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Nick Wagoner, ESPN Staff Writer
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — In the days after Super Bowl LVIII, left tackle Trent Williams spent time in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, with a handful of fellow San Francisco 49ers.
After a day on the golf course with running back Christian McCaffrey, fullback Kyle Juszczyk and others, Williams and the Niners crew retired to the vacation home owned by Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning.
The trip was meant to be an escape from the overtime loss to the Kansas City Chiefs. For Williams, it became more than that when one of Manning’s famous neighbors — LeBron James — showed up.
Williams and the Los Angeles Lakers forward had met before, when Williams had helped Auston Mims, an offensive lineman at the University of Oregon and the son of one of James’ closest friends.
But this time was different. Williams had already decided he wasn’t ready to retire. But with another long season behind him and his 36th birthday approaching in July, he was thinking more about how to extend his career and stay at the peak of his profession.
What better person to quiz on the topic than James, the 39-year-old who was in the midst of his 21st NBA season and had four championships on his resume.
“When you see and talk to a guy like that who is going and doing it at the highest level we’ve ever seen and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down,” Williams said. “I know that it can be done.”
As the night went on, they discussed how to get over losing a championship and what it takes to sustain greatness as you age.
Williams, long regarded as the best offensive tackle in the NFL, began making lifestyle changes in the last few years and has since heeded James’ advice on diet, training and recovery regimens. One of the league’s best tackles in history, Andrew Whitworth, made similar adjustments to prolong his career and won a Super Bowl at age 40 — something Williams can use as a blueprint.
“Whitworth is a guy that not only myself, I think a lot of tackles my age and younger … looked at it as that standard of longevity because he did it all the way to the end,” Williams said. “He rode out, like, literally a storybook finish.”
When training camp began, Williams didn’t start practicing as scheduled. He held out for a new contract and reached a deal just days before the season began. With an average annual value of $27.55 million, Williams became the third-highest paid tackle in the league behind the Bucs’ Tristan Wirfs and Lions’ Penei Sewell, according to Roster Management.
The fact he missed nearly two months of the preseason has not been evident in his play. Through 10 games his 95.2% pass block win rate ranks second in the NFL among tackles, barely trailing the Bengals’ Orlando Brown Jr. (95.9%). Despite being listed as questionable with an ankle injury for Sunday’s game against the Seahawks, Williams played and recorded a perfect PBWR for the fifth time this season.
A spot in the Pro Football Hall of Fame could await Williams, but he believes he has more to give to solidify his place among the greatest tackles ever.
“I’m not oblivious to the fact that if I retire today, I’d probably have a good chance of having the gold jacket,” Williams said. “My mind frame right now is I want to finish this career as strong as I opened it up.”
WHEN EDGE RUSHER Ryan Kerrigan arrived as Washington’s first-round pick in 2011, Williams was entering Year 2. Kerrigan quickly recognized Williams would offer a tougher test in practice than he would see in most games.
During an early one-on-one pass rush drill, Kerrigan recalls hitting Williams with an inside counter rush that created a clear path to the quarterback. After initially flying past, Kerrigan was stunned to see Williams flip his hips and be squared back up in front of Kerrigan to win the rep.
“It was almost defeating to go against him,” Kerrigan said. “It was just like; I don’t know what the hell to do. This guy has just got a rare skill set.”
Williams could have easily gotten by on his combination of size (6-foot-5, 320 pounds) and athleticism — he ran a 4.88 40-yard dash, which ranked second, and had the highest vertical jump (34.5 inches) of all offensive linemen at the 2010 combine — but he quickly proved to teammates and coaches he was a student of the game.
Niners offensive line coach Chris Foerster held the same position in Washington when Williams entered the league. He and Williams have grown so close, Williams calls Foerster an uncle figure.
Williams asked Foerster for film of Seahawks legend Walter Jones, who has long been Williams’ favorite tackle.
While a knee injury ultimately drove Jones to retire at 36, he was able to stay at the top of his game for the bulk of his 12 years. One of the keys to his success, according to Jones, was making the necessary tweaks to compensate when the physical gifts were no longer as plentiful.
Williams and Foerster spent hours talking about what they saw from Jones and how it could be implemented into Williams’ game. Along the way, Williams took notes on more than kick slides, aiming points and hand usage.
He entered the league at the end of a golden era for tackles where players like Jones, Orlando Pace and Jonathan Ogden — all Hall of Famers — were racking up accolades and redefining the position.
Williams can tell you that Anthony Muñoz holds the record for first-team All-Pro nods by a tackle (nine) and Bruce Matthews is the oldest non-quarterback or specialist to be first-team All-Pro (39) and holds the record for most Pro Bowls for an offensive lineman (14).
Still, for most of the first 13 years of his career, Williams leaned heavily on his physical skills and film study to earn three first-team All-Pro nods and 11 Pro Bowls and didn’t seem to be slowing down after leading the NFL in pass block win rate (95.8%) in 2023.
But the physical and mental toll of San Francisco’s recent slew of deep postseason runs has opened Williams’ eyes to the reality that if he doesn’t begin taking the right steps, he won’t be able to go out how he’d like.
“Trent just is learning that all of a sudden at 36, that he needs to take care of himself,” Foerster said. “Trent just works out and trains and he’s just a phenom. But he is at that point now in his career that he does understand that those things become more important.”
AT AGE 40, Whitworth became the oldest offensive lineman to both play in and win a Super Bowl in his final NFL game with the Los Angeles Rams in Super Bowl XVI. But the road there wasn’t easy and included adjustments.
He made his first Pro Bowl in 2012 at age 31, despite playing through a patella tendon injury in his left knee during the season. The injury became so severe, it required offseason surgery.
While some pondered whether Whitworth would return after the surgery, the recovery strengthened Whitworth’s resolve and he was emboldened to push the limits of a standard NFL career.
“I said at that time, ‘I am going to play until the wheels fall off now,’” Whitworth said. “I appreciate my job so much that I’m like, I am now going to do this and appreciate every day I get to play.”
To make that happen, Whitworth realized that he would need to adjust his training regimen.
While Whitworth had always incorporated different workouts such as yoga and Pilates in addition to weightlifting, he concentrated more on stretching and mobility. He was devoted to active recovery, a low-intensity exercise that you do after an intense workout to help your body recover, whether in the form of going on long walks or hitting hundreds, sometimes thousands, of golf balls.
Williams has made similar changes the last few years. He gave up drinking soda a year and a half ago. He boxes for active recovery on Mondays and Tuesdays, something he did early in his career. He also took up golf in the summer of 2023 and plays regularly in the offseason.
Like James and other NBA stars, Williams has grown accustomed to the NFL’s version of load management. He gets regular “vet days” off on Wednesdays, participates in Thursday practice sessions, which are generally the most strenuous of the week, and then has flexibility on his participation level on Fridays.
More than that, Williams has started to, as he says, “take my diet more serious.”
For someone who splits his time between the Houston area and the Bay Area, Williams said he enjoyed the best of both worlds with Whataburger in Texas and In-N-Out Burger in California. Which made his offseason decision to ditch red meat perhaps the greatest sacrifice he’s made to the football gods thus far.
Williams has also enlisted the help of some of his teammates such as Juszczyk, McCaffrey, tight end George Kittle and end Nick Bosa for tips on taking care of his body.
“As an athlete, you just think [as] long as you stay working out and you just think that you’ll always be the same, but the older you get, the more you got to put into it,” Williams said. “I’m just trying to find out which ways I can keep my body fresh as long as possible.”
MOMENTS AFTER THE 49ers dispatched the New York Jets in Week 1, a reporter informed Juszczyk that Williams had not allowed a single pressure, let alone a sack, on any of his 33 pass blocking snaps.
On any other night, that wouldn’t have been noteworthy but Williams had just missed an entire offseason program, training camp and preseason because of a contract dispute and was coming off just four practices. He’d also left the Jets game to get an IV, something he would need to do again in Week 2 against the Minnesota Vikings.
Even Williams didn’t know what to expect to start the season, calling it “uncharted waters.”
Those expectations weren’t shared by Juszczyk.
“That’s the least surprising stat I’ve ever heard,” Juszczyk said. “He could just wake up and go shut down the best pass rushers. He’s just absolutely incredible. The best at his craft.”
Upon ending his offseason holdout, Williams acknowledged he was seeking security on a deal that no longer included any guaranteed money. But with that security, Williams believes there also comes a certain level of responsibility.
On a team full of highly paid stars, such as McCaffrey and Bosa, Williams knows there’s an opportunity cost that might mean his big contract comes at the expense of other players. Maintaining a level of play commensurate with his contract is what drives him.
“That’s the biggest compliment that any professional can get from anybody is saying that you deserve every penny you get,” Williams said. “When you’re getting paid like a top guy, you’re basically replacing their ability to sign about two or three other guys. You have to carry the load of not only yourself but what could happen if you didn’t get paid as much as you’re getting paid. … I just try to find little motivating factors in every situation.”
Nine months after that day with James in Mexico, Williams still marvels that someone like James even knows who he is, let alone is willing to help him prolong his career. Williams said he and James will stay in touch to ensure they can “get the most out of these last few years.”
For Williams, that includes adding a Super Bowl title to his Hall of Fame resume.
In his four previous seasons in San Francisco, Williams and the Niners have reached at least the NFC Championship Game three times. They’ve come up short in each but gotten close enough that Williams knows it can be done. Even if it takes more of his remaining time than he’d like.
“Once you know that it’s possible, the competitor in you is going to give yourself every chance to try to complete that goal,” Williams said. “It’s like, why not me?”
There is, of course, a toll to be paid for those long postseason runs without a championship. After playing in just two playoff games in 10 seasons in Washington, Williams has appeared in nine in the past three seasons.
As that extra mileage accumulates, it’s not a matter of if it will all catch up to Williams but when.
“Father Time is undefeated,” Jones said. “No matter how much you work out, no matter what you do, when your body says you’re done, you’re done. … It’s not about getting to 40. It’s about what are you going to do for those 36, 37, 38, 39 years?
“If anybody could do it, I think Trent can do it.”