Montreal — Maurice Richard. Saul Bellow. Mordecai Richler. William Shatner. Oscar Peterson. Colleen Dewhurst. Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Leonard Cohen. Mario Lemieux.
Since its founding as a missionary colony 380 years ago, the city has had many prominent figures. But perhaps Montreal’s greatest modern-day hero is known for something he didn’t: Laurent Duvernay-Tardif He didn’t play football in 2020.
Consider a story of heroism and sacrifice as soccer’s Super Bowl approaches. Duvernay-Tardif is a true hero that his fellow doctors and nurses took the place of aggressive linemen who would otherwise have been by his side during a pandemic-stricken year. I should have said it first. Kansas City he signed a $41.26 million contract with the Chiefs in his five years and super won the ring in his bowl, selflessness and team for a man determined to volunteer during a pandemic. Let’s see what work means. Long-term care facility in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, 45 minutes from Montreal.
“I felt a disconnect between what was happening to me celebrating the Super Bowl and what was happening in the world,” DuVernay-Tardiff said in an interview. “I felt that I had to do something. I felt that I had to help. Like thousands of people, I raised my hand.”
He didn’t exactly blend in with the crowd at his new job. He weighed 321 pounds. In addition, he has a medical degree and is the only modern player to have the word “practice” in any special meaning, making him just the fourth player in NFL history.
He swapped out his lab coat for a New York Jets uniform and returned to the soccer field last fall, but his experience with long-term patients has changed or reconfirmed his outlook. I see,” he writes in his new book, “The Red Zone: From the Lines of Attack to the Pandemic’s Frontlines.” By the time I graduated from medical school, I had stepped away from the primary reason I wanted to be a doctor: helping people. ”
Chiefs and Jets fans imagine him in the locker room, but he began his medical residency last July in an examination room at the Herzl Family Practice Center at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital. “He did everything: clinics, long-term care, emergency care,” said Mark Karanowski, director of the center. “I don’t want to play him on the football field, but in the room with the patients, he is kind, he listens and he knows himself.”
The road from the family’s bakery in Mont-Saint-Hilaire in southeastern Quebec to McGill Medical School to the NFL was a long and complicated one.
Matthew Kiviger, McGill’s offensive line coach in the first round of the Canadian Football League draft, remembers their first meeting. He was one of only four Canadians to appear in the 1995 East-West Shrine Bowl, said Kiwiger, “For about five minutes I thought I was stuck with him.” . “After one practice, it was clear he was better than I was after five years of playing. I told him the NFL was his goal, not the CFL.”
not so soon This young man skateboarded around the McGill campus wanted to go into medicine.
“At McGill, you don’t have people with that level of skill every day in medical school,” Sonny Wolff, McGill’s head coach at the time, told me. “His academic adviser told him that playing football wouldn’t improve his medical career, so he was a little worried.” At the time he had only practiced once. Finally, he told coaches and professors that he could handle both medical education and soccer.
He then informed Robert Primavesi, then associate dean of the McGill University School of Medicine, that both the CFL and NFL were interested in him. He asked to take a few weeks off from his studies to attend a pre-draft bootcamp and be evaluated by scouts.
“The problem was how to fit NFL football into the medical school schedule,” recalls Primavesi. “We found a way for him to take the football season off school and come back in January. I’m back in medical school.”
A similar question popped up in Kansas City when he became the 10th Canadian to be drafted into the NFL from a Canadian college. His mother was one of the first women to graduate from McGill Medical School. Reid went all in and so did his starting guard.
Then the pandemic hit and Duvernay-Tardif took a break from football but attended virtual meetings with the Chiefs team four days a week. But what he saw and experienced shocked his outlook.
“I saw an amazing balance between sacrifice, teamwork, passion and privilege,” he said in an interview. You have to realize that there’s more to it than, through your football career, you build a platform and it’s important that you use that platform to promote something bigger than the sport.For me, it’s the worst health It was to promote the idea of helping one of the crises.”
Duvernay-Tardif wondered if NFL contracts (restrictions aimed at downhill skiing and riding motorcycles without a helmet) that required him to avoid physical risks in the off-season would constrain his activities. was “I wasn’t sure if what I was going to do was a dangerous activity working during the COVID emergency,” he said, adding, “Of course it was.”
Sports Illustrated has named him the 2020 star alongside Los Angeles Lakers’ LeBron James, tennis champion Naomi Osaka, WNBA’s Breanna Stewart, and Duvernay Tardiff quarterback Patrick Mahomes in Kansas City. Appointed as a sports person. This year’s.
“When you lift the hopes of your community off the field, that compassion ignites your power on the field,” said former Cincinnati Bengal linebacker Reggie Williams, who won that award in 1987. It did so for Williams, who was cited for his work with high school students.
David M. Shribman is the former Editor-in-Chief of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
