The End of Mr. Unstoppable

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It was easy last week to find good judges who rate Andrew Johns the smartest footballer they ever saw. But Johns, 32, who retired from rugby league on April 10 because of a neck injury that might have crippled him if he'd kept playing, could see himself very differently. "I'm the most immature bloke I know," he said when I knocked on his door one morning in 2000 and found him stretched out watching cartoons.

Johns was both exceptionally clever and childlike, a duality that defined him. Fans first knew him as half of an audacious double act with his look-alike brother Matthew—two innocents who went nowhere without a football to muck about with. Matthew was a fine player, but Andrew was better. From his first-grade debut for Newcastle in 1994, opposing coaches knew that success depended on stopping "Joey." Some ordered that he be bashed and heckled. Others aimed their Goliaths at him in the hope that forcing him to tackle would blunt his attack.

Neither tactic had much effect. Before one match, the then Sydney Roosters coach Ricky Stuart spent hours with his players analyzing Johns' moves on tape. Stuart thought he'd found a way to thwart him. But after 10 minutes' play, Johns had made fools of his opposition.

He was not, especially toward the end, the quickest of halfbacks, but he had every other quality a player could wish for, not least an unerring sense for where a defense was weak. A footballer among athletes, he was inventive, fearless and maybe the toughest of the tough. Born in Cessnock, New South Wales, to a coal-miner father, he played the 1997 grand final with a punctured lung amid reports that he was risking death. Yet he performed without a hint of apprehension, setting up the try that gave his beloved Newcastle their first premiership.

He wearied of the nonsense of the spotlight but never of football's simple joys. Losing well was a knack he never mastered, and he hated himself when he played poorly. At those times, or when injury stopped him surfing for a while, he could sulk with the best of them. Life after football will test him. He is gone before he was ready, leaving behind a game that will be the lesser for his absence.