Defensive tackle Lawrence Guy was back in Foxborough on Friday to sign a contract with the New England Patriots. This one, however, was of a ceremonial nature: the 35-year-old celebrated his retirement
from the NFL by signing a one-day deal with the club he played for from 2017 to 2023.
For Guy, that is a fitting way to end his career.
“I wanted to do it in New England because New England was my home,” he explained at a press conference at Gillette Stadium. “They always say the grass is greener on the other side. New England brought me in. They watered me. They let me grow. They made sure I was going to be the pinnacle where I needed to be. And it’s a blessing that I get to be here to do this.”
A Las Vegas native, Guy spent his college career at Arizona State and entered the NFL in 2011 as a seventh-round draft pick with the Green Bay Packers. The early portion of his career was marked by instability: over his first six years as a pro, he played for four different organizations and besides Green Bay also spent time in Indianapolis, San Diego and Baltimore.
Along the way, Guy appeared in 72 combined regular season and playoff games with 20 starts. After he joined the Patriots as a free agent in 2017, however, he started to find some stability: he became a mainstay along the team’s defensive line and over his seven years as a Patriot added 118 more games and 111 starts to his résumé.
Among those games was Super Bowl LIII against the Los Angeles Rams, a contest and season Guy still has fond memories of.
“I talk about one memory all the time: Super Bowl, me and my oldest were the first two persons to kiss the Lombardi [Trophy],” he said. “It was an amazing experience, able to go before all the little germs got on it. Because think about that: you’re kissing that trophy after everybody else, that’s nasty; you think about what’s going on. We were the first. I said, ‘We’re going to do this.’ …
“We won the SuperBowl. If you look look at the beginning of that year, we were doing terrible. We lost to every bad team. Was it Detroit? We lost to the Jaguars. We were just on a spree of this bad luck and we sat there as a unit and said, ‘We’re going to do what it takes to improve to go to the championship.’ And nobody believed in it. We did it, though.”
When Guy left the team after the 2023 season to close out his career with a one-year stint in Cincinnati, he did so not just as a one-time Super Bowl champion and member of the Patriots’ Team of the 2010s but also somebody who had made a constant impact off the field. His charitable efforts were recognized in 2021, when he earned the Ron Burton Community Service Award, and in 2022, when he was nominated for the Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year trophy.
Unselfishness was a theme for guy both off and on the field.
“When I look at my career, I look at the way that we should do it as a player. I wasn’t selfish. I didn’t think about myself. I wanted to make sure that the person next to me had the same success that I did because that person was going to make sure I made a play,” he said. “I made plays for that person to make plays. And it’s one of those things that when you lay your head down at night, you understand that you did what you could when you could do it and left it on the field.
“And if you’re able to leave it on the field, you can never look at a bad decision or the good decision. Every decision was a great decision because you brought this brotherhood that you could never get back. I’m not going to miss going out there and hitting somebody. You are always going to say you’re going to miss the game because the game is what you miss. The friendship, the fraternity that you are having.”
The Patriots honoring Guy will continue on Sunday. He will serve as “Keeper of the Light” ahead of the team’s Week 8 contest against the Cleveland Browns.
