COMMENTARY: THE KING

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Just like a game-ending interception in overtime of a big playoff game, Peter King’s retirement announcement on Monday came down with a large, heavy thud.

The dean of pro football writers in America announced in his popular Monday Morning Quarterback column that this week’s edition would be his last.

There seemed to be no warning nor signs that King was nearing the end of his time as the most prolific writer in the history of football, but he revealed to his millions of readers that his heart simply wasn’t in it anymore.

Peter King started that column in Sports Illustrated in 1997 before it moved over to NBC’s ProFootballTalk.com. As a kid, I bought SI for the photos but as an adult, I bought it for Peter’s column.

Did you read it? Each week he took us inside the lives of the football greats. Belichick, Parcells and Jerry Jones were legends for what they did on Sunday anyway, but Peter King made us feel like we knew them. And he was just as big a part of the NFL as those icons, as far as I’m concerned.

I took that magazine with me through the millions of bus miles and air miles I logged during my career, reading his prose forwards and backwards. It felt like Peter was right there with me.

The good ones have a way of doing that.

Nobody – and I mean nobody – wrote like Peter King and damn sure never will.

The way he started off his columns like, “At a Waffle House in Florence, South Carolina …” or, “In the lobby of a Holiday Inn in Tempe, Arizona …” made me imagine what that life was like.

So much so that it inspired me to go off and see those places on my own. And they are just as terrific as Peter wrote about each week.

He’s inspired me in so, so many ways. (i.e. ‘How can I take this weekend off from writing a column? Peter King isn’t.’)

In June of 2014, Peter King made a tour through the CFL and made a stop in Regina for a Ticats/Riders game. It was a torrential downpour that day and the game was delayed.

Peter helped us fill the time by visiting in the broadcast booth and telling football stories.

Earlier this month I bumped into him at Super Bowl in Las Vegas. We literally crossed paths in a crowded corridor at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. He smiled and waved and I wondered if he actually remembered that afternoon at Taylor Field a decade ago.

Only he knew, I suppose, that that would be his last Super Bowl after attending 40 in a row. However with the NFL Combine and Draft upcoming, King revealed he just doesn’t care that much about it anymore. And when that’s the case, it’s time to go.

His bosses offered for him to cut his 10,000-word column in half but he felt if he can’t do it the way it should be done, he doesn’t want to do it at all.

I felt that.

Now in his late 60’s, Peter King said he wants to see if there’s life out there and wants to experience it before it’s too late.

I’m happy to report, that there is.

That’s today’s Rod Pedersen Commentary

(The Rod Pedersen Show airs daily at 12 pm & 5 pm on Game+TV, WQEE Radio, Podcast & YouTube Live)