Just days after the Arizona Cardinals blew a lead to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Christmas Day, J.J. Watt announced that he was going to retire after the season. It made sense after video showed him emotional as he walked off the field.
The response to his announcement was shocking, but nobody had a better one than one that came from his teammate. Watt got a FaceTime call from a number he didn’t recognize, so he ignored it. Shortly thereafter, he got a text from the same number, but as a voice memo.
The message was incredibly incoherent that Watt said that he “literally thought it was, like, distorted, from the phone.” A picture from the number would soon follow and Watt realized it was rookie teammate, linebacker Jesse Luketa.
His message sounded bad because he had just gotten his wisdom teeth taken out. Not only did he have cotton balls in his mouth, but as Watt said, Luketa was “high off of his ass.”
“So I played the voicemail, and — I wish I could play it so bad, I’m gonna ask him if I can later, I don’t want to now — and it is like incoherent, complete incoherence,” Watt said. “And I’m like, ‘What the hell is this?’ I literally thought it was distorted from the phone.
“So 10 seconds later, a picture comes through and it’s Jesse Luketa, our rookie outside linebacker, and he has cotton balls in both (sides of) his mouth. He just got his wisdom teeth out. He’s high off his ass, he has no clue what he’s doing. And in the message, it says, ‘J.J., I just heard you’re retiring, all I want is a jersey at the end of the season.’ But it is incoherent. Beyond incoherent. I listened to it 10 times to understand what he was saying.”
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He certainly got that jersey as he showed it off on Twitter.
Luketa has appeared in five games this season and has been credited with one tackle.
The final two games of the Arizona Cardinals’ season will see a great wave of respect toward defensive end J.J. Watt, who will bring his legendary career to a close and retire at the end of the year.
Watt is enjoying a resurgent season to close his career, as his total of 9.5 sacks is the most he’s had since recording 16 in 2018.
