Detroit Lions Devon Kennard: Dad's long career 'something to strive to'

Dave Birkett | Detroit Free Press

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Derek Kennard demanded a few things of his children in high school.

They had to get summer jobs. Even though Derek played 11 NFL seasons and two more in the USFL, his children were going to learn the value of hard work and not be handed anything.

And they had to go to summer school.

Kennard waived the first requirement for his youngest son, Devon, because he was such a good student.

“He’s our Brainiac,” the elder Kennard said in a phone interview last week. “He’d get all As. … If you get all As, you don’t have to get a summer job. We can work around that.”

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As for the second, well, Devon found a way around that, too.

Derek was dead set on making Devon go to summer school, just like his older brother and sister had, until a 13- or 14-year-old Devon, intent on playing summer basketball, called a family meeting to plead his case.

As his mother and father sat around the kitchen table, Devon, the Lions’ top free-agent acquisition of the offseason, explained how he had been going to “zero hour” at his high school, essentially getting to school more than an hour early in order to get ahead of the requirements he’d need in math and foreign language to one day be NCAA eligible.

Derek called his son’s school counselor to check on the validity of “zero hour,” and when the counselor confirmed what Devon explained in the meeting, Derek relented.

“That took some big balls to stand up to dad to say, ‘No, I don’t need that,’” Derek Kennard said. “That took big balls because I was dead set against that. But he stood his ground.”

To the best of Derek’s recollection, Devon called for a family meeting just one other time growing up in Arizona. As a 10-year old, after Devon’s second season of Pop Warner football, he sat his parents down and asked that his dad never be his coach again.

It wasn’t that he didn’t like being around his father, who he says now is his “ultimate fan.” It’s that Derek, an offensive lineman who started at center in the Dallas Cowboys’ Super Bowl XXX win, took the sport a little too serious.

“I always wanted my dad to just be a dad,” Kennard said last week after the Lions’ final open practice of the spring. “He coached me a little bit when I was young. He was really hard on me and I was like, ‘Just be a dad.’”

Said Derek, “I was talking football on the way to practice, on the way home from practice and then after practice, so it was just a bit too much and he called a family meeting and said, ‘Hey, Dad, I don’t want you to ever coach me ever again.’

“He’s the only kid in the house that would call a family meeting. It’s just whatever Dad says usually goes, but when he objected to something he’d want to call a family meeting. That’s his way of standing up to Dad and it’s OK. But you better be right. … Each time, he proved his point.”

More than prove his point, the younger Kennard has forged his own path to football stardom.

He was the top high school pass rusher in the country when he tore his ACL playing as an injury fill-in at tailback in 2008.

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He started five games the next year as a true freshman at USC, where he played everything from middle linebacker to defensive end. He missed his true senior season in college with a torn chest muscle, then was a fifth-round pick by the New York Giants in the 2014 NFL draft.

And after four underappreciated seasons with the Giants, he signed with the Lions this spring to be a key part of a rebuilt defense under new coach Matt Patricia.

Kennard is expected to start at outside linebacker and play as a stand-up pass rusher in Detroit, where there’s a good chance he’ll surpass his career-high of 4.5 sacks.

“He’s an awesome guy,” middle linebacker Jarrad Davis said earlier this spring. “He’s great. From the first day I stepped in the building and I got to meet him, you can just feel the energy that he comes to work with every single day. And just the way he carries himself, it’s awesome to have a teammate like that. He comes in, he sets the bar high and I try to reset it so we can each keep going and reach new levels every single day.”

Kennard has only faded memories of his father’s playing career — Derek played his last game for the Cowboys when Devon was just 5 years old — the most vivid being sitting on his dad’s shoulders after the Cowboys’ Super Bowl win.

Still, he said his dad’s accomplishments serve as motivation for him today.

“I don’t remember much about him playing, but as I got older, just being able to appreciate what he accomplished,” Kennard said. “He played his first two in the USFL and then 11 in the NFL, so he set an example. I’ve never gotten comfortable because when you’ve had a father who’s won a Super Bowl and played professionally 13 years, it’s like, ‘I’m on Year 5. I got a long ways to go.’ So it’s kind of keeping me humble and giving me something to strive to.”

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Derek said Devon’s NFL career is “a dream come true” for both men, but he acknowledged some apprehension about pushing Devon into football given what he knows about the sport.

Derek is part of the concussion lawsuit against the league and is currently taking part in a study through the Arizona-based Translational Genomics Research Institute to help identify CTE in the living. He said he had “way too many (concussions) to quantify” as a player and that a neurologist has since told him that he has “so much frontal lobe damage that I should have been having seizures since I was in my middle 30s.”

“But football’s not for everybody,” Derek said. “You’ve got to want it, you’ve got to want this and Devon, he got a taste of a little bit of football and (loved it).”

Devon, whose first child is due in August, said he and his father haven’t talked much about the CTE study Derek is taking part in and he hasn’t spent any time reconciling his father’s health problems with his own love for the game.

“I don’t worry about (the dangers of football),” Kennard said. “You know what you’re getting into when you come and play this game, and you try to do it in the safest way you can, by tackling properly and by wearing the most up-to-date, best helmet you can. But beyond that, I’m here to play football. I love this game.”

That love, of course, can be traced back his father and the unique bond they share today.

“He’s just a great role model,” Kennard said. “I look at his life and the things he’s done and I want to do that and more for myself and for my future family. So he just set the ultimate example and I’m trying to follow in his footsteps in that way.”

Contact Dave Birkett: dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett. Download our Lions Xtra app for free on Apple and Android!