Frank Gore: 'If I had to do it again, I still would make the same decision'

One of the most grueling parts about playing football when you’re 34 years old? Pizza. The lack of pizza.

Sunday night after a win last fall. Frank Gore’s living room. The Indianapolis Colts’ running backs had gathered around the TV, there to catch the late game but also to unwind, to (briefly) enjoy the spoils of victory. They’d beaten the Tennessee Titans earlier that afternoon. Hence, the pizza. A rookie brings over a pie, sets it on the table, tells everyone to dig in. Most don’t give it a second thought.

But the oldest player in the room does. Gore eyes that pizza up and down, staring, smelling, damn-near salivating. It’s forbidden fruit for a 13-year pro who’s been dodging Father Time for half a decade. This was about discipline more than it was about pizza, and Frank Gore knows something about discipline. So while his teammates scoop up a few slices, he sits back. He holds firm.

“Sacrifices,” teammate Robert Turbin calls it.

Gore knows something about sacrifices, too. He signed with the Colts in 2015, smelling a championship. “I think we can win a Super Bowl if we go to Indy,” he told close friend Andre Johnson during free agency that spring. “I was thinking the same thing,” Johnson shot back.

A week later they were Colts. Two-and-a-half years later, everything’s changed.

MORE COLTS COVERAGE:

Johnson is long gone. Same goes for the rest of that year’s free agent haul: Todd Herremans, Trent Cole, Kendall Langford. Gore’s all that’s left. He’s taking handoffs from his sixth different quarterback in Indy, playing behind his 14th different line. He’s a good soldier on a bad team, playing out what could be his last days in this league for a franchise that’s thinking win later, not now. This isn’t how the sun’s supposed to set on Gore’s sublime career.

He came here to push the Colts over the top. Instead, everything has crumbled.

“If I had to do it again, I still would make the same decision,” says the oldest running back in football, weighing what Indianapolis was supposed to be with what it has become. “Things just didn’t go our way the last two years, starting with our leader. He got hurt. I’ve played with, what, five quarterbacks?”

Gore must be forgetting those memorable snaps with Ryan Lindley. Yeah. It’s been a long two years.

Still, he remains among the most respected players in that locker room, a legend amidst a whole lot of mediocrity. He’s on pace to climb this year to fifth on the NFL’s all-time rushing list, passing players who can be identified only by their surname — Dickerson, Bettis, Tomlinson. At 34, Gore is a living, breathing football anomaly, a glaring exception to the “running backs are done after 30” maxim. Behind a shaky offensive line, he crested the 1,000-yard barrier last season, a first for a Colts’ back in nine years, a first for a 33-year-old in three decades. It was the ninth time he’d reached 1,000. Only four other players in history have done that.

Their names: Emmitt Smith, Curtis Martin, Walter Payton, Barry Sanders.

Come Sunday, Gore will make his 98th consecutive start. It’s 48 more than any other running back in football. Few will notice: It’s a game between two winless teams.

***

This could be it, and deep down, Gore knows that. He’ll be a free agent come March, the only signee of the Colts’ 2015 class to play out the duration of his deal, and he’ll be a dinosaur by running back standards by the time the 2018 season rolls around: 35 years old. He’s thought about life after football, but he hasn’t decided if this is it.

“I will really think about how I feel after the season and how I feel I played this year,” he said. “If I feel good, a team wants me and I wanna play? Then I’ll play. But if I can’t do it no more, I won’t do it no more.”

Frank Gore without football? Seems wrong. It’s the game that lifted him from the projects of South Florida, from a dingy apartment in Coconut Grove where as a 16-year-old he caught his mother using cocaine one night, then confronted her. He was the 18-year-old who earned his keep on one of the deepest rosters in college football history, the 22-year-old who was coming off two ACL surgeries that Sports Illustrated labeled “the most overrated running back” in the 2005 draft class, the fifth one chosen that year, the last one standing.

“That’s like my life story,” Gore said. “I guess the man upstairs wanted me to go through things. That’s how I look at it.

“I thought my freshman year at the University of Miami, I was balling, I was looking forward to the NFL,” he continues. “You can’t do that in this life. After those injuries, everyone was down on me. The man upstairs wanted me to learn that the hard way, to look at myself. This game isn’t guaranteed.”

He knows that now because he learned that then. Gore never took the game for granted after that. Thirteen seasons in, his Hall of Fame-worthy career is defined by its durability more than its dazzle. The man hasn’t missed a start in six years.

He’s one of just six players left in the league from that 2005 draft. Of the five running backs selected ahead of Gore that year — including three in the top five — all have been out of the league at least four years. Ronnie Brown (second overall) hasn’t played since 2013. Cedric Benson (fourth overall) not since 2012. Cadillac Williams (fifth overall) not since 2011. Neither of the other two chosen ahead of him have sniffed an NFL field since 2008.

Meanwhile, last fall, the running back taken 65th overall that year passed the likes of Edgerrin James, Marshall Faulk and Tony Dorsett on the all-time rushing list.

“Ever since I was a kid coming up,” Gore said, “this is all I ever wanted to do.”

***

Jemal Singleton was new in town in the spring of 2016, unpacking boxes in his office, settling in. He’d been hired to coach the Colts’ running backs, which meant he’d been hired to coach Gore. He peered out his window overlooking the Colts’ practice field that day and saw one player out there, slogging through drills on an empty field four months before training camp. It made all the sense in the world.

“You know who it was,” Singleton says. “That’s when I realized everything I’d heard about Frank was 100 percent true.”

In a lot of ways, Gore is a football throwback, the kind of runner that would’ve thrived in any era. He trains with kids 10 years younger in the summers down in Miami, his way of keeping himself honest. He chides those who identify him solely by his position — if nothing else, Gore wants to be known as a football player. He scoffs at shortcuts, seethes after losses and craves the daily toil that so many lose an appetite for.

“He doesn’t cheat the game,” is how Turbin puts it.

“Been a special guy in this league for as long as I can remember,” linebacker Jon Bostic adds.

Last season, Andrew Luck called Gore “a beautiful teammate.” Pressed for what he meant, Luck revealed that his favorite part about Gore’s game wasn’t his rushing ability, his vision between the tackles or his soft hands in the passing game. No. It was his blocking. And Luck wasn’t saying it selfishly. He loves that Gore loves doing the dirty work.

“You won’t find a teammate that loves football more than Frank Gore,” Luck said.

It was the coaches who made the call to rest Gore periodically during training camp this summer. He wasn’t a fan. No matter if the man has nearly 14,000 NFL rushes to his name — and the bumps and bruises to prove it — the minute you start sliding is the minute you lose your edge. No shortcuts, remember.

“That was their decision,” Gore said, shaking his head. “What can I do?”

Maybe those rest days are paying off. Gore is running like he’s 28, not 34, at least when the holes are there. He likes the youth on this Colts’ roster, the raw pieces first-year General Manager Chris Ballard has assembled. “You can see that they can play,” Gore said. “We just gotta find a way to get wins.”

For perspective on the breadth of Gore’s career, consider who the top running backs in football were during his first year in the league: Shaun Alexander, Tiki Barber and Larry Johnson. Thirteen years later, a running league has become a passing league, rendering workhorses like Gore more novelty than necessity. That the Colts have kept Gore for three years amidst so much turnover, amidst such a massive rebuild, is a credit to how little his play has declined — and that’s after arriving at the age of 32.

He sees a future in football, but he won’t take the Robert Mathis approach. He won’t coach.

“I want to help in the front office,” he said. He wants to evaluate players, to find the ones who won’t cheat the game.

His only regret is the Super Bowl that got away in San Francisco — a 34-31 loss to the Baltimore Ravens in 2013. Gore’s 49ers were knocking on the door every year back then, and he figured he’d get another shot. He came to Indianapolis to ensure it.

Then 8-8 happened.

Then 8-8 happened again.

Then 0-2 happened.

“It’s football,” Gore said. “I just felt that if everything went perfect, we would’ve had our shot. But in this sport, you never know what’s going to happen.”

He mulls the thought for a moment, letting his mind wonder what could’ve been. A Super Bowl with Andre and Andrew? A fitting final act for the last of a dying breed?

But then he snaps back into reality. Frank Gore grabs his shoulder pads and lumbers toward the practice field, a good soldier on a bad team doing what he always wanted to do.

Call IndyStar reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134. Follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.