Growing Up on the Gridiron

by Vicki Mayk

  He was wooed away by two other school districts before landing back at Parkland in 2005. His winning ways and amiable personality made him something of a local celebrity among sports fans in the community. His seven children are used to being identified as his offspring; one of his daughters good-naturedly complains about how often she’s asked, “Is Jim Morgans your dad?”

  The unpretentious demeanor stemming from Morgans’s working-class background stayed with him. He has a straightforward way of talking to everyone, from parents to players. People know where they stand with Coach Morgans. Parents warm to his coaching style, which rewards both star athletes and second-stringers. Morgans names a player of the week—awarding a star decal that players paste on their helmets. Players don’t have to see playing time to win it. “The worst player on the football team is still important. He’s important,” Morgans states unequivocally. “If he gives us a great practice, we’re going to point him out. He may not play, may not be in on Friday night, but he’s there. What makes a kid stay there, and go through that grind? What makes a kid do that, that he’s one of sixty players, but he never really gets in the game? He’s a senior, he’s been with you for four years. I love those kids. They’re fantastic.”

  Joining the Parkland program when Owen and his friends were juniors, Coach Morgans inherited a group of players who displayed the moxie and commitment that head coaches prize. They would go undefeated in fall 2006, during their senior year.

  They were a team committed to the hard work and dedication that Morgans required. After summer practices ended and the season began, football was a six-day-a-week commitment. Monday practices were walk-throughs, with coaches focused on reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of that week’s opposing team. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, the team ran plays and drills. Thursday was another walk-through, before the game on Friday night. On Saturdays, players gathered to watch the game film from the night before and previewed film of the next week’s opponent. Saturdays also included time for lifting and running. Sundays were the sole day off before the routine started all over again on Monday.

  “When the season ends, they get off until Christmas, and then in January we start in the weight room and lift. If they don’t lift, they’re going to get left behind. They have to love it,” Morgans says. He pauses and a half-smile crosses his face, his expression changing from military general to that of a benevolent father figure. “And they do love it.”

  It was never a question that football came first for Owen Thomas and the Parkland Trojans of 2005 and 2006.

  “That’s the way it is with football boys,” former Parkland cheerleader Jess Benner quips. She was Mike Fay’s girlfriend while her twin, Abbie, dated Owen. Football boys, Jess explains, are bound by their love of the game and by their close relationships. Running together like a pack of sleek, fit young animals, they share inside jokes, play endless rounds of Call of Duty in basement rec rooms, and surreptitiously chew tobacco. Being a football boy was their identity, one that grew slowly, starting when they played peewee ball. If you were the girlfriend of a football boy, you got used to sharing him with an entire team.

  “Our girlfriends used to get mad at us for not spending more time with them,” Mike Fay recalls ruefully. “They’d say, ‘Didn’t you just see them?’ And we’d say, ‘Yeah, but that was yesterday.’”

  The girls were seeing a dynamic that has been key in the lives of boys and young men in America: the brotherhood. The relationships, shared experiences, and adventures of boys and men define a brotherhood for its members. It is such an important part of the development of boys in American society that psychologist Michael C. Reichert devotes a chapter to examining it in his book How to Raise a Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men. Brotherhood is built into the formal and informal institutions that are part of boys’ growing up years: Boy Scouts, athletic teams, even groups of boys that gather on playgrounds. In some cases, it can exert a negative influence, such as the dynamic found in gang violence or fraternity hazing. But in many cases—such as among Owen and the other football boys—being a member of a brotherhood becomes the ultimate manifestation of the exhortation “I have your back.” It provides a sense of belonging and gives young men a place where they can feel free to express affection for one another.

  Coach Morgans set the tone for expressing affection among team members. “Because of the nature of the game, you’ve got to be tough . . . but never leave the field without letting them know . . . and I have told them . . . that you love them. Because the nature of the game just brings you together.”

  The world of the football boy was built around rituals and rites invisible to the rest of the world. One of them—learning to chew tobacco—was part of the initiation for those playing on the Parkland varsity team. Owen, Mike, and Marc played varsity as sophomores—a rare privilege that only the most talented players at Parkland achieved. Mike remembers Owen’s older brother Morgan, a Parkland Hall of Fame player, tossing him the tin of chew one day in the locker room. “And he said, ‘Fay, you want to be on the varsity line, you gotta try this.’ I put some in my mouth. Of course, I got really dizzy. And I almost threw up.”

  Eventually Owen started chewing too—“After saying ‘no’ about twenty times,” Mike recalls. Once he started, Owen rapidly coined his own vocabulary to talk about the habit. In Owen’s parlance, the last remnants of tobacco in a tin—too small for a full pinch—became a “taste bud tickler.” In a maneuver he called “the flip,” Owen turned over the chaw in his mouth, reversing the side held against his teeth to extract the maximum amount of tobacco juice.

  Those words were part of a language particular to the football boys, much of it invented by Owen with help from Mike. “Charleston Chaw-daddy chew” accompanied the passing of the chewing tobacco tin. “My brotha” became their special salutation, one that began in the locker room and would be repeated in hundreds of posts on social media for years after. “Owen was known for his lingo,” Marc Quilling recalls. The unique language invented by Owen and Mike migrated from the practice field and locker room into the classrooms and halls of the high school. After they studied Shakespeare’s Macbeth in tenth grade, the boys traveled through the halls between classes, clucking like chickens, “Mac-Mac-Macbeth.”

  The boys seldom addressed each other by their given names. Relationships were cemented by bestowing nicknames, and Owen was the expert at inventing monikers. Some evolved from abbreviating a name: Marc Quilling became Quill and Jamie Pagliaro was Pags. Last names too short to be abbreviated were used in place of first names—with Mike Fay becoming Fay and Chris Funk known simply as Funk. Nicknaming extended beyond the boys to girls in their circle, with Owen doing a “Name Game” riff. The result was Kristen Dota becoming Dotes Ma-dotes and Irina Levin dubbed Ree-ner Schnitzel.

  Those were traditions established in fun. On game days, they took a serious turn. Every warrior has his ritual before battle, a series of observances meant to guarantee victory. In football, it’s often an amalgam of mental preparation and superstition. Before each game, Owen would sit alone at the far end of the hall in the athletic wing of the high school, back against the lockers, eyes closed. The moments of quiet contemplation yielded a focused, trash-talking fighter on the offensive line. “He’d be there telling players, ‘I’m coming for you. Coming for you,’” Marc recalls. Players on the opposing team were wary of the redheaded Viking, knowing he was capable of backing up his words with action.

  Marc, wearing number 15 at quarterback, had his own series of pregame rites. He would warm up wearing black sweatpants. “Then I’d take them off and give them to Coach Lane and he’d wear them on the sidelines,” Quill says.

  The superstitions at times bordered on the ridiculous. “Before every game, Chris Funk, Mike Parkhill, and me would have to sing [songs by] Panic! At the Disco,” Pags says. “Then they would have to touch Mike’s flat foot.”

  Even the coaches would succumb to superstition. Parkland defensive coach Ryan Hulmes pluck
ed stones from near the stadium and tucked them in his pocket to take to away games, carrying a bit of home field advantage with him.

  Some rituals were a shared experience for team members. On Thursday nights before Friday games, Owen and his friends would gather at their classmate Matt Bergstein’s house for another team ritual. His band, A Crisis Andrea, would give a private performance. Mike said, “We went to his house and got a heavy metal show.”

  Next to actually playing the game, good times in the weight room ranked high with the football boys. Located in the high school’s athletic wing, it was a place for strenuous workouts and bonding with guys who were serious about football. The long, brightly lit room has cinderblock walls painted in the school colors of scarlet and silver-gray. A huge head of a Trojan warrior is depicted in profile on one wall, the helmet topped with a bright red plume. Another mural shows the Trojan in a full body pose, brandishing a shield bearing the school district logo. Beside him, the years of Parkland’s state championship teams are emblazoned on the wall.

  Mirrors reflect the bodies of athletes working out. The room is packed with more than a half-dozen weight-lifting stations, each set up to serve lifters of different ability levels. Stationary bikes and treadmills form a line like mechanical sentries. Racks of dumbbells stand ready. Speakers spew an earsplitting soundtrack of heavy metal music.

  For Owen and friends, every day was a party in the weight room. During a typical session, Mike cranked up the volume on the sound system and the first chords of AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” filled the room. Owen, clad in his favorite Led Zeppelin shirt, leaped into the air off the black bench where he’d just finished lifting, his long red hair streaming like streaks of fire behind him. He and Mike stood next to each other, Owen strumming air guitar as he tossed his head back and forth. Mike followed suit. Around the room, other players paused between reps, grinning at their antics. Facing each other, they engaged in an air guitar standoff, faces contorted, heads jerking in time to the beat.

  When the next song launched—Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”—more guys joined in. First Pags, then Hesham. Pretty soon, half a dozen of the Trojans’ toughest players were engaging in imaginary drumming, strumming invisible six-strings, carried along by the relentless beat of vocalist Robert Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page, bassist John Paul Jones, and drummer John Bonham. For a few minutes, the boys became the band.

  During a pause in the music some of the guys who had been watching applauded and cheered. Owen grinned under his bright yellow bandana, catching his breath, as Mike high-fived him.

  It was weight lifting, Owen Thomas style. “We’d be absolute fools in the weight room,” Mike says, shaking his head at the memory.

  Jamie remembers when Coach Bob Ruisch, then brand new, walked into the weight room for the first time. “He walked in the door, and we all were just playing our air guitars and drums and stuff. Not goofing off: we were serious about working out. But he saw me and Owen and Mike Fay and Marc and he was like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is where I want to be,’” Jamie says. “We knew how to have fun, but at the same time, the coaches knew we were there for one thing and that was to get better and win football games.”

  For many players, lifting weights was something that was required. For Owen, as with so many of his interests, it was a passion. Players were required to lift four days a week off-season and twice a week during the season. Owen held himself to a rigorous schedule, coming to school at 6 a.m. to hit the weight room before his first class. In Diane Cortazzo’s first-period German honors class, the teacher known as “Frau” chided him for putting his head on the desk. “I said, ‘Owen, what are you doing?’ He explained that he was physically exhausted from lifting; he wasn’t sleeping. He told me, ‘Frau, I hear everything you’re saying. Call on me anytime.’ I would call on him and he would lift his head up and give me the right answer. Most kids, if their head was on the desk, it meant they weren’t listening.”

  In the weight room, he’d be on the first rack—the rack for the strongest lifters. By the time he was a senior, he could bench press three hundred pounds and squat lift five hundred. That kind of strength was important for a lineman, whose job is to stop opposing players in their relentless drive down the field. “Owen was really good at dead lifts,” Marc remembers, using a powerlifting term in which a weight lifter takes the weight from the floor to waist height in one motion.

  With many linemen in the pros and at Division I colleges topping three hundred pounds, the bar is set high. Players are bigger and more powerful than they have ever been in the history of the game. University of Nebraska professor Timothy Gay studies the physics of football. He notes that linemen’s weights from 1920 to the present have increased from one hundred and ninety pounds to more than three hundred. That’s a 50 percent increase in a football player’s body mass leading to an equally significant increase in the force players exert on the field.4 Players today must have both strength and size to compete. Owen worked relentlessly to achieve both.

  Owen’s father, Tom, recalls, “He wanted to be heavier. He made himself gain. It wasn’t his natural weight. Morgan didn’t have to try to gain weight. Owen had to push himself. He played at 240 and he was about six two, so he was big. But he was not naturally big. He had a different physique.” He would worry about losing weight, Tom says.

  Owen’s preoccupation with weight gain led him to develop an appetite unequaled among his friends. “He was a little vacuum cleaner. Anything girls didn’t want to eat at lunch, he would vacuum it up,” his mother says. “Even the lunch ladies gave him extra.”

  His preoccupation with size is common among many young athletes. Athletes brag about consuming five thousand calories and more a day to maintain a playing weight. Although Owen adopted a high-calorie diet, some athletes take more extreme measures, using dietary supplements or even experimenting with steroids. The push to be as large as possible among high school football players can lead to unhealthy outcomes. Results of a study published in 2007 in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that, among 3,600 high school linemen in Iowa, 45 percent of the players were overweight and 9 percent were obese.

  Size brought an ability to intimidate, and that is what Owen and his teammates wanted to do—intimidate. Jamie Pagliaro says Owen succeeded. “He was feared, because he was aggressive. He was just everywhere. He was just all over the field,” Pagliaro says.

  Owen’s high school coaches remember him as a physical player. “In the vernacular that we use, he was a bender,” Morgans says, describing the stance used by the best defensive players, who bend their knees, distributing their weight to give them more power to drive back the offense.

  His passion inspired his high school teammates, just as it had done in middle school. Owen—already team captain as a junior—drove his peers to be their best. They emulated his work ethic in the weight room and on the field. But his charismatic presence and ability to deliver a pep talk was equally powerful.

  “When we were walking out onto that field for pre-practice, he knew exactly what to say,” Pags recalls. “He was always the football player I looked up to. I’ve played with some really good football players. He wasn’t always the most talented, but he had the heart to play the game, more than anyone I’ve ever met. He was unbelievable on the field. He was a leader. I think that was his biggest attribute.”

  The Parkland football boys’ nostalgia for their time together extended beyond the moments shared on the field. The times shared off the field secured their bond and defined their friendships as the most important ones in their young lives.

  “We look back now with such fondness,” Mike says. “As you get older, you realize that’s over, that’s gone—that little three-year blurb [sic]. And you look back and you think, how could three years matter so much?” He pauses, shaking his head. “Those three years are so important.” Those were the years when their identities as athletes solidified and belonging to a brotherhood of players on a team became an indelibl
e part of their lives.

  On one memorable September night, just before summer slipped into fall, there was no football game, no practice to demand the football boys’ disciplines. On a rare night off, John Zaccaro, another Parkland linebacker, sat with Owen on the deck at the Thomases’ house on Jonagold Road, facing a bank of pine trees that rimmed the yard, like sentinels watching the suburban neighborhood. Dusk fell, dropping its blanket of dark over the backyard, slowly at first, then more quickly as the sun lowered in the sky. The two young men enjoyed a moment of companionable silence, killing time before meeting up with the rest of the crew. Suddenly the darkness was punctuated with a net of fireflies flashing like tiny Christmas lights across the pines, hundreds of them sparkling against the trees from one end of the yard to the other.

  “Damn! Do you see that?” John asked, breaking the silence.

  “Yeah,” Owen said.

  They slipped back into silence until John’s cell phone rang and they set off. That night would be like many others, John says. “We would pick up two or three guys in my SUV,” he recalls. They moved from house to house, hanging out, having fun. Sometimes it was at Owen’s place for endless hours playing video games. Other times they traveled to Chris Funk’s barn on Gaskill Road for beer that tasted best because they were too young to be drinking it.

  Their favorite hideout was the Zaccaros’ home in nearby Northampton.

  “That was the real country wooded place out in the middle of nowhere,” Mike Fay says, his eyes gleaming with the joy of remembered good times and harmless hellraising. “You’d leave, just say, ‘Dad, I’ll be gone for two days.’ Once you got there, you knew no one was going to come looking for you; no one was going to catch you and yell at you.”

  The boys would hang out in a shed and in a gazebo overlooking the woods. Often they built bonfires. There was always beer. And it was there that the group smoked marijuana for the first time, hurriedly extinguishing the joint when Mrs. Zaccaro came out to ask if they’d like some spaghetti.