Patrick Willis was one of the best linebackers in football when he played, but the former 49ers linebacker played only eight seasons. He didn’t know if that would be long enough to earn him a place into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
But in his fifth year of eligibility, it was.
Willis took his rightful place in Canton on Saturday, along with six others.
“The Night — Oct. 13, 2014. I still remember the last play of my NFL career, and what I heard inside me,” Willis said in beginning his speech. “I heard, ‘Job well done my son, my faithful and loyal servant.’ In that moment, I realized I had completed what I had come to do, with the time the Lord had allotted me to play in the National Football League. It’s not necessarily how long you play, but how impactful you are.
“This was the last day I played in the NFL.”
Willis recounted growing up in a trailer at the end of a dirt road with no running water until he was 8.
“We lived at the bottom of a hill, and my grandparents lived at the top,” Willis said. “Every day my siblings and I would carry empty 5-gallon plastic buckets up the hill to get water from my grandparents’ house, then carry them back down. I remember when I was carrying those buckets, I would tell myself, ‘If I can make it from here all the way to the house without stopping, I’m going to get stronger.’ No doubt I was getting physically stronger, but I didn’t know at the time that I was also building inner strength.”
Willis made the Pro Bowl each of his first seven seasons in the NFL and five times was All-Pro. He made 950 tackles, 20.5 sacks and eight interceptions and was on the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s 2010s All-Decade Team.
In 2021, the 49ers inducted Willis into the team’s Edward J. DeBartolo Sr. Hall of Fame.
A first-round pick of the 49ers in 2007, Willis had dreamed of becoming a Hall of Famer years earlier. That day finally came in a weather-delayed ceremony.
“I am elated to know that I will no longer be known simply as Patrick Willis, but as Hall of Famer Patrick Willis, Mr. 378,” Willis said. “I salute my high school, college, and NFL brothers. Now, what a privilege it is to stand with my Hall of Fame brothers in the Hall of Football Immortality.”
