By Hannah Keyser, CNN
(CNN) — Jamie Moyer is back in his hometown of Souderton, Pennsylvania, for his father’s 95th birthday party. He says it was a smashing success, filled with people from Jim Moyer’s near-century in the Philadelphia suburb.
So, maybe, the secret to his son’s longevity – and other professional athletes with similarly incredible staying power – is just really great genetics.
Lately, sports fans have been abuzz with the news of practically geriatric, at least by athletic standards, comebacks. Lindsey Vonn won a World Cup race after coming out of retirement at 41, only to be topped in terms of sensational headlines by 44-year-old Philip Rivers serving as the Indianapolis Colts quarterback nearly five years after taking his last NFL snap.
Stories about middle-aged athletes are captivating. To layperson members of a similar age cohort, they straddle a tantalizing paradox of relatability and ultimate physical otherness. Their grey hairs and perhaps softer physiques, things that many of us will be forced to reckon with over time, are juxtaposed with an athleticism that seems superhuman to someone acutely aware of how much even just sleeping wrong can hurt after a certain age.
Actually, it turns out, that stuff plagues the 40-something pros as well.
“It’s the traveling, the hours you keep when you’re traveling. It’s the eating and sleeping in different beds and waking up with a crick in your neck or a stiff back or whatever it might be because you had a bad night of sleep, or half the night you were sleeping on a plane before you got to a hotel,” Moyer told CNN Sports. “As you get older, your body doesn’t accept that as well.”
Moyer, an affable southpaw who didn’t throw very hard – or even especially deceptively – but managed a 25-year big-league career, holds the distinction of being the oldest pitcher to record a win in Major League Baseball. It was, naturally, in his last season, when he made 10 starts for the Colorado Rockies in 2012 at 49 years old.
Satchel Paige, whose Hall-of-Fame career spanned the Negro Leagues and Major League Baseball, is generally recognized as the oldest pitcher ever in baseball for his three shutout innings thrown as a 58-year-old in 1965. But Moyer’s understated productivity into his late 40s is essentially unprecedented and unreplicated.
A certain level of defiance
Perhaps even more remarkable than that age number is that Moyer missed the preceding season while recovering from double surgery to repair his flexor pronator and his ulnar collateral ligament.
Moyer remembers when, after his age 47 season, he met with the doctor who would give a second opinion about his injuries.
“‘I can fix both of these, you’re not going to play anymore, you’re 47 years old,’” Moyer remembers the doctor saying. “He kept going and I just kind of let him talk. And he got done, and I looked at him, and I was like, ‘No, I’m gonna try to play again.’”
He asked the doctor if there was anything, medically, preventing him from going through the rehab process and returning to the field.
“No, but people your age don’t do this,” Moyer says the doctor told him.
Vonn faced a similar incredulity when she made it clear she was planning a comeback less than a year after a knee replacement surgery. In her