by Vicki Mayk
Players about to play their last games as Trojans are further recognized in a rite of passage known as Senior Night, held during the last home game of the season. Each senior walks the fifty-yard line with their parents as a wistful reminder that their high school days on the gridiron are ending. A light rain fell before the game on October 27 as senior players lined up with their parents, waiting to be recognized. Some mothers popped golf umbrellas as they prepared to make the walk with their sons. Each walk reflected that player’s relationship with his parents and provided a glimpse into his family life.
Some were joined by a single parent. Number 28, Erik Rueda, strode out, his mother’s arm hooked through his. Hesham Abdelaal, number 71, carried his helmet over his arm. He turned to his mother and smiled before they walked together across the field. Dan Boyko balanced a younger sibling on his hip—clearly a move he’d often practiced—as he and his mother marched across.
Others were accompanied by both parents. Marc Quilling, wearing number 15, stepped up, flanked by his parents, helmet in hand. He paused as his name was called, bent and kissed his mother, and walked confidently on to the turf.
Next came Owen, Samson-like red hair cascading on his shoulders, stepping up with his father—almost the same height—on his right. Tom, an umbrella tucked under his arm, wore a Parkland sweatshirt. Owen’s mother, dwarfed by her husband and son, was on Owen’s left. Kathy wore a red jacket, a large mum corsage pinned on its lapel with a P for Parkland in the center. Owen looked down at her with affection, throwing one arm around her shoulders and the other around his father. The threesome walked across the field as a single unit. Next came Mike Fay, wearing number 75 and flanked by his parents, now divorced. Mike spent hours at Owen’s house, playing video games, riding out his parents’ breakup. On the field at Senior Night, he was a buffer between them, walking in the middle and holding his mother’s hand. Stepping up next, number 90, Jamie Pagliaro, ducked his head to give his mother a quick kiss before stepping out with his parents. His boyish face lacked the chiseled angularity of manhood that will come with maturity.
With the ritual of Senior Night behind them and that night’s win recorded in the record books, the football boys looked ahead to postseason play. In less than a week, it would be November. In less than a week, the team would beat East Stroudsburg’s Cavaliers 21–7 in the first round of postseason play. And then they would face Easton’s Red Rovers in the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association District 11 finals. For some members of the Trojans, it wouldn’t be the first time they had faced Easton in a championship game. For some players, it would not be the first time Easton had beaten them. They had faced Easton in middle school under Coach Steckel and lost after an undefeated season. In both games, Owen delivered savage hits against Easton that his teammates will long remember. It would be the second time that, in spite of those hits, they lost the game.
Marc Quilling would remember it all. When the Parkland Trojan Alumni Varsity Club sold engraved bricks years later to form a path near the high school athletics entrance, Marc bought one. “RIP OT #31” is etched into his brick’s red surface, a nod to Owen’s jersey number. Below that are the words “Thundercats! Football ’06.”
CHAPTER 7
PENN PALS
FOOTBALL RECRUITS AT the University of Pennsylvania were invited to a dinner on campus in the spring of their senior year in high school. The room buzzed with male voices, the voices of young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three forming an auditory collage of friends greeting friends, locker-room-like bantering and introductions of guys who would be joining the team in fall 2007.
“Hey, man.”
“How’s it going?”
“This is Adam. He’s that guy who made that incredible play I was telling you about.”
“What position do you play?”
Coming into the crowded room to take his place among the newest Penn Quakers, Owen cut an unlikely profile, his shoulder-length hair giving him a wild-man image quite different from most of the other recruits. Luke DeLuca, clean-cut and coming out of a gap year spent at boarding school at Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts, sized up the guy who would become his roommate. Despite his long hair, Owen was as neatly dressed as the others in sport coat and tie. Except that the tie he wore had lobsters on it—a trademark piece of haberdashery that had been his favorite at high school football banquets. At that first dinner, Owen’s hair and tie placed him in the category of “different.” “People weren’t sure what to think,” Luke says.
His new teammates weren’t the first to wonder if Owen would fit in at Penn. His parents were surprised when he chose to study business at the Wharton School because he had most often talked about studying engineering and playing football at Lehigh University near his home in the Lehigh Valley. The Lehigh coaches had recruited him.
“I don’t know why he chose [Penn],” Tom says, speculating about his son’s reasons. “He was never interested in finance, he just wanted to be the boss in charge. I think that’s how he saw himself: ‘If I study business, I could be the boss in charge.’”
Later, Owen would admit he also saw attending Penn as a way to make good at the school where his older brother Matt had failed, abandoning his athletic and academic careers before graduating.
“One time he said to me that he felt the pressure to undo Matt screwing up,” Tom recalls. “He put the pressure on himself. I don’t know why he felt that.”
His friends also wondered about his choice.
Attending a business school where graduates tended to focus on the accrual of wealth seemed an especially odd match. Although he had an innate ability to get along with people from many social and economic groups, wealth and status meant little to him. Mike Fay, whose older brother Joey had graduated from Wharton, pondered the contrast between the school’s culture and his friend’s persona. “I often thought, ‘Here’s Owen, going to business school. He wears hand-me-down clothes and shoes with holes in them. He drives a Chevy Lumina. And he’s just the salt of the earth. He walks around like he’s wearing a Versace suit,’” Mike said.
Yet Fay and other Parkland classmates never wondered if their friend could handle the academic demands of the Ivy League. “He was a natural,” Mike said.
With the start of football camp in August, Owen and Luke moved into a campus complex known as the Quad, short for the Quadrangle. The original structure, built in 1895, grouped brick buildings around courtyards in a style that had come to characterize college architecture. Made up of three separate college houses that encompassed thirty-nine individual houses, it was where many Penn freshman lived. Owen and Luke were in Fisher Hassenfeld College House. Getting to know the guy he’d glimpsed at the spring dinner for recruits, Luke learned Owen was as different as his appearance suggested. “He was his own person,” Luke said. “He didn’t care what anyone thought about him.”
Football was their common ground. Luke had come to the sport much later than Owen and the Parkland boys, most of whom had started playing in elementary school. He began playing as a middle schooler in Grand Island, New York, a community near Buffalo often impacted by subzero temperatures and lake effect snow. Although his father and uncle had both played football, it was not their example that drew him: Luke started playing because many of his friends did. He continued when he entered high school at St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute in nearby Buffalo. The opportunity to extend his high school career and play at Phillips Andover had come from a St. Joseph’s alumnus with ties to the prep school. He and Owen shared the experience of playing both ways—offense and defense—on their high school teams.
As roommates, they quickly fell into an easy camaraderie built around the routine of being college football players: practices, weight lifting, team breakfasts before Saturday games, required study halls during the week. At night, they kept their room freezing, setting the air conditioner to what they called the “double snowflake,” regardless of the weather outside. Friends who cr
ashed in their room for the night rarely returned because of its meat locker frigidity. The roommates loved it.
They also loved joining a football program steeped in tradition. Penn was the alma mater of John Heisman, for whom the prestigious Heisman Trophy, awarded to the most outstanding player in NCAA football, is named. Franklin Field, where the Quakers played, is acknowledged as the oldest stadium still operating for football games. Originally opened in 1895 and rebuilt in 1922, the stadium boasts a history that includes being the site of the fabled Army-Navy game, the site of Vince Lombardi’s only NFL playoff loss in 1960, and the site of the first radio broadcast and television telecast of football games. For good measure, it was the Philadelphia Eagles’ home field for thirteen years.1 For young men who had grown up with football occupying a central role in their lives, playing there was like becoming part of the game’s history.
Jake Peterson returned to Penn in 2007, the same year that Owen entered the university. A member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, he’d taken time off to serve on a mission, a typical practice among young Mormons. Upon his return, he immediately gravitated to the freshman with the mane of red hair. “First time I saw him, I looked at his super long, gorgeous hair and thought, ‘Nice: there’s someone else,’” said Peterson, who’d been known for his long, blond locks during his first year at Penn. He had to cut them short to serve as a missionary. Now, back on campus and growing out his trademark hair, he’d returned to playing football for the Quakers.
Jake’s father, Clay, played football at Brigham Young University in the years when Jim McMahon played quarterback before beginning his fifteen-year NFL career that included playing on the Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers Super Bowl championship teams. “My dad went to the coach and asked, ‘Where do you need me?’ and the coach said, ‘We could use more people on the defensive line,’” Jake says, savoring the piece of family football lore. “So he bulked up to 285 and played defensive end.”
It was a given that Jake, Clay’s firstborn, would play football. “From the time I was a week old, he would hold me and whisper, ‘Jake you’re going to be a linebacker,’” Jake said. While some youngsters slept with stuffed animals, Jake slept with a toy football. He started playing in elementary school, joining a Pop Warner team at around age ten. “I was a linebacker from the time I stepped on the field,” he says, noting that he also played defensive end in high school.
As an inside linebacker at Penn, Peterson wore number 39, and had a locker next to number 40—Owen Thomas. Times in the locker room were a nonstop comedy routine because of the repartee between Owen and Justin Cosgrove, who wore number 38 and had the adjacent locker. Adam Triglia, another pal, was always ready to chime in. Owen, Justin, and Adam would become housemates as sophomores.
As lockers clanged and teammates donned pads and uniforms, the banter often took the form of heated debate, with Justin and Owen arguing about issues that could never be resolved. Whether the ’72 Celtics could have beaten the Knicks. Whether Justin or Owen could lay claim to being best at playing Call of Duty. About things of zero consequence to anyone except the members of this football brotherhood on a particular Saturday morning in fall. At some point, Adam would chime in with his heavy New York accent. “I told them all the time they needed to have their own TV show,” Jake said.
In practices and on the field, Jake found his match in Owen. Both were aggressive players who always brought a high level of focus and energy to practices. They frequently paired up on pass rush drills, growling like two bears as they approached one another, each bringing an intensity that surpassed many of their teammates. Jake admired Owen’s ability to play aggressively without becoming negative or nasty. “He had that ability to lift people up all the time,” he says. “One thing I struggled with was anger management. I was mean. Unfortunately for me, I’d become very negative on the field.”
His anger had been encouraged throughout his playing career. Jake’s high school coaches had encouraged his highly aggressive style in his hometown of Lake Tahoe, Nevada. “During playing, I knocked out multiple players. I deliberately targeted head-to-head contact. I don’t think my mental state was very healthy. In my mind that’s what made sense,” he says. Over the years, some coaches would pay him five- and ten-dollar bonuses for heavy hits delivered in practice.
Jake worked to balance his negativity with his commitment to his religious faith. A strong belief in Christ was something else he had in common with his redheaded teammate. Sometimes the two young men lingered in the locker room after practice long after others had gone, praying together for guidance. Jake was allowed to see a persona that seldom surfaced among Owen’s other friends: the son of ministers who had a deep commitment to his Christian faith.
“Most college guys on a football team don’t focus on that,” Jake said. “With him and me, we’d talk a lot about that. . . . He had a very good understanding of the Gospel, probably because his parents are ministers. We were able to talk about some deeper things that some people didn’t have the frame of reference to discuss.”
Owen and his freshman-year roommate, Luke DeLuca, moved to what they would call “the Baltimore house” in fall 2008, at the start of their sophomore year. The rowhouses on the 3900 block of Baltimore Avenue in Philadelphia stand shoulder to shoulder, like solid redbrick linemen on a football team. The neighborhood is favored by Penn athletes living off campus. It’s a short sprint down 39th Street from the university’s fabled Locust Walk. It’s a bit more of a jog—more than a mile—from legendary Franklin Field, where the Quakers play football, which makes it a good stretch of the legs for players shuttling back and forth for games and practices.
The house on Baltimore Avenue was a legacy residence for Penn football players, passed down after every graduation. As one group of senior players vacated the row house, a group of underclassmen inherited it. It was one of several acknowledged among students to be a “football house,” where group after group of Quakers teammates made their home. It was one of several football houses dotting the neighborhood. Jake Peterson and some of his friends on the team lived a few doors away, and other teammates lived nearby.
Owen and Luke were joined in the house by three of their sophomore teammates who had also lived in their campus dorm—Adam Triglia, Justin Cosgrove, and Kale Farley. Farley, a carefree guy from Texas, didn’t survive Penn’s academic rigor. By summer 2009, he had left the university, his spot in the house filled by Dave Macknet. Macknet had transferred to Penn the year before.
Luke remembers the place with nostalgia. “That was a really cool house over there. That was the house where everything happened,” he said.
Each of the guys had his own room, with Luke and Adam on the first floor, and Owen, Justin, and Kale—followed by Dave—on the second floor. On the third floor was the shared living space, with a common living room, kitchen, and outdoor balcony. If the house had a decorating scheme, it was clutter, with coordinating grime and vermin.
Owen’s father, Tom, would walk into the vestibule and tread on a thick carpet of unopened mail whenever he came to visit. “No one ever touched the mail,” he said. Trash was disposed of by dropping bags from the third-floor balcony and watching them explode in the alley space between the row houses. Such practices encouraged an influx of mice and cockroaches, already a challenge in city neighborhoods. They weren’t the only critters to pay a visit. Once, sitting on the balcony overlooking the garbage-strewn scene below, Owen had found himself face-to-face with a large raccoon foraging for scraps. The girlfriends and female acquaintances of the house’s inhabitants had one word to describe the atmosphere: disgusting.
Owen and Abbie Benner, who was then attending Millersville University eighty miles away in Lancaster County, had continued their relationship after going to college. She frequently visited him and stayed in the apartment, cringing at the sound of the mice. “In the middle of the night, you could hear them chewing on paper, and you could hear the mousetraps going off,” Ab
bie said, shuddering.
Walking through the kitchen, visitors picked their way through a path of upended paper cups used to trap cockroaches. “We wouldn’t kill them because, when you kill them, they let out a pheromone and that would bring all their friends,” Luke explained. “So we would just put a cup over them in the kitchen.”
Although the five inhabitants sometimes made an attempt to clean when female guests visited, for the most part they relished their trashed living conditions. “We all just loved that we didn’t have to worry about anything,” Luke said.
Socializing, not studying, was the focus for the five roommates. “I don’t think I once studied successfully in that house,” said Dave, who went on to Robert Wood Johnson Medical School at Rutgers University and then to an orthopedic surgery residency. “I skipped a lot of classes just to hang out with those guys.”