June 29, 2010
Passavia juggles lacrosse, lawyer duties
by Scott Souza/
Boston Cannons player Chris Passavia helps lead the defense on the field and is a lawyer off the field. (photo: Boston Cannons)
Chris Passavia said he heard it all the time when he was young.
Only he was fairly sure it wasn’t a compliment.
“Someone would usually say it, in some pejorative way,” he remembered, “that I should ‘Go be a lawyer.’ When I heard it, I didn’t know if I should have been insulted because of the wonderful reputation lawyers have.”
Over time, he got to thinking about it: Maybe they have a point. He graduated from the Universityof Maryland in 2004 and spent the next couple of years doing a little of this and a lot of that to support himself in Manhattan. He worked in real estate, ran youth camps, did some writing and even picked up acting jobs when he wasn’t anchoring the defense of the Boston Cannons of Major League Lacrosse.
Yet while his Cannons career was soaring – Passavia made the MLL All-Star team from 2005-2008 -- the rest of his life was beginning to feel a little aimless. Passavia considered what he really wanted to do with his life, and then reconsidered those backhanded jabs he took when he was younger.
“My friends were all getting rich in the banking world and I was still poor in the world I was in,” he said. “Finally, I decided I needed to get on my horse because I felt my brain was slacking and my bank account was slacking.”
Passavia enrolled in Brooklyn Law School and embarked on the ambitious course of being a law student by weekday and MLL lacrosse star by weekend.
He studied for the bar exam throughout last season while holding down captain’s duties for the Cannons. He took the train from Manhattan to Boston for the weekly games and practices, so he could have more time to study than he would if he drove in or flew. He even missed a Cannons game in Toronto because it fell on the weekend of the bar.
“The week of the bar exam, all hell breaks loose,” he recalled. “Last summer was really tough on me. I felt like I was squeezing every bit of time I could out of every day and still never had enough.”
But Passavia got through it. He helped the Cannons to a playoff berth and passed the bar. He went to work for a firm in Manhattan, switched firms shortly thereafter, and he heads into this season as a junior attorney at Wollmuth Maher & Deutsch on the corner of 42nd Street and 5th Avenue, just blocks from Times Square.
It may seem like Passavia is enjoying the best of both worlds. But his dual life has him living in two demanding worlds, each difficult to conquer by itself, let alone simultaneously the way the 27-year-old is doing it.
Mind games
Passavia was a ferocious defenseman at the Universityof Maryland, where he was a Tewaaraton Trophy finalist and preseason All-American as a senior. He received Inside Lacrosse’s Ginsu Award as the “fastest and fiercest checker in the game” and carried that aggressiveness into the MLL as the Cannons’ first-round pick in the 2004 collegiate draft.
“He was known for being sort of wild out on the field,” Cannons general manager Mark Kastrud said. “He would be throwing all these crazy checks and hammering people when he came into the league.”
Passavia is hardly the raging persona he once took on while wearing the pads. He is a deliberate speaker who chooses his words carefully. These days he enjoys beating someone with an argument off the field as much as he would relish beating them with a stick on it.
“I’ve always been an analytical person,” he said. “In a broad sense, that’s one way the law and lacrosse mix. You look at your adversary, try to find a weakness, and go after them there.”
That serves him well as part of the MLL player’s council that acts as the collective negotiator with the league, and as Cannons team captain.
“He’s a very thoughtful person,” Kastrud said. “You don’t get a lot of flip comments out of him.
“He is also like the coach of our defense out on the field,” the GM added. “[Head coach] Bill Daye has an idea of what he wants to do defensively out there. But when [Passavia] is on the field, he’s always yelling out defenses, telling people where to slide, and controlling what goes on.”
Study haul
Passavia said his athletic experience helped get him through the grueling juggling act of being a law student and professional lacrosse player, but by last summer he felt like he had hundreds of balls in the air at once and they were all coming at him with the force of a Paul Rabil two-point shot.
“Last summer was really tough for me,” he admitted. “I was invited to try out for the World Cup team and I wanted to do that despite the obvious difficulties in trying to do that as well as everything else. But even losing those four days was hard. Lacrosse is usually a good outlet for me to be able to shake up my life and do something different, but it got to be a lot.”
Though he didn’t make the World Cup team, Passavia survived the summer and says he’s glad it’s over. Now he embarks on the new challenge of balancing the law career with lacrosse this season.
Reached at his Manhattan office days before the start of the Cannons season, Passavia was there well after business hours and had no plans to go home anytime soon. As a junior attorney, he does a lot of research for the firm, and in the world of commercial law, corporate finance, mergers, acquisitions and bankruptcy court there is always a lot of work to be done.
Passavia said he knows that will mean more weekly train rides where nearby passengers might not be able to see him through the stacks of papers and books he’s poring over to make up for the time he’s away from the office.
“They know about the lacrosse and I’ve got to say they’ve been supportive so far and I’ve been pretty happy with that,” he said of the law firm. “Conversely, the schedule is not going to be easy this summer either because of the number of hours I have to dedicate here.
“I’m hoping to be there for every single game and work hard enough during the week that when the weekend comes I can give all I can to the Cannons. I am hoping everything will allow me to do that as long as I can.”
Closing argument
Passavia said he doesn’t know how much longer that will be. As players get older and embark on careers outside of the sport, it’s common for them to assess their future and re-examine their MLL commitment.
Passavia hinted that he did some of that soul searching last winter, but that his love for the game and the draw of 10,000 fans at Harvard Stadium was too much for him to walk away from just yet.
“I love playing ball and I love playing for the fans of Boston,” he said. “If it were not for such amazing fans there, I don’t know if I would have had the same motivation to come back for another season.”
