There is no evidence whatsoever that Alex Ovechkin wants or needs any outside advice on how to navigate his 2026-27 farewell tour from hockey. It shouldn’t be complicated: At his final stop in each NHL city this season, at the end of his 22-year career, his starring role is to take the ice one last time in his Washington Capitals uniform, wave to the crowd at the appropriate moment — and if the opponent happens to offer a gift at some prearranged ceremony, accept it with gratitude and humility.
But if Ovechkin, the NHL’s all-time leading goal scorer, were to be open to some well-intended, time-proven advice, he could do much worse than this:
“First of all, your priority is always to the game. Focus on the game, prepare yourself for the game. But beyond that, go ahead and let yourself surrender to it — to the acknowledgment of you and what you meant to the sport. Someday, you’ll appreciate the opportunity to bring some closure and say goodbye.”
The speaker of those words is someone who would know.
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In the summer and fall of 2001, Baltimore Orioles legend Cal Ripken Jr. — who, like Ovechkin, wore No. 8 and spent his entire storied career with one franchise — undertook a similar farewell tour across MLB. Twenty-five years later, some of the specifics are a little fuzzy, but what Ripken remembers most are the sentiments he was greeted with at each stop and the emotions they evoked — even if, in the moment, he forced himself to push them aside out of a sense of duty to the game.
“You really only gain that perspective later. I’ve been out of the game 25 years now,” said Ripken, now 66. “You really start to appreciate it, how long you were able to play the game, and you consider yourself lucky. So when you’re sitting in that rocking chair — which some of the teams actually gave me as sort of a joke — and you’re thinking back, you think of it fondly. Going out [of the sport] can be a wonderful, positive experience.”
Ovechkin, 41, announced earlier this month, two days before the Capitals’ home opener, that this would be the final season of his career. For an athlete of his stature — the most prolific goal scorer of all time, and a 12-time all-star and three-time Hart Memorial Trophy winner as the league’s most valuable player — that naturally set into motion plans for a season-long farewell tour.
The first of Ovechkin’s farewells came just 12 days into the season, on Oct. 13, when the Capitals visited the Carolina Hurricanes for the final time this season, and where the acknowledgment of Ovechkin was brief and tasteful: an announcement over the public-address system and a warm standing ovation from the crowd. The next one comes Thursday night in Nashville against the Predators.
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When Ripken first heard the news of Ovechkin’s retirement announcement, his first concern was for the latter’s emotional state. Though they are only casually acquainted, Ripken understands perhaps better than anyone the fraught mental calculus involved in recognizing when the time has come to say goodbye to something that you’ve dedicated nearly your entire life to.
“Everybody has to come to grips about when it’s their time,” Ripken said. “Usually, you don’t get to decide. The game decides for you. And only a few of us have a chance to make that decision on our own. And with Ovechkin retiring, I think it’s cool that he had the chance to go out on his own terms and to be able to say goodbye along the way.”
Ripken made his own retirement decision during midseason, in June 2001, spurred in part by the Orioles’ shift to a rebuilding phase. At the time, Ripken had already laid the groundwork for his next chapter — a grassroots baseball empire that would come to include ownership of minor league teams, a youth baseball complex in his hometown of Aberdeen, Maryland, and a charitable foundation named for his father and namesake. By announcing his retirement during the season, he figured he could shift attention to those future endeavors and help promote them through the media.
“I didn’t think of it in terms of, ‘Well, I’ll get a farewell tour,’” Ripken recalled. “I just thought it might create some attention, so I could answer the question: ‘What are you going to do next?’ It’d be a perfect transition. But the byproduct of that was a pretty heartfelt opportunity to say goodbye.”
Like Ovechkin, who had just one goal through the Capitals’ first 10 games, Ripken struggled during his final season, hitting just .239 with a .637 OPS, both career lows. But he recalls a night in Miami when he homered off a 100-mph fastball from Marlins ace A.J. Burnett, prompting his awed teammates to ask, “How’d you do that?”
“And I’m thinking, ‘Well, I still have something left in the tank,’” Ripken recalled. “And it makes you think, ‘Well, if I can still do that, should I really be retiring?’”
The first of Ripken’s farewells that season came at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in early July, where the White Sox held a brief ceremony on the field and gifted him a box seat from the old Comiskey Park, which had been demolished in 1991. Less than two weeks later at theMLB All-Star Game in Seattle, after Ripken’s retirement was acknowledged with a standing ovation, he homered and earned the game’s MVP honors.
When the farewell tour resumed in the second half of the season, the gifts kept piling up: a pair of cowboy boots from the Texas Rangers, a case of wine from the Oakland A’s, a year’s supply of stone crabs from the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. There were a handful of plaques, framed photographs, four- and five-figure donations to the Cal Ripken Sr. Foundation and, yes, more than one rocking chair.
“To me, it was a little embarrassing to go through some of the formal ceremonies,” Ripken said. Much more to his liking was the reception he received during a four-game series at Boston’s Fenway Park in late September, where each of his at-bats was greeted with a standing ovation. “It was more spontaneous,” he recalled. “And it was a pure baseball thing.”
One subtle yet significant distinction between Ripken and Ovechkin is the way the former transcended his sport. Baseball historians widely credit Ripken with helping restore baseball’s public standing following the 1994-95 strike, thanks to his record-breaking consecutive-games-played streak that culminated in September 1995, when he broke Lou Gehrig’s fabled record of 2,130 consecutive games. Especially in his later years, Ripken was nearly as beloved around the country as he was in Baltimore.
Ripken thus carried none of the complicating baggage that surrounds Ovechkin, whose longtime support for Russian President Vladimir Putin seems likely to mute the reception he receives around the league. Even at home, pro-Ukraine demonstrators have gathered outside Capital One Arena before games to protest Ovechkin’s support of Putin.
But Ripken’s farewell tour in 2001 was also affected by global geopolitical events. The tragic 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington forced a one-week pause in MLB’s schedule, with those missed games tacked on to the end of the season. As a result, the Orioles’ 2001 season and Ripken’s final farewell, instead of ending at Yankee Stadium, would come to a close at Baltimore’s Camden Yards in front of the home fans.
The last of those games, Ripken’s finale, came on Oct. 6, 2001, against the Red Sox. Having gone 0-for-3 in his first three plate appearances, he was standing in the on-deck circle as friend and teammate Brady Anderson battled Red Sox closer Ugueth Urbina with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. With the crowd chanting for Ripken — “We want Cal! We want Cal!” — Anderson battled Urbina to a full count before striking out and ending a 5-1 loss. Ripken consoled Anderson as he walked past, then both of them returned their bats to the rack in the dugout.
His playing career now over, Ripken had one last duty: a farewell speech to the Baltimore faithful. He had already prepared some remarks, figuring he would have a better chance of getting through the speech without breaking down if he were reading from a script. It didn’t quite work. His words came haltingly, broken up by long pauses as he struggled to hold himself together.
“There is one question I’ve been repeatedly asked these last few weeks: How do I want to be remembered?” his speech concluded. “My answer was simple: To be remembered at all was pretty special. If I am, I hope it was because by living my dream, I was able to make a difference.”
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