Neuroscience or NFL? It's both for draft prospect Laken Tomlinson

Imagine what Laken Tomlinson can do with his time in the year ahead.

The offensive lineman from Duke will be selected into the upcoming NFL draft. He'll move into a new city and a new tax bracket. He'll have new teammates and friends. He'll have a new place to live, probably a new car too.

And what does he like to do with his time?

"A lot of reading," he says. "Research. If it's something about neurology, concussions or the brain, I'm in it."

Tomlinson has a different view of time than most of the rest of us. He has been this way for years, going back to middle school when he picked up football after moving from Jamaica at age 10. At Duke, his typical day started at 6 a.m. He went to practice, sat in team meetings, got back to his dorm to shower, went to class all afternoon, studied until midnight and then watched film. And if time permitted, he would go to Duke University Hospital and shadow a neurosurgeon during rounds. Maybe he'd even watch a spinal surgery, a mammoth man looming around the operating room. Five hours of sleep was plenty, perhaps above average for Tomlinson.

"Laken," says former Duke teammate Dave Harding, "is a very unique man."

For Tomlinson, a projected second- to third-round draft prospect, now is the time for the NFL. The next weeks, months and years are designed for his football dream. But there is another time he sees ahead, and that is a time for healing. That is what his mother does, as a home care nurse, and that's what his grandmother did. Laken will be healing patients as a doctor one day, and maybe beyond that he'll be healing the sport he loves through study of the brain.

"I feel like I can bring something to the football community and make football a better sport," he says. "It's definitely something I want to achieve."

So in whatever spare time he has in the year to come, Tomlinson will be thinking about the value of time and the value of healing. And that is because of the man who could not heal; because of the man with whom he didn't get enough time.

There would be no NFL career, no American journey, if it weren't for Ivan Wilson. Laken's grandfather built the family home in a rural part of Jamaica, and built a life for generations to come. He then left for Chicago in the 1980s, with Laken and his family to follow years later.

"He was the man of the family," Laken says. "He was the person who came up with the idea to come to the U.S. 30 years ago. He moved here to start working."

You can say Laken gets some of his size from his grandfather, who was more than 6 feet tall. Wilson was a boxer as well, so some of the toughness comes from him too.

The toughness worked in a way only an immigrant's toughness can: there were cold mornings in Chicago that no one in the family got used to. There was a new culture as well. And there was a new sport. Laken grew up in Jamaica playing cricket, but when he got to Illinois he was tall and wide, and immediately pegged as a football player. Excelling in that sport would be as arduous as school itself. Laken woke up early and walked to a train, which took him to a bus, which then took him to another long walk. All that came before school even started. And when practice began, Laken needed guidance on how to put on a helmet and pads.

He wasn't used to the push-and-shove of football at first – coaches playfully called him "Fluffy" – but the focus was always there. The principal at Lane Tech noticed his serious way and recommended him for a mentorship program. Tomlinson was matched with a partner at a local law firm named Bob Sperling, and suddenly Laken had a second family in Chicago. But there was never any separation from his first family.

Ivan Wilson developed stomach ulcers while Laken was in high school, and at one point he had a scare that the boy witnessed. "I was there when he lost consciousness," he says. "We had to get to the hospital."

Wilson recovered, but when Laken was in 10th grade, his grandfather went on vacation in Jamaica and had another episode. This time, he didn't make it.

"I feel like maybe if he didn't go on vacation, he'd be here," Laken says. "He'd be part of my life. He'd be proud of everything I'd be doing. It's sad. My grandmother still mourns. It's unsettling."

The loss struck Tomlinson deeply. He felt his grandfather should not have died. "In Jamaica, the health care system was not on par with the U.S." he says. "That really got to me."

Laken was always driven like his grandfather. But he became driven for his grandfather. He wanted to become a doctor, wanted to save somebody else's loved one.

So when football recruiters showed up, Tomlinson didn't just open the door and listen. He studied. He researched. And when David Cutcliffe arrived from Duke, Laken had a list of questions ready.

"I can't be some naïve high school recruit," he says. "I thought, 'Wow, this guy is really, really good. He had a great career at Tennessee. He had a really good résumé."

Tomlinson chose Duke, a place where he could chase both of his dreams with equal fervor. He says when he visited the campus, "I knew something great was going to happen to that program."

He was right. Something great was about to happen to Duke football: Laken Tomlinson.

One player never makes a team, but Tomlinson's effect on a dormant football program is hard to overstate. Duke had not gone to a bowl game since 1995 when the 6-foot-3, 330 pound offensive lineman committed to the Blue Devils in 2010, and now it has three straight bowl appearances. Cutcliffe is known for his passing work with the Manning family, but the Blue Devils gained 181.85 yards per game on the ground last year – most since 1977. The offensive line allowed only 41 tackles for loss last season – best in the nation – and the number of sacks allowed per game declined each season Tomlinson was on the roster.

"He was extremely important," says Harding, who played left guard while Tomlinson played on the right side. "There are not many football players who could say they passed up a scholarship offer to play at Ohio State. Many sensed that. He trusted what Coach Cutcliffe was doing."

Tomlinson wasn't in the greatest shape at first. The team had to run 20 110-yard sprints in a row as a conditioning test, and teammates would gather around their huge prodigy to cheer him to the finish. Harding remembers the stone-focused look on Tomlinson's face as he lugged that frame to the finish, and how he could tell what kind of intensity "Jamaican Laken" brought.

"He's a master at coping and getting used to stressful environments," Harding says.

That came from his youth, and time spent in an impoverished country. Harding scheduled a trip to Ethiopia with his fellow linemen to build water wells, and while many of his teammates gawked at the living standards, he noticed Tomlinson didn't react at all. "It made me realize," Harding says, "what he had grown up around."

Tomlinson wanted the difficulty – wanted the stress and strain. Being a pre-med at Duke as a top athlete is enough to scare off most anybody. Laken delighted in the idea.

"It was extremely hard," Tomlinson said. "That's probably why I did it – because it was hard. I said I want to do pre-med and football, and I'd hear people say, 'That's impossible.' Well, I'm gonna prove you wrong. I took it year by year, class by class, and I did it."

He made 52 straight starts, became a first-team All-American, graduated with degrees in evolutionary anthropology and psychology, and won the 2014 Courage Award for his resilience.

Then there were the extra-curricular activities: going to the hospital and shadowing former Duke football player Carlos Bagley, who is a neurosurgeon.

"He's a giant guy, but he's very unassuming," Bagley says of Tomlinson. "Very locked in on what we're doing. He wasn't, 'Look at me, I'm this big NFL prospect.' We spent time in multiple different areas [of the hospital]. And then just talking. He would ask, 'What's the MCAT like? What's it like transitioning to med school?'"

So the rigors of the NFL scouting combine didn't rattle Laken. "The meetings and all these evaluations, it was a test of mental stamina," he says. "I loved every minute of it."

Tomlinson says the last several weeks have been liberating; while the other potential picks have been ramping up their workdays, he can concentrate on football and preparation in a way he hasn't before. For the first time, he's all about his sport. Though of course Bagley is encouraging him to "thumb through the New England Journal of Medicine."

That's the game beyond the game: understanding the brain. Tomlinson might be of more value to the ongoing fight against brain injury than the weekly fight against defensive tackles. He says he is not concerned about his own health, though he knows better than any future draftee what's really at stake.

"My love for the sport," he insists, "is more than my worry about the sport."

Tomlinson is sure there's a way to be a pro football player and then a doctor. He's even sure he'll be able to create space in his life for an 11-month-old golden retriever (name: Sir Douglas) and maybe some video games. ("They're really good for your cognition," he says.) He carries the mission and the memory of his grandfather; he will serve that legacy in both of his careers.

Imagine what Laken Tomlinson can do with his time in the year ahead. Then imagine what he'll be able to do with his time in the years beyond.