Larry Blustein receives Herald’s Suarez/Krietsch Courage Award after battle with COVID-19
.JPG "Former Miami Herald sportswriter George Richards, left, and Larry Blustein with his courage award at The Miami Herald Athletic Awards Breakfast at Signature Grand in Davie May 24th, 2013.")
Larry Blustein spent 12 days intubated and 30 days in the hospital because of COVID-19 in the winter, and still, less than six months later, all he wants to do is talk about the state of the quarterback position in South Florida, an under-the-radar recruit he can’t believe colleges took so long to start recruiting and the 41 different high school teams he saw in the spring to learn about their kids.
At 65, Blustein still isn’t slowing down, even after a serious bout with the coronavirus threatened his life and kept him off the sidelines for more than two months.
Now for the second time, Blustein is the recipient of the Miami Herald’s Leo Suarez/Walter Krietsch Courage Award.
“I’m right back at it,” Blustein said.
For the last few months, it was almost like nothing ever happened to Florida’s most famous high school sports reporter. Blustein — who has been covering recruiting and promoting prospects around the state for more than 50 years on various platforms, including at the Herald — spent April and May crisscrossing South Florida to see as many players as he could. Now he’s doing the same all across the state as colleges host their own recruiting camps and coaches reach out to personally invite Blustein.
On Tuesday, he was in Boca Raton where the FAU Owls hosted a 7-on-7 tournament for Broward County teams. He spent the weekend in Central Florida to spend three days watching the UCF Knights’ 7-on-7 tournaments and another in Lake Wales at Warner University, a National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics program. He will visit with the Miami Hurricanes, Florida State Seminoles and Florida Gators by the time June is done.
He’s even still hosting his weekly radio show on WQAM and a lineup like the one he had Monday — with a guest like Auburn Tigers coach Bryan Harsin slotting in right alongside recruiting reporters and high school assistant coaches — is typical. No one in the Florida football scene garners respect and recognition from all corners quite like Blustein, who gives equal attention to the Division III-bound prospects as he does to the five-star recruits headed to the Southeastern Conference at LarryBlustein.com, and now, he half jokes, is writing about some of the grandchildren of players he covered decades ago.
“When I was up at UCF last weekend, I couldn’t walk five feet without bunches of people coming up to me. ... It was overwhelming,” Blustein said. “One lady was shaking. She goes, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to take a picture of you.’ I said, ‘Boy, if my wife ever heard that, she’d laugh.’”
From the moment Blustein woke up in January, he knew he wasn’t going to stop.
COVID gave him double pneumonia and Blustein, who also received the Suarez/Krietsch Courage Award in 2014 after going public about his ongoing battle with polycystic kidney disease, had a long road to recovery in front of him. He didn’t care.
Blustein is not religious, but he knows he must have survived for a reason.
“When I opened up my eyes after I was intubated and I was able to understand where I was, that’s when I knew. I said, ‘There’s no way I’m not going to come back,’” he said. “At 65 years old, I was willing to work as hard as I could to get back. I figured if the good Lord above gave me an opportunity to live again, I wasn’t going to just be there and convalesce for the rest of my life because that’s just not me.”
He got out of the hospital on the Friday before Super Bowl 56 — he convinced doctors to let him out three days earlier than planned so he could be home to watch his Los Angeles Rams win the NFL championship — and started outpatient rehab the next week.
When he left the hospital, he had to use a walker. His muscles had atrophied after a month of disuse, and Blustein had to relearn how to walk, so he went to rehab four days per week to make sure he was ready for the busy spring ahead.
When he was released from outpatient rehab in the second week of March, he was mostly back to himself. After his busy day Saturday in Orlando, Blustein checked his iPhone and it told him he had walked three miles.
“I busted my [expletive],” Blustein said.
The entirety of the last three months, Blustein said, has been “overwhelming.”
There was the GoFundMe, which raised more than $65,000 to help pay for his medical expenses. He was bombarded with text messages and phone calls of support. Almost everyone to ever cross paths with him had something to say on social media.
It has all been a little bit like he has gotten to watch his own funeral.
“You don’t sit there and say, Well, I hope I get sick, so I can see what people think,” he said with a laugh. “The only thing I ever said is, All those people that take me for granted, when I’m dead then they’ll understand, but I never expected anything like this.
“This is all about the kids and it has been ever since I started. I didn’t start this to be a glory hound.”
