YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN
Detroit tight end Willson of LaSalle embraces a return to his roots
“Hey, Luke!” a voice interjected. “Good luck with the Lions!” This time the well-wisher was an exerciser, jogging by along the riverfront.
It was the third time in an hour a passerby had recognized local sports celebrity and sixth-year NFL tight end Luke Willson, and briefly interrupted his interview with Postmedia to offer him good fortune with his new team. Namely, the Detroit Lions — every much Willson’s hometown team as if he’d hailed not from the Windsor suburb of LaSalle but, instead, a more distant Detroit suburb across the river, such as Royal Oak, Hamtramck, Dearborn or Southfield.
“Thank you!” Willson shouted back to flatterer No. 3. “Appreciate it!”
Willson’s acknowledgment at each impromptu interruption came not only with good cheer and authenticity, but with a quiet chuckle of humble embarrassment.
Special moments? “Yeah,” the 28-year-old said, shaking his head. “It’s all pretty cool.”
Returning home, that is. Wikipedia lists “Detroit Windsor” as the most populous of 33 twin-nation, twin-city, “transborder agglomerations” in the Americas. With 5.7 million area residents, it’s also sixth largest in the world.
Willson is among only a handful of Windsor-area athletes ever good enough, and fortunate enough, to make the figurative leap across the Detroit River and get signed by a top Motor City pro sports club. In modern times there have been only six others.
One is current Toronto Blue Jays broadcaster Joe Siddall, a Windsorite who had a cup of coffee in 1998 — near the end of his pro career as a catcher — with Major League Baseball’s Detroit Tigers; Siddall started 19 games that season, the second to last in old Tiger Stadium.
The others were NHLers with the Detroit Red Wings: Defenceman Randy Manery of Leamington, from 1970-72; Rightwinger Brad Smith of Windsor, from 1980-85; Goalie Eddie Mio of Windsor, a goalie from 1983-86; Right-winger Darren McCarty of Leamington, who played 13 of his 15 NHL seasons from 1992 to 2009 in Detroit; And, most famously, the late Bob Probert, a skilled leftwinger from Windsor who became arguably the NHL’s all-time champion pugilist, primarily with the Red Wings from 1985-94. Willson spent his first five NFL seasons as the No. 1 or 2 tight end on the Seattle Seahawks before signing as a free agent with the Detroit Lions in March. He’s set to become the first of six Windsorborn players in the NFL’s 98-year history to suit up for the Lions. “I’m pretty excited to be representing Windsor, Detroit and this area,” said Willson, who signed a one-year deal with the Lions, reportedly worth $2.5 million. “But it has been a bit surreal.” Such as in mid-April, when he and his mother Wilma were driving to Detroit to run some errands when, he later told the Windsor Star, they were shocked to see one of three Canadian-side billboards hawking Lions season-ticket sales, all emblazoned with enormous photos of him. Willson had no idea that advertisements hanging on his modest Canadian-side fame had been in the works. Three months after signing with the Lions, just days after the conclusion of the team’s spring workouts and practices, and a month before training camp’s first practice on July 27, Willson made time to address various subjects with Postmedia, including whether one can indeed go home again. The answer is, in a word, yes. But Willson doubts that would have been the case just a few years ago. “I’ve been joking with people about the fact I’ve probably gone out for dinner with my parents about once a week this off-season. They’ll come over there, to Detroit,” Willson said, nodding across the river. “It’s a bit odd, maybe, for a 28-year-old to be consistently going out for dinner with his parents. But’s it’s been fun.
“I tell people who have been asking that they have to realize I’ve been out of town, basically, since I was 18.”
After graduating from LaSalle’s St. Thomas of Villanova Catholic Secondary School in 2009 as a local multi-sport star, Willson moved to Houston, Texas, to attend Rice University on a football scholarship. He chose that over a promising baseball career; he batted cleanup on the 2008 Canadian junior national team that included Brett Lawrie, and he later had a tryout with the Toronto Blue Jays, where under the Rogers Centre dome he cranked homers as far as the third deck.
Willson also played Triple-A travel/rep hockey as a teenager, but ultimately elected to pursue football.
Good choice. After exhausting his college eligibility at Rice in 2013, the NFL’s Seahawks drafted Willson in the fifth round, 158th overall. As a rookie backup tight end to Zach Miller, Willson played in all 19 games as Seattle rolled to victory in Super Bowl XLVIII. Sixtytwo games with the Seahawks later, Willson now lives in suburban Detroit, about a half-hour drive from Windsor.
“You miss the little things,” the six-foot-five, 251-pounder said. “Don’t get me wrong; I don’t need any, like, sympathy and don’t want anyone to feel bad for me. But I was back for both Mother’s Day and Father’s Day this year, which is probably the first time I’ve been able to do that in 10 years.” Surprisingly, Willson said coming home the first chance he got after his time with the Seahawks ended was not, in fact, how it went down.
“It was definitely a perk of the decision. But it was not a case where the decision came down to somewhere else or here, and I picked Detroit because it’s home. At this stage of my life, I still feel like I’m young enough in my personal situation where I don’t mind bouncing around a little bit.” Willson has yet to marry. But now that’s he’s 18 months from turning 30, after five successful, pressure-packed, often volatile seasons with the baggage-laden Seahawks, Willson now has the grizzle to handle being home. That might not have been the case before now, he said.
“A lot of people have asked me what it’s like being home, and what about all the distractions? Well, part of the reason I was never really in town in my first few years in the NFL was because I was kind of worried about the whole distraction part.
“I don’t know if I was mature enough to survive playing for Detroit three or four years ago. “But I think now that I’ve been in this league for a little while, and grown up a little bit, and I know how to kind of handle myself off the field, and how my body needs to prepare in order to be ready to go for training camp, I’m not really worried anymore about home being a distraction. I’ve gone through some situations and whatever — distractions-wise on the field, off the field — and kind of know how best to handle my time.” Some pro athletes never want to play in their hometown. Or anywhere near it. Not so much because of added distractions, but added expectations — and attendant pressures. Not Willson. “I didn’t come here to prove I can make it in the NFL. I came here to help the Lions win, in whatever fashion.”
The Lions, alas, have as meagre a playoff resume as any long-standing NFL franchise. Only one playoff victory in the past 60 years attests to that. In fact Willson’s parents, native Windsorites Mike and Wilma, were born two years after the Lions’ last NFL title in 1957. “I’ve been in a program that has won for the last five years, in Seattle,” Willson said.
“I’ve never not had a winning record in the NFL. And we won a Super Bowl. So, mentality-wise, my idea here is to do whatever the coaches decide my role is. That’s it. I don’t feel I need to prove anything to the hometown, if that makes sense.”
It does. Unsurprisingly, Willson grew up cheering for the Lions. Even had a Barry Sanders No. 20 jersey. Now he himself wears Detroit Lions jersey No. 82.
At the conclusion of last week’s interview, Willson begged pardon and dashed toward his parked SUV, to make an appointment he was now late for — only to be intercepted by a pump-station worker. The middle-aged man not only wished Willson well with the Lions, but explained how, and with whom, their athletic pasts in Windsor had crossed. Willson patiently engaged him, chatting him up for a bit.