KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Fifth-year defensive tackle Tershawn Wharton has surged forward this season.
He’s started more games (seven) than in the rest of his career combined (three), and he produced one of the Kansas City Chiefs’ season highlights with his fourth-down sack in Las Vegas to punctuate an epic goal-line stand. And he tends to be found in the middle of pivotal scrums, like he was against the Raiders on Friday as Nick Bolton made a game-saving fumble recovery.
To understand a bit about how and why, well, consider what might be called the most important play of the season:
The alert, instinctive way he came to catch 13-year-old Andy Radzavicz as the boy fell headfirst out of the stands at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, N.C., on Nov. 24.
“They say I’m a hero,” Wharton said in an interview with The Kansas City Star, spoken in such a tone as to suggest that he just did what anyone would.
But look closely at the start of the viral TikTok video and you see something revealing about both the person and the player — who happened to be looking up because he likes to give his gloves away after games.
“His eyes just get kind of big, and he darts over,” Jay Radzavicz, Andy’s father, said Monday in a phone interview with The Star. “We had a good guy in a good position.”
‘A different way to meet him’
In fact, the undrafted free agent out of Missouri S&T made his way to the NFL in large part because of a soul and heart that make him relentless — something coach Andy Reid noted earlier this season when he said “nobody practices harder, nobody works harder than ‘Turk’” and that persistence has paid off for him.
Those traits certainly paid off for the Radzavicz family, now forever grateful to Wharton for what he did to save Andy from a potentially serious injury.
As Wharton reflected on the moment in an interview after the Chiefs’ 19-17 victory over the Raiders on Friday, he recalled hearing someone calling his name.
Then he felt fear himself as he saw the boy wearing a Bolton No. 32 jersey tumbling from the stands above the Chiefs exit.
So he barged through a couple security guards, who had their back to the stands.
“I don’t think they knew what I was doing,” Wharton said with a laugh. “So I kind of had to just lay out a little bit and push them (back).”
You can’t see any of that in the video that Jay jokingly has likened to the Zapruder film.
