When Alex Bazzie was born, his mother couldn’t risk going to the hospital because it was too dangerous.
The Liberian Civil War, which killed about 250,000 people over a period of 13 years, had just started.
“It was a rough time,” said the 27-year-old defensive end, a five-year CFL veteran who was the Eskimos’ prize free-agent signing during the off-season. “I was actually born during the war. I wasn’t born at a hospital because there was no way to get me to a hospital because there was a war outside.
“I was the third child,” he continued, “so my father was like, ‘I’ve got three kids. I’ve got a newborn. I’ve got to find a way to get them out of here.’ He came to the United States and set himself up first and then sent for my mother, myself and my two sisters. I always appreciated my father for just finding a way to better our lives.”
Bazzie, who is now a U.S. citizen, was five years old when he left Liberia, travelling first by boat and then by plane from the West African country.
“I was young, so everything was like a blur,” he said.
Unfortunately, Bazzie, was “pretty hard-headed and stuck in my ways” during his high school days in Silver Spring, Md., and almost wasted the golden opportunity his father provided for a better life.
“My mom loved school,” Bazzie said. “My mom probably has three or four degrees. She just always stresses school. For someone like me, who dreaded school, she always felt like ‘I have to be on him, I have to be on him, I have to get him to like school.’ ”
Realizing almost too late that he needed to improve his grades if he ever wanted to play college football, Bazzie took “the hard road” and attended a private military boarding school for one year after he finished high school. He kept taking the ACTs and SATs (both are standardized tests used for U.S. college admission) until his scores were high enough to become eligible for college enrollment.
“It was my last chance if I wanted to play collegiate ball,” he admitted. “Coaches always told me it’s not your talent. It the classroom you have to focus in. Just because you’re good at football does not mean people are going to open-hand give you everything.”
Marshall University in Huntington, W.V., decided to give Bazzie a chance, but he would have earn everything else. He could be a walk-on player with the possibility of a scholarship down the road.
Bazzie accepted the challenge, but any hopes of financial assistance were delayed when the head coach left after one year. The next head coach waited another 1-1/2 years before approving a scholarship.
“I made a name for myself and showed I was worthy of a scholarship, that I could compete with the kids who are on scholarships,” he said. “I actually found out from my mom I was on scholarship. The coaches were going to surprise me, but my mom had called the financial office to make a payment. They’re like, ‘What payment? Your child is on scholarship.’ She was just like, ‘What????’
“She called me and said, ‘Thank you so much.’ I was like, ‘Thank you for what Mom?’ She was like, ‘You don’t know you’re on scholarship? I don’t have to pay anything anymore!’
“It was pretty cool to hear how happy she was just to see me finally buying into taking care of my business in school.”
Bazzie stood out on special teams with the Marshall Thundering Herd in his sophomore season in 2011 (he sat out his first year as a redshirt and played in six games as a freshman). In the Beef O’Brady’s Bowl that season, he delivered a hit on future NFL receiver T.Y. Hilton on a kickoff return that garnered a lot of attention on YouTube.
“I’ve laid quite a few hits on people in my day,” said Bazzie. “That’s the one that got the most attention. To go into that game, all we kept hearing was ‘T.Y. Hilton is going to the NFL. He’s a first-round (draft pick). He’s very dangerous. This guy is all that team has.’ So I told myself, ‘Well, if this is all they have, maybe if I put a good enough hit on him, he would slow down.’ Sure enough, the lane opened on a kickoff, my eyes opened and I attacked it.
“It put me in a position to make a name for myself on the Marshall team because the following year I got a starting opportunity and I never looked back.”
Bazzie also had a similar hit against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats’ Terrell Sinkfield with different results during the 2015 CFL season with the B.C. Lions.
“I ended up getting fined for that, so I don’t know if that was a good hit or a bad hit, but it was one of those pumped-up hits,” he said. “My team got excited. I got excited. Unfortunately, we took a big loss that game.”
Bazzie has met only one other football player with a Liberian heritage. Rennie Curran, who played middle linebacker with the Eskimos in 2013-14 and with B.C. in ’15, was born in Snellville, Ga., to parents who came over from Liberia before the bloody civil wars started in 1989.
He’s now interested in visiting his native country.
“To know that I’m from there, to know that there’s a lot of history behind it, I would love to go back,” he said. “Not only that, I’ve got a lot of family there who’ve I’ve never met. They all know of me. They say, ‘I remember you when you were little.’ I’m on the phone and I’m like, ‘I don’t even know who I’m talking to, Mom!’
“I want to go back to be able to meet them, be able to see their faces, have them see me from the time when I left when I was so little to see how big I am now.”
If Bazzie’s family had stayed in Liberia and survived the civil wars, what would he most likely be doing right now?
“My dad is very much into politics, so I would probably be some form of a businessman or a politician, to be honest,” he said. “A lot of the males in my family are into politics and businesses and try to create and own things. I know that I would have picked up that habit.
“Even now, I’m a business/marketing major. I feel like it was because I was around males who never settled for just one thing or told themselves, ‘I can only do this.’ It was always, ‘I could do whatever.’ ”
Surprisingly, Bazzie’s father is a social worker in Maryland and works with people who can’t communicate or move on a normal scale. The job requires a lot of compassion.
Bazzie joined the B.C. Lions in 2014, but it easily could have been in Edmonton.
He had learned about the CFL through a college buddy whose cousin, Mitchell Gale, was a quarterback with the Toronto Argonauts. When his agent sent Bazzie to work out with a trainer in the off-season in Maryland, he met former Eskimos defensive lineman Shawn Lemon, who was playing with the Calgary Stampeders at the time. Lemon told him about the Stamps’ upcoming tryout camp in Richmond, Va., and Bazzie made the 90-minute drive a second time to work out for the Eskimos.
The Lions offered to sign him after another workout, this time in Maryland, but Bazzie wanted to wait for the NFL draft. He wasn’t selected, but the Cleveland Browns immediately invited him to a rookie mini-camp as a free agent along with quarterback Johnny Manziel, a controversial first-round draft pick.
“I had a three-day stay,” Bazzie said about the mini-camp. “Once that was over, they released me and kept only about two people. I called B.C. to see if they still had a contract available.”
Bazzie had 29 quarterback sacks over his first three seasons with the Lions before leaving for the NFL last year. He landed opportunities with the Indianapolis Colts and Carolina Panthers before spending the summer and training camp with the Arizona Cardinals.
“Great experience, very frustration experience just not being able to have enough time to get settled,” he said. “Everything was very fast. It was one team for maybe two weeks; another team for maybe two weeks. Then I had my longest stay in Arizona. I learned a lot of lessons there from the players, from the coaches. I just soaked up the game.
“Nonetheless, it was a great experience. I was glad I was able to live that dream for the time that I did.”
Bazzie was happy to return to the Lions for the last six games of the 2017 season before jumping to the Eskimos as a free agent during the winter.
“I know this is where I’m supposed to be,” he said about the CFL, “so I’m definitely going to embrace it.”
What prompted the move to Edmonton?
“I would love to help this team get back to the playoffs and take it a step further than where it was last year (losing the West Division final in Calgary) because this is a championship team,” he said. “This is a great organization. This is a great team with lots of potential and lots of great players.”
He was intrigued by the Eskimos’ tradition, likes the fact Edmonton is known (unofficially now) as the City of Champions – “To be around a fan base which doesn’t settle for anything less than a championship is where I want to go,” he said – and felt the Green and Gold had a well-rounded team. He especially liked the way the defence played and the offence scored points.
“I wanted to be a part of something so special,” he said.
Bazzie also liked defensive co-ordinator Mike Benevides, who was his first head coach in B.C.
“I knew everything was going to be OK because of Mike Benevides, who has such an enthusiastic way of coaching,” he said.
A defensive end in the CFL, Bazzie played outside linebacker in the U.S. because of his size (six-foot-one, 228 pounds).
“The only thing that’s similar about (the two positions) is getting to the quarterback,” he said. Otherwise, there are “different tools and techniques” required for each position.
Bazzie will be mostly in a three-point stance, which generally gives players a more explosive start, this season after usually playing as a stand-up defensive end in B.C. When standing up or playing linebacker, he could see the whole field and “process everything before the snap.”
“Standing up to hand in the ground, those are two different things,” he said.
But he trusts Eskimos defensive line coach Demetrious Maxie, who has encouraged him to relax and “look at it as the same thing. Even though it feels different, you’ll be able to play your game.”