In the Wake of Brett Favre – Sports Most Notable Un-Retirements

Ah, the art of the un-retirement. Some people have mastered it and some people haven’t. I’m not sure Brett Favre has mastered it, because he has made a fair amount of people angry and frustrated with it. Hey, that’s not the idea.

By the way, I don’t consider Favre’s latest "comeback" to be any kind of comeback at all, because there is an uninterrupted string of seasons where he has played in the NFL. Players who sat out a year with injuries and returned have made more of a comeback. As far as the retired-unretired scenario is concerned, those are simply theatrics. I’m from the boxing world, so I am very used to seeing these charades unfold. One of them, in fact, is unfolding right now, as Floyd Mayweather is ready to get back in the ring. There is no serious person around boxing who really believed he was retired, or as one writer once put it, when describing a "retiring" pugilist, "He is retired….until his next fight."

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Here are some REAL comeback stories – athletes who retired, then unretired, in a substantial way.

MARIO LEMIEUX – He may be the king of spectacular un-retirements. Lemieux came back, during the 1992-93 season, from Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, in the middle of a season where he was leading the NHL in scoring. After two months of radiation treatment, he came back to play, and set a blistering pace to overtake Pat LaFontaine, who had passed him in the scoring race. He then retired in 1997, and came back in 2000, as a player/owner, scoring 76 points in only 43 games. Unreal.

MICHAEL JORDAN – A couple of retirements, a couple of comebacks for Michael. The first one is still somewhat shrouded in mystery, since it is suspected by many that he was banished, albeit temporarily, from the NBA for his voracious gambling appetite. He nonetheless came back to lead the Bulls to three more titles. His second comeback, for a Washington Wizards team he was already running, was somewhat less successful aesthetically, but he did manage to score almost 23 points a game until injuries sidetracked him.

LANCE ARMSTRONG – I think when you retire from something like cancer, then come back and ascend to a point where you have basically taken over the world again, you have pulled off one of the great comebacks. That’s where Lemieux fits and that’s also where Armstrong fits. He came back to dominate with seven Tour de France victories, and created a lot of interest for the sport of cycling here in the United States, although his greatest feats (on the athletic field, that is) were overseas.

GEORGE FOREMAN – It is arguable that Foreman’s return after his un-retirement may have been the greatest in all of sports, because not only did he sit out ten years before coming back, he also eventually won the heavyweight championship and in the process completely transformed his image from one of a surly, brooding bad guy to one of the most sponsor-friendly people in sports, in what was perhaps one of the greatest feats of self-management there has ever been. Foreman’s record when he retired in 1977 was 45-2. His record after coming back at age 38 in 1987 was 31-3.

DANA TORRES – The sport of swimming, at the Olympic level anyway, is such an age-sensitive thing that it would appear remarkable that competitors past the age of 30 would have any degree of success. Torres has competed in five different Olympiads, spanning from 1984 to 2008 (she sat out the 1996 and 2004 Games). At the age of 41 she gained three silver medals, a definite first, and she’s not through yet, as she will compete in the World Championships this year for the first time since 1986.

GORDIE HOWE – It’s one thing to un-retire and embark on a comeback. It’s quite another to do it at an advanced age, hit very big, and continue with your success. That’s Gordie Howe, who had been working in the Red Wings’ front office, then returned to hockey with the Houston Aeros of the WHA in 1973 and scored 96 points or more four different times, winning a league MVP award in his first WHA season, carrying things all the way to the 1979-80 season, when he retired as a "five-decade" man at the age of 52. That’s right, he was taking shifts at the age of FIFTY-TWO.

MUHAMMAD ALI – When you think of retiring, then changing your mind, he is one of the guys who immediately pops into your head. Of course, one of those retirements was more or less forced when no U.S. boxing commission would license him. After his comeback in 1970, he eventually went on to beat Foreman for the heavyweight tile, then retired, and unretired, a couple of other times, as he beat Leon Spinks to regain his title in 1978 and was unsuccessful in comeback bouts against Larry Holmes and Trevor Berbick. He’s got Favre beaten by a mile. By the way, so does Sugar Ray Robinson.

GUY LAFLEUR – Already a member of the Hockey Hall of Fame, Lefleur returned to the ice after a three-year respite in 1988, with the New York Rangers and later the Quebec Nordiques. His scoring totals were not eye-popping; in fact he tallied just 107 points in 165 games before leaving the ice for good in 1991.

LARRY HOLMES – Boxing is going to naturally be littered with un-retirements, because its re-entry is relatively easy. Almost every great fighter makes a comeback, and sometimes more than one. I was involved in Holmes’ comeback – I guess it was his second one – after he had been knocked out in one comeback bout against Mike Tyson. In 1991 he fought Tim Anderson and after knocking him out, got in a fight with Trevor Berbick in the parking lot of the hotel (remember that?). Later we put on several more of his comeback bouts in Mississippi, which eventually led Homes to a title shot against Oliver McCall (which he lost). He finally hung up the gloves in 2002, with a few retirements and un-retirements in between. He never got the guy he wanted – another Comeback Kid named George Foreman.

BUSTER DOUGLAS – Speaking of un-retirements, one that could have been more spectacular than anybody’s, if he would have been able to follow it through, was Buster Douglas, who had retired rich after losing his heavyweight title to Evander Holyfield, then ballooned up over 400 pounds, at one point actually going into a diabetic coma. After he came out of it, his doctors strongly advised exercise, and Douglas started to take up boxing again, after almost a six-year hiatus. He was looking good, and may have been able to capture some title, but he got short-circuited by Lou Savarese, who had come close to doing the same to George Foreman a year before.

BOBBY FISCHER – We could go on and on with this list, but when you talk about un-retiring, few took as long or came back out of nowhere quite like Bobby Fischer, who won the world chess title in 1972 in the most ballyhooed match in history against Boris Spassky, a battle for which Fischer trained long and hard from a physical standpoint. He never defended because of haggling with the chess authorities over rules and regulations, then went into seclusion. He did not emerge again until 1992, when he played the rematch against Spassky, in Yugoslavia and in violation of a U.S. embargo. He came out victorious yet again, though the experts considered him past his prime (This entry dedicated to our own Travis Long).