Growing Up on the Gridiron

by Vicki Mayk

  The senior Thomas’s civil service career required a family move to Richmond, Virginia. Once there, Tom easily continued playing football. Entering a new junior-senior high school, he found being from Pennsylvania was an asset. “In those years, if you had played football in Pennsylvania, you were a star,” he says, noting that long-standing winning traditions in a number of his home state’s high schools created a halo effect for all who had played in the Keystone State. Pennsylvania’s coal regions in the east and steel towns in the western part of the state produced legendary players such as Johnny Unitas, Joe Namath, and Joe Montana. Tom played fullback on offense and linebacker and defensive end on defense in Virginia. “Which, oddly enough, were the same positions Owen played,” he muses.

  He was good enough to snag a football scholarship to the University of Virginia, entering college in 1968 as an anthropology and sociology major. As a sophomore starting in the Cavaliers’ season opener against Army, Tom was playing as a receiver on the kickoff and took a hit “that rang my bell,” he said, employing the descriptor used by players for decades to describe a hit to the head. Shortly after, playing fullback on offense, he experienced a second head hit. Recalling his coach’s admonition to try to walk off the field if injured, he did so—going right through the bewildered players in the Army defensive huddle as he headed for the sideline. “I can still see their faces. They looked at me like, ‘What is this guy doing?’”

  He received a medical redshirt for the remainder of the season because of the concussion. But Tom was not done with injuries. Playing on the practice squad after recovering, he was on his way to the ground after a tackle when a showboating defensive player hit him a second time, knocking off his helmet. “I didn’t have a concussion, but I had double vision.” He was assured by the athletic trainer that all he needed to do was ice the injury. When the double vision persisted for nearly a week, Tom finally headed to the student health center. Referred to a specialist, he learned the hit had broken his orbit, the bony cavity that holds the muscles that attach the eye in the head. Surgery was needed to repair it.

  Tom endured one more football injury during college: a separated shoulder. He does not look back on his playing career with particular fondness. The injuries alone would dissuade some, but Tom also felt separate from his teammates spiritually and philosophically. Already considering a career in the ministry, he could not relate to the newly formed Fellowship of Christian Athletes on the Virginia campus. The fellowship, a nondenominational Christian sports ministry, says in its vision statement that it aims to “see the world transformed by Jesus Christ through the influence of coaches and athletes.”5 “I couldn’t understand what these people were saying—that a drop of sweat on the practice field is like a prayer to God,” Tom says. He often felt alone.

  “I probably was—and still am—different than the rest of the team. There wasn’t a teammate that I found who was like a real colleague, someone I could share things with,” Tom recalls. He found playing football in college had other drawbacks, ones that Owen and his teammates would experience years later. One of the most challenging was the fact that playing collegiate football left little time for anything else.

  “Even then, it was a grind,” Tom says, recalling the workouts, practices, and team meetings. “And it’s much worse today than it was then. Then, we were all students first. Next to me was a mechanical engineer. Another person majored in chemistry. Football wasn’t our life.”

  Talking to Tom about his football career, you get the impression the tradition of Thomases on the field could well have ended with him. His ambivalence about playing led him to encourage his sons to try other options. Unlike his father, who was determined that his son would play the sport he loved, Tom and his wife encouraged their boys to try other sports and activities. “I would have been happy if they had been doing band or doing something else,” he says. “We certainly didn’t live through their success.” How football became central in the lives of three of his sons was more happenstance than the result of any encouragement from Tom.

  Playing sports started early for the Thomas boys—but never early enough for Owen. When Morgan started playing T-ball, where the youngest players are introduced to baseball, Owen was still too young. “Owen appointed himself bat boy. He’d line the bats up, and told people when to get up. Owen found a role, took it, and acted the whole thing out. He was so confident,” his mother Kathy says.

  It was the same when Morgan entered an under-six soccer program. The team wore purple shirts and Kathy bought a similar one for Owen and made a logo so that he would feel like he was part of the team. Finally, searching for something that Owen could participate in before he was old enough for baseball and soccer, his mother enrolled him in a youth wrestling program. Even at four, he was ferocious in competition. “The coach would complain to us, ‘Owen is so brutal in practice,’” his father says. Later, when Tom coached Morgan and Owen on an under-eight soccer team, it was his toughest year coaching.

  Morgan remembers, “After one game, a coach or a parent from another team came up to my dad and said, ‘Your son is so aggressive. This is soccer, this isn’t football, and your son was doing this and doing that.’ The thing was, this kid was two years older than Owen and Owen was bullying this kid on the soccer field.”

  As Owen entered elementary school, the year fell into a pattern marked not by academic milestones or holidays, but by sports seasons. At first it was baseball, soccer, and basketball. Jamie Pagliaro attended school with Owen from kindergarten through high school and played baseball, basketball, and football with him. The boys’ involvement with organized sports was typical for kids in the United States. Youth sports is big business, growing in value annually over the last two decades to a high of over $19 billion, according to WinterGreen Research, which conducts market research about youth sports. The numbers of young people playing organized sports are equally large, with 4 million soccer players and 7.6 million tackle football players.6

  Even in baseball, Owen dominated. As catcher, he blocked runners coming into home plate. “He defied this person to run into him,” his mother, Kathy, says. The boys played on a baseball team dubbed “the Squirmies.” “Everybody else in Schnecksville had the regular S on their hat, but ours was like squiggly, so we called ourselves the Squirmies,” Jamie recalls. “And that year we went 20–0 in baseball and we won the championship. We were in fifth grade. My dad was one of the coaches. That was one of my big memories.”

  Owen was responsible for the championship game win, making a big play to throw someone out. “He was that guy I knew who would always give 110-percent effort. He was the guy I knew who would always change the game,” Jamie says.

  A friend presented Owen with a jar filled with dirt from the field. It was a memento that a Squirmies teammate claimed after his death.

  It was the Thomases’ adoptive son Matt who made football the center of their lives. Starting as a soccer player while in middle school, Matt quickly became good enough to play on his community’s first traveling team—an honor that soon proved a hardship for his parents who were juggling jobs, household responsibilities, and child rearing. Traveling teams—which have become a highly desirable level of play for many serious youth athletes—require significant investments of time and money for young players and their families. They offer the chance to play more competitive teams in other towns and even in other states. Many parents, convinced that their child’s future success is tied to playing on such teams, spend thousands in a single season paying for gas, food, and hotels. If there is more than one child in the family, costs multiply. Some families willingly go into debt for the privilege of having their children play on a traveling team.7 Ministerial salaries are relatively modest, but costs weren’t the only consideration for Tom and Kathy. Weekends, when traveling teams play their games, are peak work times for clergy. Saturdays are spent preparing for services the next day—and sometimes include presiding at a wedding ceremony. On Sunday, the ministers off
iciated at two services at their respective churches. The needs of Matt’s young siblings also were a factor.

  “The teams were traveling to Maryland, to Ocean City, New Jersey, and we had two younger boys. So we said to Matt, ‘Take a year off soccer. You can play any other sport, but take a year off soccer. Because we can’t do this anymore.’ And that’s when he started playing football,” Tom says.

  It would be a decision that would affect the rest of their lives.

  At first Matt hated the game, but it wasn’t long before he became a star running back—one who set records at Parkland High School that stood until another star player, Austin Scott, broke them in 2003. Scott graduated from Parkland and went on to a short-lived Division I college career at Penn State. Matt, a gifted player at five feet, eight inches and 180 pounds, set season records for 2,322 yards rushing as a high school junior and twenty-three touchdowns as a senior. Also a good student, he was named scholar-athlete of the year in his senior year by the Lehigh Valley chapter of the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame.8 He set a standard for his siblings—especially for Owen. “That became a magnet for Morgan and Owen,” Tom says.

  Owen would hang out with the older boys, easily holding his own, despite being the youngest. Matt and his friends invented a game called “Pop the Tart” in which Owen was tossed high in the air by the older boys, as if he were a Pop-Tart springing out of a toaster. He loved the roughhousing, returning again and again to be pummeled and tossed. In between, he trotted around the group carrying a football, mimicking the moves he had seen them make on the field.

  The Thomas boys were among those who ensured football’s position as the most popular sport in high schools in the United States. In 1996, when Matt and his Trojan teammates won the championship, 958,247 young men played high school football. When Owen donned pads to play for the first time a year later, the number had grown, with 972,114 playing for their high schools.9

  Despite Matt’s success and the irresistible attraction of the sport itself, Tom and Kathy kept the younger boys from playing football as long as they could. They succeeded in keeping Morgan from playing the contact sport until he was in seventh grade. In his case, the fact that he was big for his age actually kept him off the field. Teams in youth football are organized by weight to ensure that boys who are much bigger than others their age aren’t grouped with smaller youth. The weight classification is a nod toward player safety, a concession that started long before concerns about concussions and head trauma. Morgan’s size would have placed him with boys two years his senior if he had started playing on the peewee level. The Thomases felt it was better to wait.

  CHAPTER 3

  SUITING UP

  BEHIND THE NONDESCRIPT white building that houses the Tri-Clover Fire Company on Kernsville Road, two back-to-back baseball fields sit like twin green thumbprints. A gray metal pole building boasts a sign for the North Parkland Athletic Association, the words printed over a silhouette of a buffalo. “Players and coaches only,” announces a sign on the building’s door—an attempt to deter overzealous parents from following their sons and daughters or arguing with coaches. The association, a volunteer-run organization, provides opportunities for boys and girls to get involved in sports—baseball, soccer, football, and cheerleading. Overly invested parents of young players are commonplace in youth sports, hounding coaches, screaming at referees, and shouting directions to players. The sign on the North Parkland building guarantees a space where players and coaches can communicate without parental interference.

  The fields behind the fire company are home base for some of the association’s teams, and they do double duty. When baseball season is over, they yield a large, grassy area big enough for young football players to run drills. Parents can watch from beat-up bleachers ringing the field while the boys practice tackling, passing, and blocking. As the fall weather turns cooler, the boys’ breath hangs like clouds in the air as the shrill sounds of coaches’ whistles punctuate the drills.

  This is where Owen and his teammates began their football careers. Owen—with characteristic determination—convinced his parents to allow him to start playing in North Parkland’s youth football league when he was nine and entering fourth grade. He joined a team for players in the ninety-pound weight group.

  At the first practice, Owen burst from the car, impatient to begin. While volunteer coaches called the roll and organized their young players into groups for calisthenics and drills, he bounced from foot to foot. Every time his feet hit the dirt, they seemed to pound out a rhythm that said “Football. Football. Football. Football.” His energy stood out. Most of the young players were enthusiastic. A few were fearful, warily sizing up the other boys who would eventually be tackling them. Owen was ecstatic.

  Marc Quilling was there from the beginning.

  “I was from Kernsville [School] and he was from Schnecksville,” Marc says. “I’ll always remember him as being overly excited to play football. He was this outgoing, personable kid who approached everyone with a smile.”

  Marc had been playing football for several years before Owen became a teammate. He began playing flag football—the lowest level of play, which involves no tackling—at age five. Like Owen, Marc’s interest in the sport was spawned by watching his older brother, Ryan, two years his senior, play first. And like the Thomas family, the Quilling boys also followed in their father’s footsteps when they stepped onto the gridiron. In his home state of Ohio, Marc’s father, Scott, was a multisport athlete who played football for two years as a walk-on punter at Ohio State University under legendary coach Woody Hayes. Earlier, Marc’s great uncle had been a running back for the Buckeyes on one of Hayes’s teams. Yet Marc insists there was never any pressure from his father to play. “He got us involved in it because both my brother and I were so interested in it from a young age,” Marc says. “It’s almost in our blood, you know?”

  If it was not in their blood, it was certainly part of their psyche. In addition to watching brothers play and hearing the intoxicating tales of fathers, uncles, and grandfathers suiting up, the boys were immersed in a culture in which football plays a central role. By the late 1990s, football clearly was an obsession for many in the United States, whether as a fan or a player. It was the decade that spawned one of the most highly praised books about the sport, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream, H. G. Bissinger’s nonfiction account of a high school football team in Odessa, Texas. Although the book reflected the racial divide and social strain, it also captured the drama in a town where football was king. Readers identified with the players whose stories are told in the book.

  Football’s popularity started long before. Since the earliest days of football, in the late 1800s—when the sport was introduced in America on the collegiate level—America’s interest in the game has grown exponentially over the decades. With the introduction of radio and later television to broadcast games, football came to occupy a singular part of America’s consciousness.1 It is a sport with loyalty built via the media, and its ascendance in popularity is tied to how well it plays on television. The start of the professional sport as we know it in the United States is often acknowledged to be the broadcast of the 1958 championship game between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants. Dubbed “The Greatest Game Ever Played,” the contest went into sudden-death overtime while a large TV audience watched.2 Games once broadcast only on weekends became a popular prime-time staple with the introduction of Monday Night Football in 1970. Games would be broadcast on other nights of the week as decades passed. By the time Owen and his friends began playing football, the Super Bowl had set records as one of the most-watched television shows each year—and would remain such in the years to come, when as much as a third of the viewing population in the United States tuned in. Games were true stories filled with gallant warriors who risked everything for victory—an enticing tale that invited young athletes to become part of the narrative. Little wonder that interest exists in boys as young
as five.

  Jamie Pagliaro already had been Owen’s teammate on the Squirmies baseball team and on the basketball court. He was happy to finally see his friend on the football field. Like Marc, Jamie had been playing youth football for several seasons before Owen started. Although he enjoyed playing multiple sports, Jamie had a clear preference, even in elementary school. “Football was always number one,” he says. He, too, claimed the sport as his birthright—although in his case, the affinity was inherited from his mother’s side of the family. His maternal grandfather, Joe Beblavy, had played for Kutztown University of Pennsylvania—then Kutztown State—as tight end, defensive end, and kicker—the latter a position that earned him the nickname “Joe the Toe.” Later Beblavy coached at Allentown’s Trexler Middle School. The coaching would extend to his grandson. “Football was everything,” Jamie says.

  When the boys donned pads and uniforms, it was easy to imagine Marc as the quarterback. Even in elementary school, he already displayed the boyish handsomeness associated with the stereotype of the team’s star player. Owen, thin and impish looking under his flaming red hair, had yet to grow into the formidable physical presence on the field that he would become by high school. He seemed nearly dwarfed by his pads. Jamie, despite his propensity for fierce play, had a round, almost baby-like face under his helmet.