heartbreak. The Arizona Cardinals head coach has sadly announced the retirement of his greatest key player of all time due to terminating his contract with another one.
With just a few minutes remaining in his team’s Sunday game against the San Francisco 49ers, JJ Watt, the defensive end for the Arizona Cardinals, bid a sorrowful farewell to football.
On December 27, the 33-year-old declared his retirement from the game, following a three-month period of atrial fibrillation that necessitated shock treatment to restore cardiac rhythm.
He left the field in the closing seconds of Sunday’s Cardinals versus 49ers game, which saw his Arizona club fall short, 38-18.
Neither Watt nor his spouse, Kealia, who was as emotional as the defensive end and received a standing ovation at Levi’s Stadium, underestimated the significance of ending the game.
J.J.
Watt finishes as one of the NFL’s top defensive ends. Watt is the only NFL player to have had multiple seasons with 20 sacks; he was a five-time Pro Bowler and a first-team All-Pro. Both of those seasons occurred during his ten-year tenure with the Houston Texans. He spent the previous two seasons as a player for the Cardinals.
Because of Watt’s well-known charitable activities, he was also named the 2017 Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year.
The Justin J. Watt Foundation, Watt’s charitable organization, offers after-school programs in a number of locations, giving kids a secure environment in which to participate in sports. The majority of the schools in the program are in Wisconsin, his home state, Texas, Illinois, Alabama, and California. He played for ten years in Texas.
He raised $37 million for Hurricane Harvey victims in the Houston region and volunteered to cover the costs of the victims’ families’ funerals in the wake of the horrific killings.
“I think part of it was that I also wanted to be able to say thank you to everybody who’s helped me and everybody around here,” Watt said in a statement made on Friday before his final game. I don’t get to explore this building properly if you wait until the middle of the offseason because no one will know.
