by Ron Kaplan
NJJN Features Editor

March 19, 2009

Lennie Friedman has been playing football since the sixth grade. For 10 years, the Milford native performed at the sport’s highest level until an arm injury forced him to miss the entire 2008 season.

So his recent decision to retire comes with a combination of sadness and relief — sadness that he’s leaving a game at which he excelled for more than half his lifetime, but relief that he’s going out on his own terms and with his health intact.

The news has been full of horror stories about former players who suffer from all sorts of debilitating maladies, from arthritis to post-traumatic stress disorder, so Friedman is confident he’s doing the right thing; he joked that he’d been thinking about quitting “for 10 years.”

Turning more somber, the now-former offensive lineman for the Cleveland Browns told NJ Jewish News in a phone interview, “I didn’t want to play to the point where my body would break down so much that it would impact me greatly in the remainder of my life.”

“It’s a good time to settle,” he said. “With the injury I’d have to prove myself again and go back to contracts without guarantees. The older you get, the more fear you have of getting injured, and if you worry about that too much so it impacts your playing, it’s time to move on.”

He said he was grateful for the opportunity to have played in a variety of venues. In addition to the Browns, Friedman played for the Denver Broncos, Washington Redskins, and Chicago Bears, as well as in Barcelona for NFL Europa.

Friedman, who turned 33 last October, said he thought he was still physically capable of playing, “but at the same time, is the risk worth the reward at this point? I want to be able to play with my kids,” which include Sayde, Connor, and Elian.

And how does his wife, Katie, feel about having him around the house? “I think she is happy. She’s excited to be settled, as much as settled can be. A lot of it had to do with the family dynamic.”

So what does the future hold? “That’s the million-dollar question,” said Friedman, who will attend business school at Duke University, where he received a degree in psychology as an undergraduate. Other than that, he says he has no plans.

There wasn’t much fanfare with the announcement. “It’s not like I’m Brett Favre, let’s not exaggerate,” said Friedman, referring to the future Hall of Famer who was famous for declaring his retirement and then changing his mind. “I can totally understand that,” said Friedman. “It’s a very hard thing to do,” he said.

After the summer, when the weather starts to cool off, the leaves begin to change color, and football is in the air, Friedman expects to feel “very nostalgic. It’s very hard, very hard. I think I’ve been through a lot of the emotions of it because of the injury that happened early in the year. So I had to sit there and watch my teammates and I couldn’t play and participate in any of that.

“When the finality of it hits me, it’ll be another wave of emotions.”

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