Growing Up on the Gridiron

by Vicki Mayk

  Her cooking was always a highlight. The boys love talking about the time she made a giant tub of sloppy joes and Owen stood eating right out of the pot using a dripping ladle to spoon the tangy meat as the guys chortled and laughed around him.

  High school was a time, John says, of “innocent awesomeness.” It was a time to be football boys.

  Coach Morgans says that Owen and his friends seemed aware of the unique time in their lives, even as they were experiencing it. “Every game to them was a special event. It was like they knew that this wasn’t going to last. They knew it. It was a treasure that they could participate and play football in high school.”

  Three years later, when Owen was at the University of Pennsylvania, laboring in the intense atmosphere at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, he would remember those times, telling his high school friends that he felt lonely in the city.

  After he chose to fasten a football belt around his neck and hang himself, his friends wondered if he had thought of their times together in his last moments. If he saw, as the belt forced the breath out of his body, the lights of a thousand fireflies rising in the gathering darkness.

  CHAPTER 6

  THUNDERCATS

  THE NEW PARKLAND HIGH SCHOOL was dubbed the Taj Mahal when it opened in 1999. The huge school sitting on 128 acres matches the expectations of residents in the upwardly mobile community it serves, with facilities that are the biggest and best of any school in the region. Its three thousand-plus students jam the halls, moving between classes in a school that has a reputation for being an academic and social pressure cooker. Students’ cars in the parking lots reflect the socioeconomic diversity of the owners.

  Dropped into the sea of Parkland students, Owen Thomas, with his trademark red hair, floated to the top. The school’s culture pigeonholed students into myriad social groups: jocks, goths, nerds, brainiacs, bandos, arts kids. Owen navigated among these groups with ease, claiming friends throughout the school.

  “He never cared where you came from, what you looked like, who you were,” says Parkland teammate John Zaccaro, recalling the way his friend ignored the high school caste system. “He always was nice—unless you were playing against him on the football field in a different color uniform.”

  Status based on clothes and material possessions seemed meaningless to Owen. His ancient blue Chevy Lumina—dubbed the Lum-dizzle—clearly placed him among the less affluent. His collection of shirts from the Salvation Army was worn as confidently as his peers wore clothes with labels from Abercrombie and Gap. But he and his friends had claimed something more valuable than material possessions to define them in the Parkland culture: they were athletes. More importantly, they were football players—perhaps the most desirable of all the school’s social groups.

  Mike Fay says the football player identity shaped him from the time he was the awkward kid who wandered the golf course until he became a respected part of the offensive line as a Parkland Trojan. “I got the Life of the Party award, which is an award they give at the end of the year,” Mike says. He’s so astonished by the fact, he repeats it. “I got the Life of the Party award, and I graduated with nine hundred kids. . . . I don’t really like the term, but I guess I became popular. But I felt very lonely and isolated when I was younger.”

  Being a football player was a shared identity. Getting to wear your football jersey in school on game day Fridays placed you among a brotherhood of sixty or more guys all wearing the same jersey. It was great to be part of the club. In Parkland, the proud football tradition was shared even by the school district’s senior administration. High school principal Rich Sniscak coached the Trojans for seven years, winning two district titles, before becoming principal in 2001. In 2011, he would become the school district’s superintendent.1

  Athletes weren’t the only students lionized in Parkland. The school also elevated the academically talented, and competition among those students could be as tough as it was among athletes on the playing field. In each year’s graduating class, the race to see who would be valedictorian and salutatorian—those graduates with the highest grades—became a face-off among a handful of students whose grade point averages were separated by a hundredth of a point. The district finally eliminated class rank in 2012, five years after Owen and his teammates graduated. With some 56 percent of Parkland students earning averages of 3.0 or better, class rank could actually work against them when applying to college. Because so many had high averages, students with a 4.00 could actually rank below the top 10 percent of the graduating class—the position valued by competitive universities.2

  Owen’s inherent competitiveness helped him to deal with the academic pressure at the high school. Not content to be known only for athletic prowess, he pursued top grades, taking honors and Advanced Placement classes. When his buddies on the team asked him to hang out, the answer invariably was, “After I’ve done my homework.” But unlike many of his classmates who focused on academics, Owen maintained a sense of fun. Steve Yoder, a former Parkland social studies teacher and basketball coach, saw it when the redhead was in his Advanced Placement government class.

  Yoder routinely stood at the classroom door to greet students at the start of each class period. One day he looked down the hall to see Owen come around the corner wearing an AC/DC T-shirt, long red hair skimming his shoulders and a small drum set hanging off his arm. Following him was a ragtag group of students, a mix of every different kind of kid in the school.

  “What is this mess?” Yoder asked as Owen reached the door.

  “You said I could bring it in,” Owen said matter-of-factly.

  And then Yoder remembered: Owen had lobbied every day during the term that the class should be allowed to play Guitar Hero, a popular video game. Yoder had put him off: “You can bring it in on the last day at your last class.”

  Yoder had forgotten, but when the day came, Owen had remembered. Minutes after he arrived, a full rock band was playing in the classroom, surrounded by laughing students.

  “Owen was part of that intense, highly competitive culture at Parkland. A lot of kids who went through there, it impacted their experience. It’s great to be an AP student, but it’s also great to enjoy being eighteen, seventeen, sixteen. So many kids there didn’t experience that. Owen always did,” Yoder says. “Intellectually, he was near the top of his class. I had kids who got perfect scores on SATs, who were going to Harvard and Yale. What made Owen different than everyone else was that he was so well adjusted. He balanced it so well.”

  For others in Parkland, Yoder says, it wasn’t so easy. “I felt that at Parkland, there were a lot of kids who fell between the cracks,” he says. “If you were very bright, very athletic, very attractive, Parkland was great. But if you were one of those ‘other’ kids, it was easy to get lost.”

  Andy Roth became one of those “other” kids when he stopped playing football. With social groups tied to activities—sports, theater, music, art, science clubs—leaving an activity meant losing your place in the social order. For a teenager, it came close to losing your identity. Andy had played football with Owen since childhood, but an injury ended his athletic career in high school. The fact that Andy also attended classes at vocational-technical school instead of college prep classes made leaving athletics even more difficult. The vo-tech kids often felt invisible in a school where traditional academics were prized. Once he was off the team, he lost friendships with boys he’d known since playing youth football in elementary school.

  “The other kids stopped talking to me. It’s like, if you leave the family, that’s it. It was never like that with Owen. Every time he saw me in school, he’d always yell, ‘Hey, Andy.’” He pauses and adds, “It meant the world to me.”

  Owen’s parents—both United Church of Christ ministers—played a part in instilling a sense of kindness and compassion in their sons. Both Kathy and Tom led by example. The congregation at Union United Church of Christ was defined by the gentleness that Tom displ
ayed as its senior pastor. Visitors are quick to notice the friendly atmosphere, and Tom greeted newcomers by name by the time they had attended services three or four times. When the congregation voted to adopt the United Church of Christ’s open and affirming congregation policy, welcoming people of all sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions, Tom’s presence helped to avoid a major rift. A former congregant, Gloria Ringer, says, “He had such an easy way with people. And a great memory for names and faces—and even for people’s relatives.” His sons displayed the same friendly, welcoming demeanor.

  Jamie Berkowitz moved in social circles with some of the football boys’ female friends, Kristen Dota and Irina Levin. A confident brunette with large, expressive blue eyes, Jamie drew Owen’s attention at a party in winter 2006 during their junior year. Before long they were a couple. Like many teen romances, it was characterized by a series of breakups and reconciliations. During one breakup initiated by Jamie, Owen confided in Kristen Dota—one of the few people he allowed to see him cry.

  Owen eventually stopped dating Jamie to return to his longtime crush, Abbie Benner. The idea of dating Abbie started when the boys were in preseason practice before their senior year. Mike Fay, already paired with Abbie’s twin, Jess, encouraged Owen to join him to watch a favorite movie with the sisters. Romance blossomed from there.

  Their relationship was an extension of the football boys’ close-knit crowd. They spent all their time together, from school to the playing field to socializing at each other’s houses. “We would be together all the time,” Abbie says. “We would be together, but we could hang out with everyone else at the same time. Our circle of friends was so close. We could just be together and be with our friends.”

  In the crisp fall days of senior year, it was easy to believe that football always would be at the center of their lives. Classes and the prom, romances and academic honors—all the other things that marked that final year of high school were incidental to the experience of that last season as Parkland Trojans.

  For Owen and his friends, it was a time measured by moments on a field, playing as part of an undefeated team, only the third one in Parkland history. There would be ten victories in regular season play. Six of them would be shutouts in which Parkland racked up scores as high as 49 and 54. Such a season lifts the powerful, shared experience of football into something nearly transcendent. Neuroscientist and Trinity College Dublin professor Ian H. Robertson describes it in his book The Winner Effect: The Neuroscience of Success and Failure. Robertson writes that winning makes you more confident and focused, which leads to more and greater victories. More importantly, it actually alters the chemistry of the brain. Winning increases testosterone, Robertson writes, which in turn increases the chemical messenger dopamine. When dopamine hits the reward network in the brain, it makes us feel better. It also makes winning addictive.

  Little wonder that their senior season—an extraordinarily successful season until their loss in the District XI playoff game—would forever take on heightened importance in their lives. It became a memory wrapped in velvet, like a medal won in wartime, to be taken out and shined from time to time.

  Some new rituals and traditions were added that fall. Spirits were high on bus rides returning home from away games. Players, tired but happy, beamed after the night’s victory. In contrast to their youthful smiles, eye black smeared on their faces to reduce glare gave some the look of ancient warriors. Jamie Pagliaro strode down the center aisle of the bus, raising an index finger to silently proclaim “We’re number one.”

  Owen, a knit cap pulled over his mane of flaming red hair, sat with a benevolent half-smile on his face as the team bus began its journey home. As the bus made its way up Cedar Crest Boulevard toward the high school, it passed over a bridge, the signal for him to spring into action. Hitting the side of the metal bus with the flat of his hand, he would yell, “Thundercats!” As Owen beat his hand against metal, the rest of the team took up the cheer, making the ensuing ruckus deafening. It happened on every ride home in fall 2006.

  The boys knew that their days playing together would soon be over. The thought had been an abstraction, one that didn’t seem real as long as they were still lifting together in the weight room and hanging out most evenings and weekends. For a time, some of them considered going to the same college, nursing the fantasy that they could continue to play football together.

  “We were all recruited by Lafayette [College],” says Marc. “Owen, me, and Fay. We walked around campus talking about how cool it would be if we all went there together.”

  They were invited to a camp on a Saturday at Lafayette as part of the recruitment process. Mike and Owen had partied the night before, crashing at a friend’s house. When Mike awakened in the darkened basement of the friend’s house, long after the sun was up, he discovered Owen had left without him, later saying he didn’t know where to find Mike. When Mike complained about being left behind, Owen told him, “You need to be responsible for yourself.” Mike remembers, “He was driven and laser-focused—sometimes to a fault.”

  Earlier generations of athletes relived their best plays and proudest moments by reviewing record books and sharing memories. But for Owen and his friends, there was a more indelible record: the season highlights video. Such videos have become a staple for youth playing football. Young players who grew up watching their pro football heroes on the documentaries produced by the award-winning company NFL Films fantasized about seeing their own touchdowns immortalized, complete with music and voiceover narration. Players aspiring to play at Division I schools needed individual videos to help sell them to prospective coaches. Formerly, athletic talent could only be observed by scouts on recruiting visits, at football camps, and at combines; now it can be cued up and reviewed on demand, even watched on a cell phone.

  Highlights videos—whether for individual athletes or teams—are part of the $15 billion annual youth sports industry. Today individual athletes can pay from $400 to well over $1,200 for videos sent to college scouts.3 Costs have skyrocketed since the years when Owen and his friends played—but even in 2006, athletes and parents expected a well-produced video with voice-overs, music, and athlete interviews edited into the final product.

  Parkland High School, like hundreds of other high schools, contracts to have a season video produced. When the boys were seniors, that video was made by Schaf’s Video Productions, a company in Allentown specializing in capturing athletic memories for players and their families. The 2006 Trojans highlights video begins with narration in a woman’s cultured voice, speaking in an English accent reminiscent of those heard on public television’s Masterpiece Theatre.4

  There is a legend over twenty-eight centuries old of a city that was home of the world’s greatest army. Alongside mortal men, the gods Apollo and Poseidon built the city of Troy. With the help of Aries, the god of war, the walls of the city remained unbreached.

  On the video, images from paintings of ancient armies in conflict dissolve to the image of the helmets of the Parkland Trojans, held in the air by players huddled in a circle, as the narrator continues.

  Much like those ancient warriors, we can find the modern-day Trojans defending their gates against any savagery.

  A montage of plays opens the film, awakening muscle memory for the players watching it. Successful interceptions. Completed passes. Tie-breaking touchdowns. Bone-crushing hits receive special attention, celebrated as game-changing moments or chances to even the score. Slow motion transforms the hits into a kind of ballet combining grace and power. Years later, as the young men watch, their bodies unconsciously prepare for the next play. They lean forward as their senior season flickers across the screen. The video chronicles a victorious season, celebrating the kinds of games that are part of the lore of high school football—grudge matches and traditional rivalries.

  Parkland’s face-off against the Bethlehem Catholic High School Hawks—Becahi, as the school is referred to in the Lehigh Valley—was
a classic grudge match. Owen talks about it in an interview in the video. He sits in a director’s chair, his hair a silky cascade. A single word—Warriors—is visible on the front of his T-shirt.

  “We just hate them,” he declares. “We just have a born hatred for Beca.” His tone is matter-of-fact, belying the harshness of his words. “They rubbed it in our faces the year before, so we knew we had to take it to them. Some of the coaches got real emotional before the game.”

  He pauses, then continues in the same even tone, the softness of his voice contrasting with his threatening words. It surprises no one: This is football, a game built on crushing hits and domination.

  “We just came in and punched them. We kicked them right in the face. It’s something that we needed to do. It got our season off to a great start. It’s something that propelled us into the rest of the season.”

  On the video, the victory against Becahi unspools from the opening kickoff. Play after play, the Trojans stop the Hawks and put points on the scoreboard. Coach Morgans, clad in one of the red polo shirts worn by Parkland’s coaching staff, leans forward, intent, watching the action. A touchdown by Greg Bortz in the first quarter starts the rout, with two more touchdowns to follow. “The Trojans are unstoppable,” the play-by-play announcer intones. By halftime the score is 21–0.

  It’s Owen who scores the final touchdown. Stepping out of a tackle amid a swarm of Beca players in black and gold, he gives an almost balletic hop before he takes it into the end zone to bring Parkland to its winning score of 35–0.

  The highlights reel ends with Parkland’s traditional rivalry against the Zephyrs of Whitehall High School. Each year the two teams play for bragging rights and to claim the Gerencser Trophy, named for a coach who had a hand in establishing a winning football program at both schools. Joe Gerencser, a legendary coach who successfully led the Trojans for fourteen seasons, is credited with building the school’s football program after he arrived in 1962. In those days, other schools referred to Parkland’s team as the Farmers, reflecting a time a half-century ago when the district had far more farmland than suburban sprawl. Before Gerencser left Parkland after the 1976 season, he had compiled a record of 97–36–7, with two undefeated seasons. He finished his career as the head coach at Whitehall for eleven years, retiring in 1986. A tough coach known for having little tolerance for bull from his players or his coaching staff, he was honored in 1995 shortly before his death from cancer with a perpetual trophy created in his name. In 2006, the teams met in the last game of the season, bringing an undefeated Parkland against a Whitehall team with a 5–4 record heading into the game. The Trojans trounced the Zephyrs, 28–13.