Kyle Orton and the search for the NFL's liberals

“I just have been going at it for 10 years, and it’s just a family decision, and I’ve decided to get home and be a dad and call it a day,” Kyle Orton said in a brief statement announcing the end of his playing days on Monday morning. With that boring and sensible sentiment, he concludes one of the NFL’s more medium-notable careers. Orton literally slipped out the back door in lieu of discussing his retirement further with beat reporters, presumably because he felt the above quote sufficed. There is nothing else to explain, no tributes to a glorious career. What made Orton remarkable was not his dubious ability to throw a crisp 15-yard out, but his politics.

His playing career did not stand out. It was maybe his lack of charisma or that he resembled Cousin It after a seven-mile run, but Orton was something of punchline since entering the NFL as a failed Heisman candidate who fell from prospective first overall pick to the fourth round due to injury and a not-wholly-impressive senior season at Purdue. In his rookie year, he was thrust into the Bears’ starting job and did not, erm, thrive: a 51.6 completion percentage, nine touchdowns, and 13 interceptions in 15 games. He spent the next two seasons on the bench.

Even when he was at his best – you might forget he had a couple perfectly cromulent seasons with the Denver Broncos – Orton was seemingly always on the verge of being replaced. To have Kyle Orton as your quarterback was to be in search of an acceptable one. This past season, Bills fans bemoaned Orton’s slight sub-averageness. If only we could get a decent passer in here, they thought, we’d make some noise in the playoffs.

You could do worse than Orton (this tended to be uttered after an exhausted sigh), but you could also do a lot better. That will be his legacy, as a player. Cast him in aluminum and put him next to Neil O’Donnell and Jeff Blake in the Hall of Not Particularly Good.

But back to what made Orton different. The son of a labor commissioner, Orton grew up in the midwestern liberal tradition. This is a banal thing – knock on a few doors in Wisconsin or Iowa, and you’re bound to find some folks with views not unlike Orton’s – but an athlete who talks about it is not.

This goes double for football players, who are taught not to have personalities or to speak on matters not pertaining directly to their jobs. The NFL frequently engages in a sort of pageant-like God and country patriotism that involves a lot of fireworks and field-sized flags, and many of its fans, for whatever questionable reason, treat Republican rage-case Mike Ditka, who was last seen concern-trolling Rams wide receivers who had the gall to show support for a dead teenager’s family, as if he were a font of wisdom. An institution so firmly established in the American mainstream shouldn’t be overgeneralized, but football coaches tend not to resemble Berkeley professors, and there probably isn’t a huge overlap between Sunday Ticket subscribers and Elizabeth Warren supporters.

About those Rams wide receivers: Perhaps we are entering an age in which athletes are becoming less afraid to vocalize their liberal beliefs and in which voices like Ditka’s are marginalized. Over the past month, we have seen and heard a slew of players express their views on Mike Brown and Eric Garner’s deaths. (When LeBron James and Kobe Bryant are wearing “I Can’t Breathe” t-shirts, it’s hard to say that times aren’t a-changing in some significant way.) The response to openly gay athletes like Jason Collins and Michael Sam has been mostly positive, not just from fans and media, but from those players’ colleagues. It’s a comment on how straight-jacketed (or, for that matter, apathetic) athletes have been in the past that they are only just now asserting the humanity of gay men and talking about how black people tend to get the short end of the stick in America, but baby steps are better than no steps at all.

Orton, for his part, has always been the change he wants to see in the world, in a matter-of-fact way. He’s not a proselytizer – you have to go to Chris Kluwe for that – but he is also not shy about saying what he thinks. “I remember four years ago when I started thinking about it, I thought it would be some groundbreaking decision in your life,” he said in 2009, in reference to his environmentalism. “But it’s easy decisions. There are small, little things you can do throughout the day that make a difference.” While he was still at Purdue, he told the New York Times’s Pete Thamel that the biggest impact his father had on his political beliefs was helping him understand that “there are a people working hard every day that don’t necessarily make a lot of money doing it. There should be more people out there working for them.” There’s action behind his words, too. Orton drives a hybrid and helped organize a recycling program at Halas Hall during his time with the Bears. He was Denver’s union steward during the 2011 player lockout and was strongly opposed to the war in Iraq. Small, little things, sure. But he has made a difference.

We don’t know what Orton will do now that he’s an ex-NFL quarterback. (Other than, apparently, spend more time being a parent.) He talked, when he was young, about wanting to run for office some day, but the best laid plans of 22-year-olds tend to be underthought. What we can be sure of is that he’ll support the causes that move him. We might catch him holding a sign at a labor rally, or speaking to schoolchildren about conservation, doing the sorts of things a good-hearted liberal does.

If only there were more Kyle Ortons out there. Maybe there are, and maybe the sports climate is changing such that they will feel emboldened to say and do what they feel. One hopes they will make themselves known, and soon.