Chiefs offensive lineman Duvernay-Tardif facing different NFL off-season

It’s been a very different off-season for Laurent Duvernay-Tardif.

It began with the Kansas City Chiefs’ veteran offensive lineman basking in the glory of the club’s epic 31-20 comeback Super Bowl victory over the San Francisco 49ers. Not only did it end the franchise’s 50-year championship drought but also marked the first time in NFL history a team had won three games after trailing by 10 or more points in a single post-season.

The six-foot-five, 321-pound Duvernay-Tardif then took a two-week sailing vacation in the Caribbean with his girlfriend, Florence Dube-Moreau. But upon returning to Montreal, Duvernay-Tardif faced a 14-day quarantine due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The NFL hasn’t yet postponed either the start of training camps or the regular season. But last month it ordered teams to close their facilities and its annual draft — slated for April 23-25 — will be a virtual event rather than staged in a public setting.

“Many people have asked me what I’ll do if there are no OTAs, if there’s no season,” Duvernay-Tardif said. “Right now, let’s worry about this pandemic.

“Honestly, if we get to that point, football is going to be the least of our concerns (because) it’s going to be really bad. This is much bigger than football.”

Once Duvernay-Tardif returned home, he immediately offered to help health officials fight the outbreak. The Chiefs guard graduated from McGill in 2018 with a doctor of medicine and master of surgery degree.

“I’m in kind of a grey zone,” said the seven-year NFL veteran. “I’ve got my MD but I don’t have a license to practise yet because I’ve taken a year off between my studies and the beginning of my residency.

“Usually, people jump from being a medical student into a residency program so it’s hard for me to help on the front lines. We came to an agreement that my best role was to relay information from public health authorities about social distancing, all the hygiene measures and to stay at home.”

The 29-year-old native of Mont-St-Hilaire, Que., practised what he preached. Duvernay-Tardif spent much of his quarantine doing carpentry, building two tables, two gardens and a change table from scratch.

“It’s something I’ve always wanted to learn, how to work with wood,” Duvernay-Tardif said. “It’s manual work but you’ve really got to be delicate and pay attention to detail.

“You can’t be impulsive otherwise you’re going to miss an angle, miss a cut, be short or too long. With everything that’s going on and because we don’t know for how long we’ll have to isolate at home, it’s important to have structure and different projects. I feel it’s true for everybody, especially kids who don’t have school right now. You’ve got to find ways to give them ideas and keep them motivated.”

Duvernay-Tardif was drawn to carpentry because it allows him to mentally decompress while still problem-solving. Abstract pieces of wood must be measured and cut precisely so they can be assembled to create something that’s functional and durable.

Dealing with mental challenges was also something that attracted Duvernay-Tardif to sailing. Growing up, Duvernay-Tardif took year-long sailing trips around the Caribbean with his parents and two younger sisters.

“My memories of sailing with my family, one of the things that struck me the most was the different relationship to time,” he said. “You’ve got to cover 25 miles (40 kilometres) and it might take you five hours but who cares?

“To be honest, taking possession of a 40-foot sailboat on an island you don’t know with the weather, tides, winds and access to ports, I was a little nervous, maybe. For me, that’s how I decompress, I’ve got to put my brain to another task. Doing that with the beautiful weather and just my girlfriend, it kind of put us into a different mindset and that was great.”

But the COVID-19 pandemic has made training difficult and forced Duvernay-Tardif to be innovative.

“I ordered some weights and bands and I’ve been in communication with the trainers in Kansas City and they’ve given me a bunch of workouts and ideas,” he said. “You just try to do your best and at the end of the day I feel we’re all really privileged as professional athletes and not really allowed to complain about training right now.

“I feel like I’ve got into a rhythm and built myself a training schedule where I’m able to do all the stuff I need to. Hopefully it’s going to help me transition once we’re allowed to go out and train like normal again.”

Duvernay-Tardif is having no problem dealing with the uncertainty that is the 2020 NFL season.

“I feel as a professional athlete you lift, you train, you get yourself ready,” he said.

When football does resume, the defending-champion Chiefs will be deemed by many as the team to beat. And that’s just fine with Duvernay-Tardif.

“I feel like having a target on our back is a sentence I’ve heard many times the last few years,” he said. “I know it’s the first time (in 50 years) that we’ve won the Super Bowl but it’s the third or fourth time we’ve won our division so for six games out of 16 you have a target on your back, for sure, playing the (Los Angeles) Chargers, (Las Vegas) Raiders and (Denver) Broncos (all AFC West Division rivals).

“You want that challenge of getting everybody’s best shot. After (winning) when you know you’ve received their best shot, it’s the best feeling in the world.”

This season, the Raiders will play in Las Vegas after years of being in Oakland, Calif., at Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum.

“That was one stadium that every time you travelled to you knew it was going to be different,” Duvernay-Tardif said. “I have a picture in my mind of the bus driving there and the fans going crazy.

“Those fans were very vocal, they really cheered for their team and hated the other team. I’m curious to see how it’s going to be in Vegas . . . but playing in Oakland was, for sure, one of those games that I felt as a team it was important we showed up.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 13, 2020

Dan Ralph, The Canadian Press