Aggie great Anthony Calvillo, 17 years later
You probably don’t know who he is. You probably don’t know he has played professional football for 17 years. You probably don’t know he has won three championships. You probably don’t know he has nearly 1,000 more passing yards than Dan Marino and 86 more touchdowns than John Elway.
Right now you’re wondering why you’ve never heard of him. If you’re like most Americans, you probably won’t even care after you realize he played in the Canadian Football League instead of the NFL.
You probably don’t know he was MVP of the only bowl game Utah State football ever won. You were probably too young to remember the students storming the field and tearing down the goalposts at Romney Stadium after his record-setting five touchdowns the last time the Aggies beat BYU in the 58-56 win of 1993 – before this season’s long-awaited victory.
He has only been back to the campus of Utah State University once since he graduated 17 years ago. Last weekend, Anthony Calvillo returned to Cache Valley with his wife to be honored during halftime of a basketball game and speak to several sports psychology classes about his time playing professional football.
“They had some questions,” Calvillo said. “I think a lot of them didn’t know much about the Canadian Football League and probably didn’t know much about me so it was a good opportunity to share my story with them.”
Calvillo said he never thought he would play professional football and wanted to coach at the high school level. After leaving Utah State, however, he spent 17 years in the CFL, all but four with the Montreal Alouettes. He led his team to the championship game eight times, with Grey Cup victories in 2002, 2009 and 2010. Calvillo was the Grey Cup MVP in 2002. He was a CFL all-star many times.
Calvillo was also diagnosed with thyroid cancer.
“When I got hurt in August, they found the lesion in my throat,” Calvillo said. “Initially I did not want to say anything, but it did come out and I’m kinda glad it did.”
Three different specialists told Calvillo he could wait until the end of the season before having surgery to remove half of his thyroid to determine the extent of his cancer. Calvillo and his wife Alexia said they did a lot of research on the topic and it gave them a lot of comfort.
Calvillo said: “As we got closer to the end of the season, I knew that I had this coming up, this surgery. Before that I wasn’t thinking about it much because I had football to distract me, my family. But as we got closer, I started getting a bit emotional talking to my teammates, talking to the media. It was pressing my mind. After that game, I was excited, we had just won the championship and we’re just going crazy and the reporter asked me just some kind of questions like, ‘What does your future hold now?’ and right there it just clicked.”
Once doctors found the cancer, Calvillo underwent a second surgery to remove the remainder of his thyroid. Doctors had him undergo a radioactive iodine treatment and remain in isolation from Alexia and their two daughters Athena and Olivia for a week.
“Now I’m doing great,” he said. “I’m back into our normal routine.”
The Calvillos are no stranger to cancer. Doctors found a large mass of b-cell lymphoma in Alexia’s chest cavity shortly after she gave birth to the Calvillo’s second daughter Olivia in 2007.
“Her’s was very severe,” Calvillo said, “very life-threatening, where mine is not very life-threatening, very treatable. Her’s shook our whole entire family and our entire life.”
Calvillo said he and his family appreciated things much more after his wife got sick and started talking about life after football. Other retired players he knew from the CFL told him to keep playing for as long as he can.
“I’ve been playing this sport since I was 5 years old,” Calvillo said, and he will likely play for a couple more seasons before retiring from football. “It’s a job, but it doesn’t feel like a job. I have nothing else to do right now, I really enjoy the game.”
Reflecting on his time in Logan, Calvillo told reporters about his first summer after transferring from Mt. San Antonio College where he attended his first two years of college. His scholarship at Utah State did not take effect until August, and Calvillo had to take a job cutting fat from steaks at a meat factory. He worked eight hours a day before going to football practice to train for another two or three hours. In the warm-up period before the first practice, Calvillo was so exhausted from a full day’s work combined with the first half hour of lifting that he vomited in the weight room.
“I was done,” Calvillo said. “I will never forget that because there in my mind I’m thinking to myself, ‘I wonder what these coaches are thinking; here they are expecting me to come in and play and here I am throwing up on the first day of working out.'”
Despite later being MVP of the Las Vegas Bowl and helping his team to a Big West Conference championship, Calvillo said “without a doubt,” his favorite memory at Utah State was beating BYU his senior year, a game his family was able to visit from California to attend.
“The fans kept on reminding me that it wasn’t (just another game),” Calvio said, admitting he didn’t think he appreciated the rivalry at the time. “We had lost like four straight games and the season was going right down the tubes and that got us right back on track again.”
Calvillo said he often jokes with Alouette teammate and BYU graduate Ben Cahoon about the game. After seeing highlights from the Oct. 1 game of 2010 between the two rivals, Calvillo remembered the students rushing the field and tearing down the goalposts after the last time Utah State beat BYU, 17 years prior.
“He’s definitely sick of the story,” Calvillo said of his Montreal teammate. “There’s always an occasion at least once a year where it comes up and he gets to hear it again. That game is always gonna stand out in my mind.”
–tavin.stucki@aggiemail.usu.edu