Doyel: Colts' Tyler Varga reached top of mountain, but had to step off
INDIANAPOLIS – The letters surprised him. The headaches, the nausea, the dizziness? Didn’t surprise him. Before he became a running back for the Indianapolis Colts, Tyler Varga was studying to be a surgeon at Yale. He knows the body, the head. He knows what a concussion can do.
So as it was happening to him, he understood. The confusion, the fatigue. The words forming in his brain but getting lost on the way to his mouth.
Tyler Varga even knows the physics behind the football helmet, and why his concussion happened on a hit that was less a head-on collision, more of a glancing — hard, but glancing — blow.
“There’s a linear force the helmet can absorb pretty well,” Varga was telling me a few days ago from his home in Ontario. “But there’s rotational forces you’re subject to in a collision that helmets don’t do as good a job absorbing. I knew all that even before this happened.”
The letters, though. He didn’t know they’d come. They were hand-written and heartbreaking, coming from all over the country — all over two countries, Canada and the United States — and mailed to the Colts complex. Every so often the Colts would put the letters into a package and send them to Tyler Varga.
This is what I went through …
I don’t think you should go back …
Not worth the risk …
* * *
It was the game that saved whatever season the Colts had left.
Already 0-2 after losses to the Buffalo Bills and New York Jets, the Colts were at Tennessee for their third game and losing in the fourth quarter. Andrew Luck rallied the Colts to 21 straight points for a 35-27 lead, but the Titans scored with 47 seconds left to draw within 35-33.
Here comes an onside kick. Tyler Varga had one job.
“Basically blow up the guy coming down the field,” he says. “All I know is he had about 50 pounds on me.”
Varga blew him up, the onside kick bounced harmlessly out of bounds, and the Colts ran out the final 47 seconds.
“I got my job done,” Varga says of the last play of his NFL career.
After the game, Colts coach Chuck Pagano said there were no injuries.
* * *
Tyler Varga didn’t know anything was wrong, really wrong, for a few days. He thought the nausea and headaches were from a virus. The flu, perhaps.
By Wednesday of that week, he knew otherwise. He told the Colts. They put him in the NFL’s concussion protocol program, then on injured reserve.
Tyler Varga and the concussion that lasted 4 months
What has happened since then has been so Tyler Varga. The abbreviated version: He spent most of the rest of the 2015 season at home in Canada, then took part in an internship in the Yale Investments Office. He reported to Colts camp in April for voluntary offseason workouts and went through the non-contact drills. Then he took classes at the Stanford Graduate School of Business; the strength and conditioning coaches at Stanford let Varga use its weight room and field. Back home in Canada he kept working out. He was telling me that he has felt normal for a while now.
“I’m probably in the best shape of my life,” the 5-11 running back says. “Same weight — 225 pounds — but a little leaner.”
For months Varga was pushing himself through those workouts, and wrestling with himself. The concussion symptoms receded and then were gone, but Varga knew another hit could bring them back and then some. He knew, he says, “there’s potential for serious long-term impact on your quality of life.”
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And he knew his future wasn’t dependent on football. His future, in fact, would have nothing to do with football. In college he majored in evolutionary biology and wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon, but in the past eight months he has become fascinated by the financial realm. He interned at Yale, studied at Stanford, read on his own and taught himself the basics of financial modeling. He’s interested in private equity.
But football …
“There was an internal conflict going on,” he says. “Yeah, I want to go back. No, I shouldn’t go back. Yeah, I want to go back — but should I? Is it the right thing to do? I was still training hard because I wanted to have that option available to me, and I wanted to be absolutely sure before making that decision. It’s a decision you can’t come back from. Let’s be honest: A guy in my situation, once you pull the trigger, it’s sort of done.”
Varga talked it over with his parents, both athletes in their own right. His mother, Hannele Sundberg, was second in alpine skiing in the 2015 Winter World Masters. His father, John Varga, is a bodybuilder who has won Mr. Eastern Canada.
As he was deciding what to do, Tyler Varga put his football career into economic terms.
“Getting to the NFL, I worked really hard — there’s a huge cost involved,” he says. “Before you write that off as sunk cost, you want to be sure this is the path.”
The letters kept coming. Strangers, all of them, telling Varga their stories — and their stories were saying the same thing: Be done.
“I was shocked,” Varga says. “These weren’t just four or five sentences — there were multiple pages, and there were some great anecdotes in there. As much as I appreciated that from the fans, you’re obviously going to take into account the opinion of those you know and who know you best. We came to the decision as a family.”
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A few days before he would have reported last week with the rest of the Colts to training camp in Anderson, Varga made his decision: retirement. Colts coach Chuck Pagano reached out to him. So did other coaches, some teammates, even a few scouts.
Then came the media storm. Since last week he has been getting five or six calls a day from radio shows, TV shows, even symposium organizers wanting to fly him into town for a panel on concussions and the trend of NFL players retiring early.
Varga does the media. He won’t do the symposiums, not yet anyway. For now he’ll continue tinkering with the financial world. He hasn’t ruled out going to medical school, but isn’t sure anymore. He will take his time on that decision, just as he took his time on this one.
He made it to football’s apex, this longest of long shots — born in Sweden, high school in Canada, college in Ontario and then the Ivy League — and he finishes his NFL career with one carry for 2 yards, one catch for 18 yards, and one tackle on special teams. On his final play, he got his job done.
Tyler Varga is 22 years old. His future is calling. He will not look back.
“Once I made the decision, that was it,” he says. “Got to look forward to jumping on some other challenge. I guess that’s just how I work.”
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter:@GreggDoyelStar or atwww.facebook.com/gregg.doyel.