KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Chiefs defensive back Trent McDuffie was 13 when his second-oldest brother, Tyler, died from what he calls a heart complication.
“Out of nowhere,” he said in an interview with The Kansas City Star on Monday at the team’s Missouri Western State training camp. “He was sick for two weeks. And then I just woke up, and he was gone.”
The inconceivable loss of a dedicated brother, a brother who pointed the way and looked over him, left McDuffie in shock and feeling he had entered a “black hole.”
“I just really blacked out,” the California native said, “for a good two years.”
As he thinks about it now, McDuffie figures it wasn’t until he arrived at the University of Washington that he began to truly deal with it and learn to accept all the emotions. Having that distance enabled him, he said, to “separate things and kind of build upon what happened.”
Funny how fate wrapped all that back together.
Because when he arrived in Seattle and entered the locker room his first day on campus, he found he’d been randomly assigned jersey No. 22 — the number Tyler always wore.
You could call it coincidence.
Or say it’s just a number.
But if you’ve ever lost somebody you loved, it’s not hard to imagine the heart and comfort you can take in wrapping yourself in something of theirs or otherwise embracing something that makes you feel their presence.
“It felt like, ‘OK, this is what’s supposed to happen,’ ” he said. “I felt like I was on the right path.”
Sure was.
A stellar career at UW primed him to be selected by the Chiefs at No. 21 overall in the 2022 NFL draft.
After earning a starting job, he suffered a hamstring injury in the opener at Arizona and missed the next four weeks.
But he returned to become an integral part of the defense, including breaking up two passes in the AFC Championship Game victory over Cincinnati, and established himself as a core part of the team.
