Le’Veon Bell feared his NFL career was over before the Tampa Bay Buccaneers came calling. In fact, he was already thinking about his next career choice.
In need of a running back, the Buccaneers brought in Bell, who had been without a team since the Baltimore Ravens released him in November. Bell admitted that he was legitimately concerned that his NFL career was over, and considered retiring at age 29 in order to take up boxing.
“I’m not even gonna lie — I got to the point where I had thought about kinda calling it quits, just ’cause of the fact that it wasn’t working out for me the last couple spots I’ve been at,” Bell said, via Jenna Laine of ESPN. “This was like literally the only spot that I felt like made me want to play football and go out there and be excited to play. This was like literally the only place that could have called me and got me to really go play. I was gonna start boxing and focusing on boxing.”
Bell was an All-Pro as recently as 2017, which makes it even harder to believe he was nearly out of the league at 29. That said, there is reason to believe he was serious about the boxing career. For now, he gets another shot to re-establish himself as an NFL-worthy running back, which seems like his true ambition all along.
