even Michael Vick—one of the most hated men in professional sports—served out his jail sentence and is back on the football field. After time away from the limelight, plenty of players try to return to the sport that made them famous.
Michael Jordan
After leading the Chicago Bulls to three consecutive championships in 1991, 1992, and 1993, Michael Jordan was considered the greatest basketball player in the history of the game, but he decided unexpectedly to retire at the age of thirty. Having accomplished every feat imaginable for a basketball star, including starring in a movie as himself (Space Jam), playing on a gold medal–winning Olympic team, and having a line of sneakers named after him, he decided to try his hand at another sport: baseball. Jordan played for a minor league team within the Chicago White Sox farm system and earned middling but respectable batting averages. Then, in 1995, having rediscovered his love for basketball, Jordan returned to the NBA and the Bulls and, in his first complete season back, led the team to yet another championship—followed by two more. After victories in 1996, 1997, and 1998, Jordan retired once more in 1999. But then, after the 9/11 attacks, Jordan returned to basketball yet again for two more seasons, this time playing for the Washington Wizards, and announced that he would donate his salary to relief efforts.
Kim Clijsters
Clijsters was so successful as a junior tennis player that she earned a spot on the women’s pro tour, where she won the French Open and Wimbledon in 2003, reached the quarterfinals of both the Australian Open and the U.S. Open, and eventually became the number one–ranked female tennis player in the world. Then, in 2006, she announced abruptly that she was engaged to an American basketball player in her home country of Belgium, and that she was retiring in order to have a family. In 2008, she gave birth to a daughter, and in 2009, at age twenty-seven, she decided to return to tennis again. Her first year back on the tour, she didn’t even have a ranking that qualified her to play in the U.S. Open, but she entered as a wild card anyway and won the tournament—she was the first woman with a child to do so in decades. Clijsters claimed that she became a stronger player after her pregnancy than she had been before.
Mario Lemieux
Lemieux’s brilliance on the ice secured two Stanley Cups for his longtime team, the Pittsburgh Penguins, and an Olympic gold medal in 2002 for his home country, Canada, but his career was always plagued by injuries and health issues, including a bout with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He retired in 1997 and was instantly inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. By the late 1990s, years of financial mismanagement forced the Penguins to declare bankruptcy and consider the possibility of leaving their home city, but Lemieux had an idea to save the team: he bought it. As the leader of a group of investors, he paid off all the Penguins’ creditors and insisted that the team stay in Pittsburgh. He then returned to the ice himself in 2000 and played for another six seasons as the first player-owner in modern sports.
Kelly Slater
By the time Slater was in his teens, he was already acknowledged as a surfing superstar. At the age of twenty, he won his first World Championship title from the Association of Surfing Professionals, becoming the youngest competitor ever to do so. Throughout the ’90s, he was a worldwide ambassador of surfing, winning five more ASP championship titles and becoming his sport’s most visible, most beloved, and most honored superstar. But in 1999, he quit surfing unexpectedly to star in one season of Baywatch and perform in a band with a few other surfers. By 2003, however, he was ready to ride again. When he rejoined the tour, he broke his own record for most championships by winning three more titles in 2005, 2006, and 2008. In 2010, Slater won an unprecedented tenth ASP World Championship—and, at age thirty-eight, gained the additional distinction of being the oldest surfer to ever clinch the title.
Dara Torres
In 1984, Torres was seventeen years old and a member of the 4 x 100–meter relay team that won the gold medal at the Los Angeles Summer Olympics. Torres was a prominent member of the U.S. swimming team at three more Olympic Games—1988 in Seoul, 1992 in Barcelona, and 2000 in Sydney—and earned medals at each.
By the 2000 games, she was thirty-three and already the oldest member of the team, and even though she won more medals that year than any other American swimmer, she announced her well-earned retirement, telling acquaintances that she had no plans to ever swim again. She stayed in shape by biking and running, but when she got pregnant in 2006, she started swimming as a low-impact workout and couldn’t resist resuming competition. She began training intensively and qualified for the 2008 games in Beijing, at age forty-one, and earned another medal. Torres is now the first woman in history to swim in the Olympics past the age of forty and the only American to compete in five separate games, and has publicly stated her intention to qualify for the London games in 2012.
Whether athletes are beloved and revered or hated and ridiculed, they’re never really forgotten. For some who love their sport deeply, retirement is so painful that they’ll find their way back by any means necessary. And for the most talented sports legends, the second act can be even more magnificent than the first.