The New York Giants’ Darren Waller, who overcame substance abuse issues to become one of the NFL’s highest-paid tight ends, announced his retirement at 31.
In a video he shared Sunday, Waller said a near-death experience away from the field last season, plus a personal “journey” over the past four months, helped crystallize what he wanted.
Describing himself as having been “a people-pleaser my whole life,” Waller said, “This is an opportunity for me to kind of take back the power in my life, start to make choices for myself, take control.”
“I’m eternally grateful for the game of football,” Waller added. “I wouldn’t be able to have this conversation, or to think things through or be self-reflective, if it wasn’t for an opportunity to save my life and go to rehab, which the NFL offered me.”
In an incident Waller said occurred in early November, after he injured his hamstring in a home game against the New York Jets and stayed in New Jersey to work with trainers as the Giants traveled to Las Vegas to play the Raiders, he felt a “fever coming on” as he was going to his home and was “shaking pretty violently, uncontrollably” by the time he got there. Waller said he called 911 and had an agonizing wait for paramedics, during which he felt as though he was “dying on this couch” in a “very scary event.”
Spending the next three-plus days in a hospital in a state of physical infirmity, Waller said, led to a reevaluation of his athletic career and his then-marriage to WNBA star Kelsey Plum. Having tied the knot in March 2023, the pair filed for divorce in April.
“I’m doing something that I found a lot of joy in and have had amazing moments with,” Waller said Sunday of his self-assessment, “but the passion has slowly been fading. You know, I’m with a person that is a great person, but I just feel so many things inside of me being driven by, like, co-dependency. … I feel like I’ve spent most of my life doing what I should be doing and measuring that in the eyes of what people would expect from me.”
