Here we go. Just 35 minutes in and there are cell phones in the air, stretching over the promenade like an oak forest. And it’s not just the three kids from a nearby high school who saw Russell Wilson over by the park, received autographs, played catch with him and got an inspirational pep talk after sharing their career goals. It’s mostly people one would assume were indifferent to this kind of thing. Stylish city people. Septuagenarians in pastel-colored pants. Couples who look like they would care more about when the new LCD Soundsystem album is dropping than about a guy who might only be a temporary solution at quarterback for the New York Giants.
Of course, Wilson doesn’t see it that way—temporary. He never sees it that way. He certainly doesn’t carry himself that way. And really, this is difficult news for someone like me, who was debating whether I should continue to pay tithes to the Church of Russell Wilson. I was wondering if, after all this time, he had, in fact, become the player that your favorite NFL analyst, part-time social media comedian, anonymous league source or fantasy football tape dog has proclaimed to be past his prime. Like any believer questioning his faith, I had gone through an arc, one that began with astonishment (at peak-of-his-powers Wilson performing backfield evasions that looked more like something you’d see from a circus performer than a football player), followed by unquestioned adoration, then acclimation and, ultimately and inevitably, a bit of disillusionment.
But seeing Wilson here in this element—seeing him at a Knicks playoff game, seeing him now in this very moment surrounded by beaming officers from the NYPD after the kids have cleared out, seeing him hanging with Carmelo Anthony, seeing him in the suite at Yankee Stadium and with Aaron Judge next to the batting cages—one cannot help but tumble into the reality that Wilson has so effectively created for more than a decade. A world where anything is possible. And, really, a world where most of it comes true if we’re being honest. The guy is a Super Bowl champion dual-sport athlete who has played for both the Yankees (albeit only in a spring training game) and the Giants and is married to Ciara, a quadruple-platinum pop star.
Now, his latest chapter begins with a magical kind of symmetry—the Giants handing Wilson the same locker in MetLife Stadium that he used at Super Bowl XLVIII as a member of the Seahawks. It’s a world where the past three seasons—during which Wilson has become, to some, more meme than player—are simply part of a larger conversation.
“Honestly, I feel like I’m 25 years old all over again,” Wilson says, leaning against a fence backing up to the East River, not far from the Brooklyn Bridge. “And I think part of that is just physically I feel great. Mentally, I feel amazing in terms of, It’s possible. You know what I mean? And I think ultimately, a big part of it is the people you’re around, the players, the coaching staff, the mentality of the guys. And then being in the city. The energy of it is for people that like to be fast-paced, which is me.”
Laugh if you’d like at the people—people, dammit, like me—who now can’t help but reserve some benefit of the doubt. There’s a difference between the Wilson experience on screen and in person. Face-to-face, he has the ability to make it seem like the sun came out because he wanted it to; that a person can will everything from an outfit, a hairdo, a Williams Sonoma catalog–perfect family and, sure, that the latter stages of an NFL career turn out the way he writes it down on paper. (He writes everything down on paper.)
And in New York, with a young Giants team searching for an identity, in a place that rewards those sort of lofty manifestations produced by the type of athlete who can ably filter out the noise of the detractors, it’s worth wondering if this is where Wilson was meant to end up all along.
“Me and Carmelo were talking about this,” Wilson says. “He’s like, ‘Man, this is the perfect place for you to reestablish and have everybody realize who Russell Wilson really is, by not just how you play on the field, but what you do, the community and different things that you’re able to impact.’
“And people, it doesn’t get any bigger than New York City.”
In the past three years, Wilson has gone from from a torrid stretch of nine Pro Bowl berths in 10 seasons with Seattle to a 2022 campaign, his first with the Broncos, that saw his completion percentage (60.5%) hit a career low, his sacks (55) hit a league and career high and all the fervor around his arrival in Denver completely vanish. Despite bouncing back in ’23 with a 26-touchdown, eight-interception season, the Broncos ate a historic amount of dead money ($85 million) for the right to start over at the position with 24-year-old rookie Bo Nix.
Wilson signed with Pittsburgh and recovered from injury to retake a starting job last year, but with Aaron Rodgers in the Steelers’ sights, Wilson left to join his fourth team in five years.
Underlying all this was the manner in which the discourse surrounding Wilson—which had previously bordered on hero worship—changed. In reality, Wilson is probably one or two good seasons away from becoming a Hall of Famer. Fans went from universally begging the Seahawks to “let Russ cook” to making a mad dash to their own personal open mic night to chide Wilson for, say, doing high knees on an airplane to aid in his recovery during an international flight, or having his own office while in Denver, or putting his whole heart into an elaborate on-field warmup. Last year, former NFL quarterback Robert Griffin III said in a video posted on social media that he’d never seen a future Hall of Famer become the victim of “slander” as much as Wilson had after leaving Seattle, where an impasse in 2022 led to him being traded to the Broncos for a massive haul of picks and players.
How would Wilson contextualize all of this? What would he call it?
“It’s called a career,” Wilson says. “You look back at somebody’s career over a 20-year period—I would say that 18 or 19 or even 17 of my 20 years, if they’re great years, would you complain? And I think that everything in life happens for a reason.”
If one were to project Wilson’s numbers last year with Pittsburgh to a full season, he was on pace to throw 25 touchdowns and eight interceptions. This, following a finale in Denver in which he threw 26 TDs and eight interceptions.
Drew Brees had four seasons in his career in which he played 16 games and threw for 26 or fewer touchdown passes. Tom Brady had six. Peyton Manning had three. Only seven of Ben Roethlisberger’s 18 seasons were better from a statistical standpoint than Wilson’s 2023 season in Denver, one that was supposedly a harbinger of his demise. (Wilson has four total seasons of scoring a 12 or less on Pro Football Reference’s Approximate Value metric, whereas Roethlisberger only has six above that number). A composite of EPA (expected points added per dropback) and completion percentage over expectation has Wilson 13th overall spanning a 14-year period between 2010 and ’24, ahead of Roethlisberger, Matt Ryan, Dak Prescott, Matthew Stafford, Eli Manning and Jalen Hurts. And just a decimal point behind reigning NFL MVP Josh Allen.
Wilson, who turns 37 in November, confirmed that he still believes, as he told me nearly five years ago, that he wants to play into his early 40s. (“Five-plus years,” he says now.) He says that a “big part” of whether he can keep playing is knowing that he can still evade rushers in the backfield like he did so famously in Seattle for so long, allowing him to create explosive plays downfield. It’s not that Wilson didn’t do this over the past three seasons. It’s that he did it less, as evidenced by a more expedited snap-to-throw time. And when he did it, some of the theatrics were replaced by the efficiency that comes with experience, like a touchdown pass to Pat Friermuth against the Bengals last year, a play on which Wilson ducked under a free rusher, climbed the pocket and sidearmed a ball to his tight end in a rapidly closing window between two defenders. Same result as a vintage Wilson touchdown, only with about 300 fewer steps.
“I can still throw the ball a long ways, 65, 70 yards,” he says. “I can still move. And I think that I’m capable of a lot. It’s funny because to me, being in Denver my first year, I was hurt most of the time and battled through it. The second year I felt like myself again. Then going to Pittsburgh, obviously, unfortunately I got injured early in the season, [and it] didn’t end up the way we wanted it to. But it just rejuvenated everything. And then being here, it’s like, playing the stadium again, knowing that I’ve held the trophy there ...”
This is the gist of the cold, fact-based case for Wilson. A string of injuries excuses the lowlights, his newfound health should unearth his DNA from his prime Seahawks seasons, and the adaptations he’s honed over the past three years bring him full circle and crystalize him into the elite player he still sees himself as.
He puts it more concisely.
“Just believe. Why not?”
Which leads to the other part of Wilson’s milieu that bears further examination: his relentless faith both in himself and the power of positivity now that so much has changed. He is still like a machine that spits out staccato inspirational quotes. But his life is different now in ways that are objectively both good and bad.
He has a family of six (and seems open to expanding it even further), meaning he has a smaller but much more important audience growing up around him. He’s also pinballed through the increasingly cruel spin cycle that a more attentive and vitriolic NFL audience and its industrial-strength media arm can unleash. NFL players speak all the time about the slow creep of cynicism and the efforts they must go through to fend it off.
Is the continuation of this Wilson Brand a way of setting an example for his own children, the rest of the world—including football—be damned?
“That’s important,” Wilson says. “But how could I have a bad day?”
Wilson is speaking just a few days before the 15th anniversary of his father’s passing. (Harrison Wilson III died due to complications from diabetes in 2010.) With time, the end of his father’s life has only fortified Wilson’s thoughts about wringing the most out every possible moment in a way that leaves permanence.
Within the sadness of Harrison’s decline came what Wilson sees as a miracle: his dad, lying in a coma he was not expected to recover from, hearing his mother singing gospel music. “All of a sudden he wakes up out of the coma,” Wilson says. “And seeing him in a coma for three and a half weeks, man, I can’t have bad days. Because you know what? If you believe that anything’s possible, believe in your faith, you stand on faith, truly stand on faith. To me, it’s like, man, there’s going to be some s----y days for sure, but it doesn’t mean that we have to make the next day a bad one.”
Standing there with the late-spring sun beating down, baking into every inch of city concrete around us, Wilson has made me feel absurd for my skepticism. The cynic in me now feels buried, Hoffa style (perhaps fitting given that Wilson will now be playing in the Meadowlands). Maybe Wilson isn’t for everyone, but he is especially for people who need to believe that good things can happen anywhere, and always. For a Giants team coming off the most losses in the franchise’s 100-season history, maybe that’s a good thing.
I get it, as much as anyone can get anything after spending an hour with a person. After what he went through with his father, the source of so much of his joy and his fortitude, how ridiculous would it be to tell Wilson that he can’t fend off Jaxson Dart, the quarterback New York took in the first round? That the Giants, despite having the most brutal schedule in the NFL for 2025, can’t win some games people don’t expect them to? That Malik Nabers—a second-year Pro Bowl receiver for whom Wilson can already recite down and distance highlights (a shallow cross against the Commanders on third-and-12 in which Nabers picked up 28 yards and popped up quickly after getting blasted by linebacker Frankie Luvu)—won’t be even better with Wilson throwing to him? That reuniting with quarterbacks coach Shea Tierney, a graduate assistant for NC State when Wilson was at the school, is merely coincidence and not another element of this comeback narrative that has already set and hardened in his mind?
That he won’t be healthy?
As Wilson fades out of sight, eagerly taking a recommendation for barbecue that one of the police officers has given to Ciara, I thought about how some of the moments from the afternoon seemed crafted by a production company. The central criticism of Wilson is that he lives life in a way in which everyone is always watching (because they kind of are). And I thought of Wilson talking about the letter Harrison wrote him before he died, which outlined his assessment of life after 55 years, as well as his hopes and dreams for Russell.
I thought about a quote from the author Ge Fei, who wrote: “The best attributes of anyone or anything usually reside on the surface, which is where, in fact, all of us live out our lives. Everyone has an inner life, but it’s best if we leave it alone. For as soon as you poke a hole through that paper window, most of what’s inside simply won’t stand up to scrutiny.”
Basically: We’re all kind of messed up and confused inside. It takes a certain strength to continue building and perfecting the facade that is public facing.
Wilson thinks about that letter a lot and wonders what would be included in the one he’d have to write for his kids one day. And if you think of life that way, why wouldn’t you want every moment to look like the closing scene in the most beautiful movie ever made? Why wouldn’t you always at least try?
Why wouldn’t you stage your comeback here, in the land of hope and dreams?
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Russell Wilson Thinks New York Is the Perfect Place for His Next Chapter.
