Laurent Duvernay-Tardif is a true hero for NFL. His opt-out makes world a better place
From the outside looking in, anyway, Laurent Duvernay-Tardif’s momentous decision to opt out of the 2020 NFL season to continue working at a long-term care facility in Canada might seem surprising if not downright astounding.
Not to those who have come to know him well, though.
“No, it didn’t surprise me,” Chiefs coach Andy Reid said. “No, it did not.”
But the decision clearly moved Reid, whose mother, Elizabeth, a radiologist, earned her medical degree at McGill University — the same school in Montreal where Duvernay-Tardif earned his.
“So I understand the dedication that it takes to be a doctor ...,” Reid said in a Zoom video conference on Saturday, “They’re givers, and they’re healers, so they want the best for you. And so ‘Larry’ has that quality, and you’re seeing it to the utmost here. I just think it’s tremendous dedication to his profession, what his future’s going to be and mainly to the people that he gets to help.”
He added, “What a dedication that is and a love that that is. I’m so happy and proud.”
Perhaps especially so as you consider not just the increased health risk he’s choosing (in a role he described in April as work more typically associated with that of an orderly or nurse than a doctor) but what he’s passing up.
Fresh off the team’s first Super Bowl in 50 years, with nearly a complete cast of players and coaches returning in pursuit of a repeat and scheduled this season to earn $2.75 million, he presumably had every incentive to resume his role at right guard.
Particularly in an unforgiving profession marked by inherently brief shelf lives, the conventional logic of self-interest would suggest he should seize the fleeting moment.
But there is almost nothing conventional about the Canadian-born LDT, or Larry, as Reid and others call him. That was evident from the first time most of us heard his name:
When the Chiefs made him their sixth pick in the 2014 NFL Draft, it was hours after the med student had finished a pediatric rotation at Montreal General — where he had stayed late after his shift to assist in the neonatal intensive care unit as an obstetrician performed a C-section to deliver premature twins.
“There’s protocol, you have to look for any meconium aspiration, you have to suction … so you end up doing a lot,” he explained upon his arrival in Kansas City.
Rare enough to draft a Canadian, let alone one who was still a fledgling at the game and with that stuff in his vocabulary … and a worldview quite literally different than most having twice been on yearlong educational family sailing trips down the East Coast of the U.S. to the Caribbean.
“I think it just opened your mind to different cultures, to different people, different ways of living,” he said then.
So after Duvernay-Tardif earned his medical degree in 2018 and resolved in April to serve in the fight against the COVID-19 coronavirus, his announcement Friday night that he would stay on the frontline of that crucial work instead of returning to the frontline of the Chiefs stands for many things.
For one, it’s testament to the sheer humanity of a player who would seem a candidate for the prestigious Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year award for, well, not playing. Or at least the reason he isn’t.
“This is one of the most difficult decisions I have had to make in my life but I must follow my convictions and do what I believe is right for me personally,” he wrote on Twitter, later adding, “If I am to take risks, I will do it caring for patients.”
For another, his selflessness is inspiring at a time we need his example of sacrificing for the greater good.
It stands in stark contrast to those willing to inconvenience, or even put others at risk, for their own selfish interests. Like refusing to wear masks and keep social distance, notions that bear constant reminding and reinforcement as the pandemic surges on … especially considering how much better Canada has coped with COVID than we have.
“Yes, it is an individual sacrifice,” Duvernay-Tardif, who has been part of the NFL Players Association coronavirus task force, said in April. “But once you look at what everybody’s doing, working with their visor, mask, gown and just like exhausting days trying to save lives, I think the least you can do as a citizen is to stay home when the government is telling you to stay home.
“Anyway, I know it’s kind of a political deal a little more in (the U.S.) than it is here right now. But it made me realize that as a citizen, when I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is hard’ … what was I thinking compared to the sacrifices (health-care workers) are making?
“Anyway, food for thought.”
So is what he’s done now as he disavows well over $2 million. (Per the NFL and NFLPA agreement, players who opt out will receive $150,000.)
The first NFL player to opt out of the 2020 season due to COVID-19 may not be the last.
But anyone else that does will be hard-pressed to make a greater impression or impact.
“Everybody respects the decision 100 percent,” star quarterback Patrick Mahomes said Saturday. “Larry’s a guy who loves football but he also loves his other passions.”
That includes, Mahomes added, “making the world a better place. … I believe that he is doing that. He’s seen (the effect of the pandemic) firsthand, and he understands that he needs to be in that place now. We’re going to respect it and give him as much support as we can.”
That and then some from Reid, who has lost an important player but embraces the greater calling.
Growing up in Los Angeles, Reid was introduced to a medical colleague of his mother’s named Danny Fortmann, a Pro Football Hall of Famer who went on to become team physician for the Los Angeles Rams.
When Fortmann was drafted out of Colgate by the Chicago Bears in 1936, Fortmann was conflicted over whether to play pro football or go to medical school. The legendary George “Papa Bear” Halas supported him in aspiring to both.
That story was on Reid’s mind when the Chiefs drafted Duvernay-Tardif. He wanted to help him meet his dreams.
So when it came down to this, well, it not only wasn’t a surprise to Reid but a point of pride.
“We understand when football’s over (he will be) one of the greatest doctors ever,” said Reid, who had a long and “great” talk with him recently. “So, we appreciate that.”
Including the part where LDT is attention-averse for doing what his conscience tells him is only right — a notion to which he alluded in April when he wanted to make sure it was understood he was only one of many people heeding an urgent call.
“I don’t want to look like a superhero or whatever,” he said. “I’m just doing my duty.”
This story was originally published July 25, 2020 at 4:40 PM.