Arthur: Concussion symptoms hindering Calvillo’s career,
Persistent symptoms of concussion dog storied quarterback
It looked like a perfect day in Montreal on Sunday, in that beautifully boxed-in stadium at McGill. Autumn sun, scarves and jackets, and the home team running Hamilton out of the building. The Alouettes demolished the weirdly unstable TigerCats 36-5, and the starting quarterback delivered. Same as it ever was.
Except Montreal’s quarterback was Troy Smith, the former Heisman winner, and for the Alouettes it may have been the first game of the rest of their lives. It was the first game since Anthony Calvillo, the beating heart of this franchise for so long, admitted he wasn’t going to return from a bad concussion suffered in August. And with that faint bit of hope extinguished, it became that much easier to wonder if he would ever come back at all.
This season was always a sliver of a chance, if not outright delusion. Two weeks ago the 41-year-old Calvillo surfaced at practice and threw short passes with the other injured guys, said some encouraging words, but the doctors were still keeping him off the sidelines of actual games because they were worried how the noise would affect him. The hit from Ricky Foley Aug. 17 was clean, shoulder through the chest, and it didn’t look awful, except the back of Calvillo’s head hit the ground. He spoke after the game, and said he didn’t remember the hit, and then it got bad. Still, there was this notion hanging in that air that maybe he could come back.
Now, we wonder whether he should. The Montreal Gazette reported that Calvillo had suffered a setback and called the team to say he wasn’t coming back to work this season. According to Zurkowsky, Calvillo has been walking on a treadmill, but he is still having issues with concentration, with reading, with processing visual information, which was always his greatest gift. His contract with the Alouettes runs through the 2014 season.
Calvillo has been a wonderful player for the Canadian Football League for 20 years. He has been the perfect sort of CFL star, and the numbers became staggering through accumulation: 79,816 yards passing, more than anybody else; 455 touchdowns, just 224 interceptions, a 62.4 per cent completion percentage. He wasn’t big and didn’t have a rocket arm, but he was a guy who could read the churning canvas in front of him, process the sturm and drang, and find the seams. He was always serious, so durable, a pro.
But Calvillo admitted to TSN a couple years ago that he felt like his memory wasn’t what it should be, and he had no doubt football had impacted it; he started doing what people called the chuckand-duck the last few years, releasing balls and dodging away before he could take a hit. He didn’t have a long history of recorded concussions, but you could see it. It’s a human reaction, even if you’re not 41 years old, but we ask quarterbacks to suppress that reaction. As Brett Favre said Sunday, it took him 20 years to realize he didn’t like getting hit.
“You’re not headhunting or anything like that, but you are trying to take the QB out of the game clean, right?” Foley told reporters a few days after the hit. “If anybody says they’re not, they’re lying. Everybody is. But you never want to see a guy, especially a legend like him, miss more than one game.”
Calvillo was always such an improbable star — the kid born from Mexican parents who grew up dirt-poor in La Puente, Ca., who had never heard of the CFL before he started practising on grass laid down in a casino parking lot for the Las Vegas Posse in 1994. When he got to Montreal in 1998 he was a backup, a maybe. He learned.
He became Montreal. He embraced stardom in this little league, signed autographs, volunteered for charity work — he came to relish the compromise, as Grantland’s Michael Weinreb once wrote. He was almost always a statue of a man in public, stoic and dignified, though he cracked a little when his wife, Alexia Kontolemos, was diagnosed with B-cell lymphoma; he walked away from the 2007 season to be home with her and their daughters. They decided he would come back in 2008, and he played in three straight Grey Cups, winning the last two. She went into remission, and is a survivor.
And after he won his last Grey Cup in 2010, his third win in eight appearances, Calvillo broke wide open. He announced after the game that he had an unidentified lesion on his throat, and he hoped it wouldn’t be cancerous, and the words burbled out. The next day, in a quiet moment at an airport, he said it had been happening for weeks — he would be addressing the team, talking about football, about appreciating it, about appreciating life, and he would just start to cry. The statue cracked, over and over.
A few of his veteran teammates noticed he had given up cigars; some knew about his hospital visits. His teammates in Bible study prayed for him, and he told a few others in the back of the bus, where he sat with the team’s other old men. Surgery found cancer cells, and they removed his thyroid. The doctors only found the lesion because somebody had put a helmet into his sternum hard enough to need doctors.
But he came back, and stayed so healthy for so long, which is how those numbers piled up into the sky. He could have walked away anytime in the last five years; he could have walked away after that third Grey Cup, after coming back from the surgery, after last season ended in another disappointment.
So few men get to walk away from football the way they want to, though. Matt Dunigan, Dave Dickenson, Steve Young, Troy Aikman, Kurt Warner, Favre — they all left after getting hit that last time, leaving their brains unable to continue. Anthony Calvillo travelled so far to get here, discovered a world he hadn’t imagined, soared in it. We are lucky he did. But maybe it should be over.