by Vicki Mayk
Coach Morgans resented the loss, not for himself, but for the members of his team—particularly those ending their high school playing careers. The loss also marked the end of their football careers. Only 7.1 percent of high school players go on to play in college.4
“I’m going to continue to coach, but there’s fifty kids, fifty-five, who are never going to play football anymore. They’re done. They’re done with high school football. Not that many kids go on,” Morgans says.
Everyone on the team would remember the loss. They would also remember Owen’s game-changing tackle. Hard hits are the stuff of American football legend, from high school games through the pros. New York Giants football great Y. A. Tittle bleeding as he sits on the sidelines in a 1964 game against the Pittsburgh Steelers is one of the most iconic sports photos of all time.5 New York Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor breaking Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann’s leg, ending Theismann’s career, is recalled by fans decades later.6 But no one speculates about what those hits cost them in the long run—just as no one speculated about what leveling the Easton player might have cost Owen. Considering what is now known about the effects of subconcussive hits on players’ brains, it’s reasonable to surmise that Owen’s memorable tackle in the regional championship may have exacted a price. It was yet another hard hit in a decade of them that started when he began playing football at age nine. The price would be apparent later.
But in 2006, despite the heartbreak of the playoff loss, Owen had assured his place in Parkland football history: a player and team captain who was tough, physical, and inspiring. To a man, his teammates and coaches would say, “Owen was a born football player.”
CHAPTER 2
BIRTH OF A VIKING
OWEN THOMAS CAME into the world screaming.
His face matched his flaming red hair and the veins on both sides of his neck stood out.
“A Viking,” the doctor pronounced examining the newborn.
Tom Thomas, assisting at the birth on September 30, 1988, was doing double duty. Nurses were scarce that day in Allentown’s Sacred Heart Hospital, so he kept an eye on the contraction monitor while serving as labor coach to his wife, Kathy Brearley. He remembers his youngest son’s first sound.
“It was a passionate, intense scream, as if he were saying, ‘Here I am. I’m in the world,’” Tom Thomas says. “It was that intensity he always had.” They named him Owen, a Celtic name meaning young fighter.
Years later, the intensity became his trademark on the playing field, an innate drive that made opponents wary of his ferocious hits. But that day, as his mother looked down at her son’s eyes—the same vivid blue as her own—she only worried how he’d fit into a busy household with three older brothers. His birth completed a family that had begun when she first met Tom on the other side of the world.
Tom and Kathy met while serving as teachers and missionaries in Zambia. A graduate of Andover Newton Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, Tom was already an ordained minister when he arrived. His journey to Africa was preceded by assignments at churches in Linsport, Kansas, and Portland, Maine. Both were formative experiences for the young minister.
When he arrived in Kansas for a one-year ministerial internship, he found himself in a farming community dubbed Little Sweden because of its strong ethnic roots. Members of the congregation had just finished cleaning the enormous seven-bedroom parsonage that rose like a monument on the flat prairie. As they were leaving, the car carrying their new pastor pulled up. Out stepped someone who looked like one of the Vietnam War protestors of the era. Coming from Boston, Tom sported long reddish-brown hair and an equally long beard. There was a moment of silence before introductions began.
“The men had on their John Deere hats. . . . Everybody was farm-related. How could we respond to each other?” Tom says, remembering both sides had cautiously assessed each other on their first meeting. “But by the end of the year, I knew. You talk about the price of wheat. You talk about the rainfall. You talk about what they’re interested in. It was a great year, but I had to adapt to that culture. They weren’t going to adapt to me. I made friends with some of the most conservative members of the congregation, because I shoveled out their manure.”
The lesson had a permanent impact. Over the years, people would often remark on Tom’s ability to empathize and interact with all kinds of people. It was something he’d pass on to his sons.
After returning to seminary to complete his training, Tom was sent to State Street Church in Portland, Maine, after his ordination. The four-year assignment was not as affirming as his Kansas sojourn. He served as associate pastor. When the senior pastor retired, the new pastor made it clear he wanted no associate. It was the second ending for Tom while living in Maine. An early marriage to his high school sweetheart also had ended while he was there. It left him free to fulfill a longtime dream of serving in Latin America or Africa.
“I was always interested in liberation movements and changing civilizations,” Tom says. The change also meant he was single when he met Kathy Brearley.
Tom worked at the United Church of Zambia’s Kafue Secondary School while Kathy taught at Chipembe, a neighboring girls school. Zambia’s capital city, Lusaka, separated the two institutions. Kathy, who had a degree in math, had worked as a systems engineer for British Aerospace when she responded to a call for people who could teach math in Africa. She arrived in Zambia in January 1979. Tom received his assignment via the United Church of Christ and arrived in September of that year.
“The first time I saw him, he was digging his vegetable garden without his shirt on. I can’t say that impressed me too much,” Kathy says with characteristic bluntness. “Later that day or the next day, it must have been a school holiday, he and some friends were out on a grassy soccer field playing Frisbee.
“I am the most uncoordinated person. . . . Tom was so graceful. Someone would throw to him and he’d just put out his arm like this,” she adds, chuckling as she pantomimes the long, fluid motion of her future husband’s arm.
She soon learned that Tom had played football in college at the University of Virginia. Having grown up in Great Britain, she had little understanding what it meant to play football in the States. She only knew that it was different than rugby, which was her home country’s version of the sport. When they began dating, she would learn that his athleticism made it hard for her to keep up on long bike rides.
Tom drove the school truck that also functioned as a bus to shuttle male students back and forth for joint activities at the girls school or to take Sunday school teachers there for combined training. One trip provided an unusual chapter in their early relationship.
“I got malaria when I was at Kathy’s school and I couldn’t drive back, so I stayed in Kathy’s house,” he says, a bemused smile crossing his face. It was unheard of to allow two unmarried people of the opposite sex to stay in the same house, but the severity of Tom’s illness was insurance against impropriety.
“His temperature was 105; he was delirious,” Kathy says. “He kept babbling on about Richard Nixon.”
After Tom recovered, romance eventually blossomed. They became engaged in April 1980 and married in August. Tom’s parents visited at the time of their engagement, while Kathy’s parents and sister came to Zambia for the wedding.
Kathy went to the market in Lusaka and bought hand-printed Zambian fabric to make her wedding dress and a shirt for Tom. Held after Sunday services, the ceremony and celebration were well attended. “Since I was a pastor, people came from all over from all of the parishes I served. And the reception was in our yard,” Tom recalls. He wore a black shirt with patterns in red, beige, and white. A pineapple-shaped motif extended from the open neck of the shirt to its midsection. Kathy’s empire-waist gown’s bodice was in the same bright fabric as her groom’s shirt, topping a long white skirt. She wore a head wreath of red blossoms and carried a large bouquet of native flowers, so informally arranged that they could have been plucked
from the ground that morning. The young couple exited the church, Kathy on Tom’s arm, and walked into the blinding African sunlight. The menu at the reception included chicken, rice, a kale-like vegetable called rape, and crates of Coca-Cola to wash it down—served without ice. The wedding party sat at a long table under a small tree that cast what passed for shade in the hot climate.
Their most memorable wedding present was a hen—given so that a young couple would not have to waste time going out for food. They would be free to spend their time in conjugal relations while the hen supplied eggs. Because the hen was redheaded, they named her after Kathy’s mother, Hazel, who had the flaming hair that Owen would inherit. “She was always frowning and always running backwards and forwards looking for something,” Kathy says. “Which is what my mother did and what I do now. So we called her Hazel.”
The couple returned to the States in 1982, settling in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where Kathy began studying for the ministry at Lancaster Theological Seminary. When Tom was called to be pastor of Union United Church of Christ in 1984, they moved to Neffs, a suburb twelve miles north of the city of Allentown in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. The redbrick church’s beautiful steeple, visible for miles over the surrounding countryside, dates back to the 1800s when Pennsylvania Germans built it in their farming community. The couple settled into the parsonage, an updated Cape Cod a short distance from the church. Fronting busy Route 873, the house was a place where they could start their family as Tom began his ministry.
The Brearley-Thomas household grew rapidly. “We went from two to a family of six in three years’ time,” Tom recalls. The couple became foster parents to two brothers, Jerry and Matt, then seven and five. In 1987, Kathy delivered their son Morgan, and shortly after, their adoption of Jerry and Matt was finalized. “I remember holding Morgan when I was testifying in Reading [Pennsylvania] for the adoption process,” Tom says. By the next year, Kathy was pregnant again with Owen.
She had worried how her youngest son would fit into the household. “I thought, ‘If we don’t create a space for him to be himself, he’s not going to be able have his own identity.’ But we never had to worry about that.” She pauses and her tone turns rueful. “Not once did we have to worry about that, about Owen having space to be himself. Owen created plenty of space to be himself. He came with this incredible energy and this very strong opinion of who he was and what he wanted.”
Being able to hold his own was an asset in a house where relationships among his older siblings were frequently in turmoil. The adopted boys—children of a mother who struggled with addiction—brought myriad problems. “Jerry and Matt were just always at each other. Or there was always conflict or tension all the time. It really was often very unpleasant being with them,” Tom recalls. “They were always squabbling and fighting. And this wasn’t normal brother stuff. This was more serious. Matt still will have no relationship with Jerry. He just hates Jerry so much.”
The situation became overwhelming. Jerry, who suffered from severe mental illness, was placed in institutional care at the end of fifth grade when Owen was a toddler. His complicated diagnosis, involving several conditions, required a combination of medication. Tom says the volatile nature of the older boys’ relationship affected the parenting of the younger two. “Kathy and I both realize now we didn’t have the time to spend with Morgan and Owen because we also had Jerry and Matt. And they demanded so much attention,” Tom says.
The younger boys had their own dynamic. Morgan displayed a laid-back demeanor. Owen, younger by a bit more than a year, approached every situation with a desire to be first. “There was a television show around that time, Charles in Charge, and his goal in life was to be the boss in charge,” Tom says. “That was his phrase, ‘The boss in charge.’”
A trip to the park when Owen was three and Morgan just over four reflected their personalities. When their mother suggested that they could pretend to be an army and march behind a commander, Owen announced, “I’ll have to be the commander.”
“Now, with our older boys, Matt and Jerry, who were also close in age, that would be an endless fight; we’d have to get in the car and go home. Morgan just happily said, ‘I’ll be last.’ Morgan wants people to be happy and for everyone to have a good time,” their mother says.
Owen’s intensity juxtaposed against Morgan’s happy-go-lucky nature played out in many aspects of their lives. When Morgan visited the doctor for earaches or other childhood illnesses, he sat placidly through the examination. Owen screamed from the moment the doctor entered the room. His father recalls being asked to help hold him down during treatment.
The biological brothers differed in stature as well as personality. Morgan’s size placed him among children two or more years his senior in sports and other activities. Owen was clearly the little brother. “He was a scrawny kid,” says the Reverend Kris Snyder-Samuelson, the youth minister and Tom’s associate pastor at Union United Church of Christ. “You never thought he’d be a football player.”
The rough and tumble life that comes with being the youngest of four boys wasn’t without mishaps for Owen. “I gave him a bunch of stitches,” Morgan says, his eyes twinkling in his round face. Once, as the boys were running around the first floor of the church parsonage, Owen fell and hit his head on a radiator. Another time Morgan pushed Owen, causing him to hit his head on a wooden sofa frame. An argument over who could play with their father’s golf clubs ended with Morgan whacking Owen over the head with one of the clubs. If their hijinks didn’t involve physical injury, it sometimes led to property damage. Owen shot out a neighbor’s windows with a BB gun. On another occasion, a passing car’s headlight was damaged as the boys bounced a ball across the street in traffic while waiting for the school bus.
“Sometimes I feel bad for my dad and my mom for how mischievous we were,” Morgan says.
The pair never squelched their behavior—even in their father’s church. Sofas in a church conference room became trampolines, with the boys doing elbow drops. In the children’s choir, Owen was the loudest and the most energetic. On one memorable Sunday, while adults sipped coffee during the social hour in the church hall after services, Owen and his buddies returned to the sanctuary, dove headfirst under the first pew and made their wriggling way under the long rows of white pews, commando style, to the back.
Impish, fearless behavior characterized his childhood. “He was just always exuberant. Anything he did, he was exuberant,” Tom adds. “Once he was jumping on a picnic table. And he danced right off the end of it. And I was there to catch him.”
Tom’s voice cracks as he recalls the moment, several years after his son’s death. He composes himself, reflecting. “He was never intimidated. I never remember him being intimidated.”
Owen may have inherited his love of aggressive play on the gridiron from his paternal grandfather. Frank R. Thomas played in the 1930s as one of J. P. McCaskey High School’s Red Tornados. The Lancaster, Pennsylvania, school was one where “they took their football seriously,” Owen’s father recalls, and it matched Frank Thomas’s dedication to the sport. When it came time for college, he attended nearby Millersville State Teachers College so he could live at home to help his widowed mother. He still found time to be a running back for the Millersville Marauders.
A passion for the physicality of the game was a trait that Owen shared with his grandfather. “My father always loved football. Even in his sixties, he’d be watching football and say, ‘Ah, I’d like to get in there and tackle someone,’” Tom says.
Football was a different game in the 1930s and 1940s when Frank Thomas played. In those days, it was still more of a ground game, compared to the aerial passing game known today, with the forward pass just beginning to gain traction. Helmets were not mandatory until 1943, and the players who did wear them were probably wearing leather helmets, because the first plastic helmet was not introduced until 1939.1 Shoulder pads during the era when the elder Thomas played were leather and offered less p
rotection than the pads worn today.2 Even the football itself did not evolve to the standard size and shape that is now found on playing fields until 1935.3 In that bygone era, many men played both offense and defense. But perhaps the most important difference was in the size of the players. Frank Thomas weighed around 160 pounds when he played as a running back and was considered a good size. Players were considered really big at 200 pounds. Over the decades, the average weight of lineman increased, topping 300 pounds in the last two decades. And with their increase in size have come more powerful hits, blocks, and tackles.4 The era of bigger, stronger, faster players was the era in which Owen and his brothers took the field.
The Thomases are typical of many American families. Football is a tradition—a sports legacy passed down through generations. Family dynasties in the sport exist from high school teams all the way up through college and the pros. In the NFL, families like the Mannings—father, Archie, and sons Peyton and Eli, who all had long careers as pro quarterbacks—are the stuff of legend. For every high-profile family dynasty of players, there are thousands more on the amateur level.
Fathers encourage sons to play football as a rite of passage that instills discipline and teaches lessons of bravery and loyalty. Others may encourage their sons to go out for the team so that their offspring can fulfill the dreams of gridiron glory that eluded them. For others, it means continuing the history of family success on the field. Owen’s grandfather, father, and two older brothers were gridiron standouts. It was natural that he would become a third-generation football player.
The legacy of the Thomases on the football field might have ended with Frank Thomas if his son Tom had a choice. Big and solidly built, Tom fit the physical profile of a football player even as a boy. There was no team in the Lampeter-Strasburg School District in rural Lancaster County where Tom entered junior high. Realizing his son’s size would be an asset, Frank hauled him to tryouts for the all-Lancaster team, a squad that played all over the county. “I didn’t want to do it. I just remember that my father put me in the car and I remember being so scared,” Tom says. Even then he was soft-spoken and displayed the gentle nature and low-key demeanor that his congregation would come to know well when he entered the ministry. Despite his reservations, he made the team, playing both offense and defense on a squad that would be undefeated.