Excellence, both on and off the field
How incredible and inspiring that in a year of pandemicabbreviated sports, there was still cause for vigorous and impassioned debate about just who should be honoured as Canada’s top athlete of the year.
The field of choices was in fact so strong that it came down to a tie vote for the first time in nearly four decades.
On Tuesday, soccer star Alphonso Davies and NFL offensive lineman Laurent Duvernay-Tardif were named co-winners of the 2020 Lou Marsh Trophy.
The prestigious award, named after the legendary former Toronto Star sports editor, is handed out each December to Canada’s top athlete — professional or amateur, man or woman, in any sport.
In a year like no other, the co-winners are both magnificent athletes who delivered excellence on and, just as importantly, off the field.
Davies is, in many ways, the modern face of Canada, coming here as a child with his family from a refugee camp to build a better life. Now, at just 20, the Edmontonian has risen to the highest level of global soccer playing for Bayern Munich and becoming the first Canadian man to lift a Champions League trophy.
Duvernay-Tardif, who protects the quarterback on his team, won the Super Bowl in February with the Kansas City Chiefs. Then, astonishingly, he gave up his multimillion-dollar salary to sit out this season to work on the pandemic’s front lines in a long-term-care home near Montreal.
His success on the field is impressive enough. Only a handful of Canadians have played on Super Bowl-winning teams before and he’s the first to have reached that height from playing university football in Canada — while graduating from McGill’s medical school, no less. But it’s Duvernay-Tardif’s selfless act in a health crisis that elevated him to co-winner of the athlete-of-the-year award.
The professional athletic window is a short one so choosing to set aside that opportunity, with no real guarantee of being able to get back to it, in order to serve one’s community is beyond admirable.
His actions help to remind us all that our collective welfare depends on the selfless acts of individuals.
“If I am to take risks,” he has said, “I will do it caring for patients.”
When a football-playing doctor (not quite certified) decides the best use of his time is helping vulnerable seniors in his home province of Quebec, it’s an act that deserves recognition.
And while Davies is best known for his footwork on the field, he also recognizes the need to give back. He became a supporter of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees this year and uses his public profile and substantial reach on social media to raise awareness and money for the cause.
As Davies said on hearing that he’d be named co-winner: “In this challenging year, it is nice to know that we were able to make Canadians proud with our accomplishments on and off the field.”
Canadians should indeed be proud. Not only has sport in this country grown to the point that the Lou Marsh debate centres on Canadians playing at the top of their game, on the top teams, in the top leagues of the world, but the athletes themselves are standup citizens.
In this unprecedented year in life and sports, it’s fitting that contributions off the field mattered as much as performances on it when it came to winning the Lou Marsh Trophy.