THE CANADIAN PRESS
Almondo Sewell’s continuing story is a varied and interesting one.
It has to do with football excellence and military precision. It’s also about early years in the Caribbean and formative ones in Trenton, New Jersey. Of knowing almost immediately that Edmonton was home. It also has to do with somersaults, of course. Oh, and about watching football with his pet rabbit.
Hard to know where to start with the 28-year-old from Buff Bay, Jamaica, who’s quick to laugh and up for answering pretty much any question. Defensive linemen, it seems, can be broken up into two groups: The intensely serious ones and the laid back ones, whose affability belies their ferocious domination on the field. Sewell seems to be the latter.
He’s got a pet bunny named Dusko (pronounced DUSH-ko), a three-year-old, black and reddish Lop Eared Rabbit that will hop up on the couch and watch football with him.
“He sits right next to me. Doesn’t like it when we hold him too much,” Sewell laughed. “(But) he’ll sit there the whole time, right next to you.”
If you’re lucky, you may see Sewell and his wife, Natasha, free ranging Dusko in an Edmonton park.
“He listens when we tell him to come here. We let him out at a park, he doesn’t run too far from us and he comes right back when he’s ready to go.”
Dusko, then, is disciplined. You could be surprised that one of the most fearsome defensive tackles in the Canadian Football League has a pet rabbit. You should not be surprised that said rabbit holds itself accountable. It’s a theme that has prevailed for his entire life. Sewell’s, that is, not Dusko’s.
“My dad was a military guy,” Sewell begins, talking about his childhood in Buff Bay. “We grew up in Jamaica. And he was in the army in Jamaica the whole time. My grandfather had a huge farm there, so we had to get up, help him out, go to school right after. So, we were always up at the crack of dawn.”
Sewell had one of those things you call a career year, in 2014, piling up 49 tackles and nine sacks on his way to a second consecutive placing on the CFL All-Star Team. He’s off to another all-star start, with eight tackles and a sack in two games, at the vanguard of one of the league’s best defences, one that is filled with so many returnees from a unit that shut down most everybody a year ago.
“We all get along which is the good thing,” Sewell said of his mates on the defensive line. “Nobody’s jealous of anybody. Most teams, you get your knucklehead in the group but this one, we don’t have any.”
After a rough start against the Argos in Week One – “We ended up beatin’ our own self that game. Not like they whooped us,” Sewell said – the Eskimos’ defence was again dominant in last week’s 46-17 dismantling of Ottawa. They will attempt a repeat performance on Friday night when they meet the REDBLACKS again, this time in the nation’s capital.
There should not again be a letdown of the kind the Eskimos’ defence suffered in that loss to Toronto. Sewell, the man who first broke out the now famous post-sack somersault in a game in 2013, points to more discipline as the reason why. Discipline that comes down from head coach Chris Jones.
“If he’s gonna say something to you, you’re gonna do it,” Sewell states. “We’ve all got tremendous respect for him.”
Respect for authority figures is a quality that Sewell had conditioned in him as a child in Jamaica. A quality that was further cemented after the Sewells moved to the United States.
“We were just about to come to Canada, actually,” he said, mentioning a distant cousin the family had in Ottawa. Instead, they ended up in New Jersey.
His father became an electrician. His mother, a nurse. Sewell was introduced to boarding school, spending a year “in the middle of nowhere,” at Hargrave Military Academy, in Virginia.
“Every single morning you had to get up at 4:30, get dressed, make your bed and be outside for formation at 5:30,” he said, laughing at the memory. “In military school, if you were ever late, you’d get these demerit points. You get too much demerit points? They had this square. You had to walk around there for fifteen hours,” he chuckled. Noting that he never suffered that fate because his early mornings in Jamaica had conditioned him to be an early riser, Sewell still got – and gets – the message that was being sent.
“You have to be accountable,” he said and then repeated for emphasis. “You have to hold yourself accountable.”
After being introduced to football in America and playing college ball at Akron, Sewell is now doing just what he wants, just where he wants. “The moment I got off the plane it was one of those surreal moments like ‘this is where I want to be,’ he said of his first visit to Edmonton back in 2011.
“It’s a great community, great country. We’ve decided this is home now.”
That means he and Natasha will either stay put, or return if need be, should Sewell’s path take him to another city before he’s finished playing. He knows that a football life can be unpredictable. His first stay with the Eskimos was short, released after Week Five in 2011. He was back in 2012, totalling 31 tackles and 6 sacks and being named a West All-Star. “Whether I’m somewhere else or I’m here, Edmonton’s always gonna be home,” Sewell said, sounding comforted by the thought.
When football is over, he plans to join the Edmonton Police Service. “That’s absolutely something that I want to do,” Sewell confirmed, adding that he’s had conversations with Constable Rob Brown, the former Eskimo and Montreal Alouette who received the Edmonton Kiwanis Club’s “Top Cop Award,” last March.
“He told me, after football, he was always searching for something,” Sewell said of Brown. “Being a cop offered similarities to football like teamwork, leadership and those type of things.”
No surprise that Sewell would aim to ensure that discipline remains a part of his lifestyle in a post-playing career world. That kind of sensibility has deep roots, all the way back to those early mornings in Buff Bay. It continues to govern the habits of a CFL All-Star.
And his rabbit.
