Troy Polamalu is indisputably one of the great players in Pittsburgh Steelers history. You wouldn’t have known it watching him during his rookie season, though—and he nearly stopped playing soon after. At least that is what longtime teammate Ryan Clark said Polamalu told him he was considering.
The 16th pick in the 2003 NFL Draft, Polamalu didn’t start as a rookie, but he played a fair amount. He finished that season with 43 tackles, two sacks, and a forced fumble, but his play left much to be desired. While it’s not uncommon for rookies to struggle, it seemed to hit him hard.
Speaking with Jerome Bettis on The Pivot podcast, Clark revealed what Polamalu once told him. “He said that he decided in the offseason going into the second year that if he was as bad as he was the first year, he was gonna retire”. Bettis, who’d just gone on at length about his experiences with Polamalu, could only say, “Wow. Did he? Wow”.
Of course, history didn’t play out that way, for which the Steelers are very thankful. After entering the starting lineup in 2004, Troy Polamalu recorded 97 tackles, a sack, a forced fumble, and five interceptions. He made his first Pro Bowl and was named second-team All-Pro, and he was off to the races. But the transition from college to the pros wasn’t easy for him, and Bettis had a front-row seat.
“Early on I got a chance to see him develop as a football player. They hadn’t figured out his true gift, his true ability”, the Steelers Hall of Famer said of Polamalu. “He had a superpower to be around the football. He knew where the football would be”.
It’s worth noting that Ryan Clark and Troy Polamalu didn’t become teammates until 2006. Obviously, that means Polamalu couldn’t have told Clark in 2004 that he was thinking about retiring if his career didn’t turn the corner. But the two are very dear friends and have obviously had many conversations over the years about football, their careers, and life in general. Nothing in the manner in which Clark stated this indicates he wasn’t completely serious.
Bettis was nearing the end of his career when the Steelers drafted Polamalu. They lockered next to each other and had lengthy conversations about everything under the sun. He also watched Polamalu’s transformation on the field, both in himself and within the Steelers’ defense.
“They didn’t know how to deal with that. And because of that, he felt kind of stymied. It was all in that process of them figuring out who he was”, Bettis said of the Steelers and Polamalu. “I got a chance to have an inside track of seeing how he was processing everything, how he was dealing with different issues.”
Bettis called watching Polamalu blossom one of the “best joys” of his career. “I’ve never seen a player go from an organization thinking, ‘Well, maybe we didn’t get the right guy. We’re not sure on him’, to him being a first-ballot Hall of Famer”.
During his 12-year career, all with the Steelers, Troy Polamalu recorded 783 tackles with 56 for loss. He registered 12 sacks, 14 forced fumbles, 32 interceptions, and 107 passes defensed. But just looking at his statistics won’t even tell you who he truly was as a player.
And it certainly won’t tell you who he is as a person. Polamalu was never the type of player whose entire life was football. He gave everything to the Steelers, but football was simply what he did, not who he was. It wouldn’t surprise me if he really did consider retiring if he continued to struggle in 2004. But fortunately for the Steelers, their fans, the NFL, and the game itself, he didn’t. So now it’s just a curious footnote from the early days of his remarkable career.
