Garrett was one phone call from becoming entry-level medical clerk

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/11/2011 (5253 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

VANCOUVER — He hadn’t given up completely on his dream of playing pro football.

But Chris Garrett had already done the necessary paperwork. “I had my résumé all typed up,” the Winnipeg Blue Bombers running back recalled Thursday during his club’s brunch with the Grey Cup media at a downtown hotel.

Garrett has a degree in health services management and when he found himself unemployed last summer — having earlier been cut in training camp by the Winnipeg Blue Bombers — the 24-year-old figured his education could at least land him an entry-level job at a hospital or walk-in clinic to pay some bills.

So what’s an entry level position in health services? “A clerk,” said Garrett.

It was a sobering moment, typing up that first résumé, for a young man who had dreamed from the age of 6 of being a pro football player — where the only curriculum vitae required is your statistics on the field.

And it sounds like it pains him still — even at this moment, when things are so very different — the memory of just how he close he came to giving up.

“It’s not anything you want to brag about,” says Garrett. “Any time you try to focus on something when your heart is somewhere else, it’s a very humbling experience. I mean, I wanted my success to be from football. I can work later on, but I want to use my youth playing football.”

Funny — amazing, really — how that all turned out. Because not long after that humbling moment came another moment — one that changed Garrett’s life and which, depending on what happens this Sunday when the Bombers take on the B.C. Lions in the 99th Grey Cup, maybe even change the course of history for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers franchise.

With a stack of résumés staring back at him accusingly at home in Utica, NY., Garrett took a cross-country trip to visit Los Angeles last August and, as he tells it, just get away from his life for a bit.

He was sightseeing and had just seen Jack Nicholson’s star on the Walk Of Fame with his mom — he still lives at home with his parents in the off-season — when his phone rang.

Bombers assistant-general manager Ross Hodgkinson was on the line with that rarest of offers in life — a second chance. “I was like, ‘Mom, I got my job back.’ And she was like, ‘Thank you Jesus!” Garrett recalls.

The divine intervention was just beginning for Garrett. While he was back in Bombers camp, he was on the practice roster and not playing. Until, that is, Sept. 24 in Toronto when lightning struck the Bombers twice in a 25-24 loss to the Argos. First, it was running back Fred Reid — the leading rusher in the CFL in 2010 — going down with a season-ending torn ACL. And then, incredibly, Reid’s backup, Carl Volny, tore his ACL minutes later, ending his season too.

And with that, a man who never believed he should have been cut in the first place — “I was in shock. It’s like a candid-camera type of thing” — was by bizarre circumstance suddenly the team’s starting running back.

It is one thing to get an opportunity, it was quite another to take fullest advantage. But Garrett has run with it, literally and left an impression on his teammates almost as big as the one he left on a Hamilton defensive line that he decimated for 190 yards last Sunday in a 19-3 Bombers victory in the East Final.

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“He does it exactly the way the coaches want it done,” says one of the men who has to block for him, tackle Brendon LaBatte. “And as soon as he sees the hole, he gets his shoulders going north-south and he’s got that extra burst to get through the line.

“And rarely do you see the first tackle bring him down. He always seems to break the arm tackle — or at the very worst, he’s falling forward. He’s getting big yards per carry and I think that’s the thing — he’s just so disciplined with his reads.”

Bombers veteran slotback Terrence Edwards says he’s also impressed by Garrett’s maturity off the field. “With the success he’s had so far, with some young guys it goes to their head. They think they’re bigger than the program or the team. But he just goes about his business like he’s supposed to be here. He’s got the confidence that he’s supposed to be here and this is his time.”

Funny that it would come so soon after he thought his time was up.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca