RENTON, Wash. -- Seattle Seahawks wide receiver Tyler Lockett said he "definitely had a lot of hesitation" about playing this season amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Lockett's concern stemmed from a preexisting heart abnormality as well as the fact that much of his family has asthma. Before the Seahawks drafted Lockett in the third round in 2015, medical checks at the scouting combine revealed that his aorta is on his right side. At the time, Lockett was briefly unsure if he would be able to continue playing football.
"So just with everything that happened in COVID, that was one of my biggest issues was just trying to make sure [this heart condition] wasn't gonna affect me if I was able to go out there and play," Lockett said Friday on a video conference with reporters. "Obviously, nobody really knows. You've got doctors who kind of give you what you need to know up front, what they think and what their biggest opinion is of it, but I think I had my chance to opt out, and I said that if I come up here, I'm gonna just play.
"I know that we've got Pete [Carroll], we've got a lot of older coaches. They don't want to put themselves in a situation to get sick neither, so I told myself if they could do it then I know I could do it. And if I'm going to come out here and play, then I'm just going to do what needs to be done. I'm not going to stress about COVID. I did that from February to before we came into camp."
The 27-year-old Lockett has led the Seahawks in receiving in each of the past two seasons.
His family experienced a scare earlier this year when a cousin contracted COVID-19. The woman had previously lived with Lockett in Seattle.
"It was bad," he said. "I would get messages from her mom and she would send me like a long paragraph and stuff because my cousin never told me. She was just telling me how she was having a hard time breathing, she really didn't feel good, and when I ended up talking to my cousin after she ended up overcoming it, she had told me that there was one day where her body was just aching so much she had told a woman ... basically like she really didn't think she was going to make it. She was like, she didn't think her body was going to be able to deal with what she really felt another day."
Lockett said the cousin has asthma, as does much of his father's side of his family.
"That's why it made me question if I wanted to come play," he said. "I have a lot of stuff in my family to where I don't want to put anybody in jeopardy."
The Seahawks had one player, guard Chance Warmack, opt out of the 2020 season due to coronavirus concerns. As of Friday, they had placed only one player on the reserve/COVID-19 list, and that was due to a false positive test to wide receiver John Ursua, who has since been activated and is taking part in practice.