You happy NFL? This is what your lockout has done? With no football all summer, no free agency, nothing really going on except the endless speculation of will they, won’t they get a deal done, here’s where I ended up on a Friday–at the downtown Seattle opening of a Seahawks-Sounders store. On hand at the opening were Sounders goalie Kasey Keller and former Seahawk Walter Jones. The big production was them getting molds made of their hands, but that wasn’t why I went. I figured with Jones on hand it’s be worth catching up with the big left tackle.
He said he has no regrets about retiring when he did, and that he only misses the camaraderie of the locker room.
“It’s been good,” he said. “Just to get away from the game has been great. I don’t regret it, there’s no itch to play again. The 13 years that I played, I put my all into it, so for me to walk away was fine.”
Jones splits time between Seattle and Alabama, and said most of his free time is spent being a dad to his 11-year-old twins, Walterius and Waleria.
“Just running around with the kids,” he said. “My son, I’m getting him into the sports thing now. A lot of people ask if I’m going to get into coaching or something, but I haven’t figured that out yet, because I don’t want to get into something that I’m not ready to be in right now.”
Another reason I wanted to catch up with Jones is that he was the king of jumping into a football season without a proper offseason and preseason worth of workouts. That, of course, is relevant because whenever this lockout ends, the entire league will have to do what he made a habit of during all those years of holdouts.
His advice to players: “Just get healthy and get in shape. When I was missing it, I was doing the things that I had to do to get myself ready. I wasn’t out there running with receivers or running backs. I did the stuff that I knew I needed to do. I don’t need to run long distance, I work in a box, so I had to do the things that would get me ready for football.”
Then again, it’s worth noting that Jones was a once-in-a-generation talent, and that very few players could get away with missing as much time as he did and still play at such a high level.
Asked if he thought he was missing anything by missing so many offseason workouts and training camps, Jones smiled and said, “Nah. Nah. I never felt like I was missing a lot.”
Then again, as he points out, it won’t be as easy for the current Seahawks, who will be adjusting to a fourth offensive coordinator in as many years.
“The best thing for me was that we were in the same offense,” he said. “If we were changing coaches a lot that would be tough, but for me it was easier because we were always in the same system.”
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