Israel Gutierrez of the Miami Herald:
There’s a cliché that retiring professional athletes use often about ”going out on your own terms.” The idea is that an injury shouldn’t force you out. That you should choose when it’s time to go. That you’re shortchanged otherwise.
Mourning spoke about that when he first started his recovery. He didn’t want fate to shortchange him, even though he had previously conceded that the 2007-08 season would be his last.
Mourning didn’t give up on that hope. His career did end on his own terms. Physically, he’s back to playing form. He could come back if he wants to. On a probable playoff team, no less. He just chooses not to.
These are his terms. They include not hanging on for the sake of some tired sports cliché. They include not being ‘’selfish” — his words — and playing in one more game just to prove his comeback was completed. They include being adult enough to recognize that there are so many more years in his life beyond the 16 he devoted to professional sports, and he’d prefer they not be spent needing a cane or a wheelchair or one of his children’s support just to walk upright.
Michael Wallace of the Miami Herald: A timeline of Alonzo Mourning’s NBA career
Rick Bonnell of The Charlotte Observer:
I don’t know whether Alonzo Mourning ever played in a school band, but I have little doubt what instrument he would have played.
Everything about Zo said a giant set of cymbals. Percussion was his thing.
Mourning retired Thursday after 15 NBA seasons, the first three as a Charlotte Hornet. Somewhere between high school in coastal Virginia and college at Georgetown, he decided the best way to deal with variables was to act as intimidating and volatile as possible.
That worked well enough on the basketball court because few were going to mess with him. In a John McEnroe sort of way, he often performed better when angry.
The problem was he couldn’t separate his on-court and off-court personas. So when the world inconvenienced Zo, the world should change, not Zo.
Greg Stoda of the Palm Beach Post:
There was a time when Mourning, 38, seemed less than genuine to me. The muscular preening and posing he regularly demonstrated on the court to the very end of his career appeared too frequently to mirror Mourning’s look-at-me attitude. It wasn’t unusual for Mourning to act and sound thoughtful and gracious when the cameras were focused on him, but surly and confrontational otherwise.
He often was unnecessarily combative or defiant in casual situations.
He cultivated anger and belligerence, but struck me as insecure.
Something happened, though, and whatever the epiphany, there were increasing glimpses of Mourning’s basic goodness, decency and generosity.
“Who I was then and who I am now, it’s like Jekyll and Hyde,” Mourning said of his maturation.
