Peter Forsberg on foot issues: ‘I should have quit earlier’
After years of attempting a comeback before being derailed each time, Peter Forsberg's return to the NHL lasted a whole 35 minutes and 10 seconds over the span of two games with the Colorado Avalanche last season.
On Feb. 14, Forsberg announced that he was officially done with the game and was named assistant GM of his former Swedish club Modo in April.
In an interview with Swedish newspaper Metro, Forsberg admits that if he could go back in time, he would have retired at the onset of the nagging foot problems that hindered the final years of his hockey career.
"... looking back on it I should have, but that's easy to say now," said Forsberg. "I'm still glad I tried, because now I know that there is nothing more I can do — I tried everything."
Through many of Forsberg's comeback attempts, the calls for him to finally retire were loud and he heard them all.
"When I read those things I thought that if I was on the outside looking in, I'd also say, 'Come on, it's time to quit. You've accomplished everything, why skate around and lose it all here?' " he said. "Everybody's entitled to their opinion, but the more they wrote those articles — the more I thought that I was going to make it work."
Forsberg also talked about how long he'd been thinking about his post-hockey life.
"Around 2003-2004 I started to have my foot issues, I felt as if I couldn't do it anymore," he said. "That's when my thoughts started to shift from hockey to the life afterwards and I managed to come to terms with those thoughts pretty quickly."
Since 2003-04, Forsberg played 128 NHL games with the Philadelphia Flyers, Nashville Predators and Avalanche, along with 59 games in the Swedish Elite League with Modo and 10 games with Team Sweden at the 2006 and 2010 Winter Olympics.
As we've said in the past, you have to credit Forsberg for trying to stick with the game that made him a worldwide phenomenon. Though nagging foot injuries robbed fans of seeing the future Hockey Hall of Famer continue to shine during the back half of his career, he kept trying one last time to make it happen.
He wasn't Brett Favre, he was a guy who just wanted to go out on his own terms.
Huge stick-tap to Fredrik H. for the translation
Photo credit: Getty Images
