Barry Sanders

Water claims four of his ten planets, with three apiece in fire and earth and not one in air. Water registers everything and earth keeps at it; the element that would stand back and talk the thing over is missing from the chart entirely. Sanders ran the ball, and the record says he retired abruptly while near the career rushing record.

The Sun, Mercury and Mars sit across twenty degrees of Cancer, three planets in the sign that keeps and defends, and the Moon answers from Aries at seventeen. Jupiter, Uranus and Pluto make a second group across twenty one degrees of Virgo, which corrects what it finds. Cancer holds on and Aries is finished with a feeling almost before it arrives. For a career the record ends with a sudden departure, a protective Sun and a Moon with no patience is the pairing to keep.

The Moon sits square Mars at a third of a degree, need and drive colliding, which is the tightest contact here. Saturn sits at an awkward angle to Uranus at four fifths, the fight between staying and going, and at the same angle to Neptune at a degree and a third, with the three of them closing a yod that never resolves. The Sun sits square that same Saturn at just under a degree and in easy contact with Neptune at a third. Neptune alone was retrograde at his birth.

Jupiter came back round to its Virgo birth degree on 4 September 2015, at forty seven, and three laps precede it. Virgo asks whether a thing would survive a second look, which for a record built on a decision nobody expected is the question it keeps being asked. Limit at an awkward angle to the planet that breaks a long commitment, inside a yod with nothing to discharge it through, is the structure to take from this chart. With four planets in water and none in air, a departure like that was never going to be talked through first.