CFL exec made tough call to be away from family in Big Easy
WINNIPEG John Murphy admits he made a choice.
It was mid-march and the worldwide shutdowns related to the coronavirus pandemic were just beginning.
Murphy, the vice-president of player personnel for the Toronto Argonauts, was faced with a decision: stay in Toronto and continue to do his job, or head home to New Orleans to be with his family.
At the time, the Canadian Football League was still a ways away from cancelling its March scouting combine, or postponing training camps and the start of the season.
With no idea of what was actually coming, Murphy chose to stay in Toronto and focus on his job.
“I guess I could have said, ‘Hey I’ve got to go home,’” Murphy said in a phone interview from his downtown Toronto apartment. “But who knows how that would have sorted itself out or played out if you couldn’t come back 10 days later.
“Nobody is ever going to tell you if you did the right thing or the wrong thing. I just made the best decision I could with the information I had at that moment. Now I just have to deal with it every day and make the best of it.”
Murphy had planned to spend time at home with his daughters, 11-year-old Eden and 10-year-old Faith in March, then attend the combine in Toronto and then take the girls to visit their grandfather, John Sr., on New York’s Long Island at Easter.
Instead, with travel across the U.s.-canada border now restricted, he has spent the last six weeks on his own, speaking to his daughters and 90-year-old dad only through Facetime.
He doesn’t know when he’ll see them again. Normally, his daughters live with him during the off-season in Louisiana and in Canada during the CFL season.
Right now they are with their mother, who is tasked with facilitating their schooling and providing all the other necessary care.
“Someone else is having to be the school teacher and the Uber driver and having to do all the other stuff,” he said. “It’s not nearly as stressful on me as it is on their mom.”
It’s certainly not ideal, but even if he had gone home, Murphy realizes he wouldn’t have been able to get things back to normal.
“I’m the traveller. … I’d be the outlier,” said Murphy, who normally spends a lot of time scouting American players in the off-season.
“Am I putting them at more risk because I’m the one travelling so much? I’d have to quarantine myself from them even if I was home.”
Murphy has spent 15 years in the CFL, as a scout, a player personnel man and an assistant general manager.
He’s been in Winnipeg, Calgary, Saskatchewan and now Toronto, and he’s obviously used to being away from home.
So now, he’s doing what he always does — focusing on building his team into a winner.
“I would sleep under my desk at the office if the alternative was not having a chance to make this work,” Murphy said.
“I need to do what I’m doing with this and get to the destination point I need to get to as much as I need water or oxygen. That’s just how I’m built.”
So he spends his time preparing for the upcoming CFL draft, doing evaluations of returning players, interacting with coaches and staff and setting things up as normally as possible behind the scenes.
The only thing close to personal interaction he’s had is with “the guy that you are ordering food from.”
There are certainly people who question his choice, but being relatively new to the job with the Argos — he was hired last October when general manager Jim Popp was fired — Murphy did not want to let his bosses down.
“No one said any of this was going to be easy,” he said. “I had zero element that led me to believe that this was what was going to come out of just coming up to work. This is clearly something that’s unexpected for all of us.
“I’m not willing to risk our season. I’m not willing to put the coaches and the people that gave me an opportunity in a bad situation because I got scared and wanted to go home or I didn’t know what to do, so I turned around and went the other way.
“You want to show these guys what kind of person they hired, what kind of person they have invested in. How did that person respond in that kind of scenario. I can’t use this as an excuse for not getting to where I wanted to get.”