Over the weekend our beloved Calvin Johnson aka Megatron was inducted into the pro football hall of fame. Well deserved, far and away the most dominant wide receiver I've ever seen and outside of maybe Aaron Donald, the most dominant player I've ever seen play the game I love. You ask me, Calvin is the best to ever do it. I never watched Jerry Rice play, and I don't care how many practice reps he ran all the way to the end zone just to practice scoring touchdowns, you will never convince me that he could do the things Megatron did. Megatron truly was a once in a lifetime type guy, a dude playing his sport at the heighest level on earth and STILL was a gamebreaker. Into his 20s and early 30s if you turned on any random Lions game he still was drawing enough attention and doing enough things to convince you he was still the 6'5 kid in high school dominating inferior competition... only, it was the NFL. Obviously I could go on and write a fifty page blog about how good the guy was on the field alone, and I will do that on this weeks episode of The Detroiter. It'll be a full fledged Calvin Johnson stroke party and I honestly can't wait, who doesn't love talking about greatness? What I wanna talk more about in this blog is just the crazy fact that I'm only a 24 year old kid and I just came to the realization that Megatron is the first athlete in my life that I will NEVER see a replica of. Fucking crazy. But first, highlights.
Hopefully that loads, if not, follow the link to YouTube and then try to tell me Jerry Rice was doing shit that even looked 20% of that. You can't.
We will never see another human being play the game of football that can do things like that, we just won't. Just like we will never see another guy like Barry Sanders, like we won't see another guy like Gretzky, like Ricky Henderson, like Bonds, like Lawrence Taylor, like Jordan, like LeBron etc etc etc etc. Calvin is one of those guys. Fucking wild to think about. I'm only 24 years old and I already have seen an athlete come and go, the likes of which I'll never see again. Sure this might be corny but I don't give a flying fook, it's nuts. Also a big time "taking things for granted moment". Don't get me wrong, when Calvin was in Detroit and when he was doing the things that he was, I was very aware of how special it was. I was aware that 2000 yards in a season (which he didn't quite get) was an outlandish accomplishment, I understood that going up into triple coverage and coming down with it regularly was not normal NFL behavior, I understood that things like this didn't happen anywhere else in football.
Yea, I knew something different was happening, but I didn't totally grasp the fact that a once in a lifetime thing was happening. Feels like what it'll be like when LeBron hangs it up, only difference being that Megatron was being great for my favorite team in the world. A player I don't think anyone will forget, thanks for keeping the Lions... relevant? during those years. Whatever you wanna call what they were, and congratulations on a well deserved accomplishment, Megatron.