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Canada bound
By Joe Scalzo
YOUNGSTOWN
Last spring, when Desmond Marrow opted to stay home with his newborn son rather than play in the Canadian Football League, he thought he might be done with football.
Turns out, football wasn’t done with him.
The Cardinal Mooney High graduate signed a two-year deal to play cornerback with the Edmonton Eskimos, a team located 2,000 miles northwest of Youngstown. It sits about eight hours north of Montana’s Canadian border.
“It [the chance] kind of came out of nowhere,” said Marrow, who signed the contract on Jan. 22. “I hadn’t been in contact with anyone, but I put a video on the Internet of me working out and they somehow saw it.
“They called my Uncle Vince [Marrow, an assistant with Kentucky] and the GM wanted to know if I was still interested in playing.
“They sent me the contract the next day. I didn’t have to work out or anything.”
Marrow has stayed in shape working out at Max Athletic Training in Boardman (Falcons safety Sean Baker of Canfield has also worked out at the facility) and will attend a minicamp in Florida at the end of April. Training camp in Edmonton begins in June.
The 18-game regular season runs from late June to early November, followed by three weeks of playoffs. The title game, the Grey Cup, is played in late November.
Marrow would be the second Valley native in the CFL, joining Liberty’s Marcellus Bowman, who played in four games as a linebacker with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats last fall after spending three years with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. Bowman was injured for most of last season but played in all three of Hamilton’s playoff games.
Marrow, who played collegiately at Toledo, signed with the Houston Texans as an undrafted free agent in the spring of 2012. He was released two months later and was picked up by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who released him in late August.
Marrow originally signed with the Eskimos last February but didn’t want to leave his son (who is now 14 months old) in Youngstown. He plans for his son to eventually join him in Canada once he gets settled in.
“Last year, he had just been born and I didn’t want to be that far away,” Marrow said. “I basically said, if it [the chance] comes back around, that means I was meant to still play football. I honestly didn’t think it was going to happen, but I was praying it would happen.”
Edmonton’s new coach, Chris Jones, prefers his cornerbacks to play press-man — a style that suits the tall (6-foot-3), physical Marrow.
“That’s one of my better skills,” he said. “I’m a big corner, so that allows me to use my long arms.”
When asked why he decided to keep playing after more than a year off, Marrow said, “Football’s my thing, man. It’s going to be cool to get back into it.”