Growing Up on the Gridiron

by Vicki Mayk

Luke concurred. “I would find myself doing all-nighters. I would not be able to do work when everyone was awake; I wanted to be hanging out with them. Sometimes I’d have to go to the library to get away from everyone.”

  In the living room, two television sets provided a focal point. The larger one was for watching movies with the smaller one reserved for video games. A small chair was positioned for the video game player to sit. Guys waiting to take their turn lounged behind it on a red couch. The young men spent hours rotating on and off the sofa, taking their place at the game controls. As Owen took his turn playing his favorite game, Call of Duty, the air was filled with sound effects. Lobbing virtual grenades on foes, his mouth opened wide to mimic the sound of explosions. Seven hits entitled him to send in dogs to aid in the attack. “Send in the digs,” he screamed, giving a classic Owen twist to the word for a canine.

  Procrastination—a venerable pastime for college students—was raised to high art by the five inhabitants of the football house. The video games and ready access to a group of best friends for nonstop talk were favored ways to avoid the inevitable demands of academics. In addition to the shared distractions, each of the men had his own way to kill time.

  Owen frequently rearranged the furniture in his room while listening to his favorite music—Led Zeppelin, Incubus, and Third Eye Blind. The sound of the Led Zeppelin hit “Over the Hills and Far Away” signaled that Owen was up and about. A visit to his room would reveal a new floor plan. Desk, bed, and bookcases would all be rotated.

  Classes might be cut and homework postponed, but there was no procrastination when it came to the game of football. The young men seldom deviated from the regimented schedule of lifting and conditioning, practices, and watching film. The commitment went beyond the threat of being cut from the team. It was a discipline that they embraced for love of the game. Owen retained a level of enthusiasm for workouts that was matched by few.

  On an early morning in late fall, Jake Peterson trudged down Baltimore Avenue, a cloud of foggy breath floating above his face in the cold. He didn’t mind getting up early, but—a true West Coast native—Jake hated the cold. His dislike was reflected in everything about him: the layers of clothes he wore, his unhappy expression, and his loud grumbling that he wished he were running on an indoor heated track.

  As other football players gathered from nearby football houses for their run, Jake did a double take. There was Owen Thomas, unbelievably wearing shorts and a cut-off T-shirt despite the frigid temperatures. And he would be singing. Singing! Typically it might be a tune by Third Eye Blind or Incubus. Heavy metal was usually reserved for the weight room or game day. Jake shook his head and broke into a grin in spite of himself.

  Soon a group of Penn players had assembled to start their mandatory run. For a few minutes everyone would be quiet as their feet hit macadam, their heavy breathing and grunts so low that the sound was almost subliminal. Suddenly, Owen would speak, his nonstop patter a counterpoint to the sounds of physical exertion

  “Gentlemen, we got to yoke the youlders,” he shouted. It would take the runners a minute to process it. Youlders . . . Owen’s offbeat lingo. And pretty soon the whole crowd of tough football players was laughing together and talking about shoulders.

  “From the very start, all the way, he just had that effect on people,” Jake said. “It’s hard to be upset when you’re laughing.”

  In the Penn weight room, Owen recaptured some of the atmosphere that he had created during high school. Clad in a raggedy T-shirt, hair topped by a bandana—“He looked like a homeless person,” Jake Peterson quipped—he would crank up the music, playing heavy metal and classic rock while he lifted. Jim Steel, Penn’s strength and conditioning manager, shared Owen’s love of the classic tunes and enjoyed hearing the music played at a high decibel.

  Owen’s offbeat way of talking made its way from workouts to practice field to the playing field at Penn, permeating the football team, just as it had done in high school. His invented words soon became an accepted part of the Penn football program, even making their way into team meetings. “He’d say something using that lingo, completely serious, to the coaches and the coach would know exactly what he meant. Everyone would burst out laughing,” Luke said.

  Even his trash talk on the field, meant to disarm opponents, included language that was quintessentially Owen. Facing his opponents across the line, he kept up a barrage of nonstop jabber, which at first sounded nonsensical to players on the other team.

  “I’m coming at you like a puma cat.”

  “I’ve been eating vegetables all week like a deer.”

  “Are you ready for the lonely satchel? ’Cause I’m bringing it.”

  And while the other players were trying to figure out what to make of the big guy who sounded like he was saying a bunch of ominous nonsense, Owen would be getting ready to take them out of the game.

  “Sometimes,” Jake recalled, “he’d been making sound effects, like explosions, as he was running through these guys.”

  The Penn locker room was full of big personalities when Daniel Lipschutz entered it as a freshman place kicker and punter in fall 2008, when Owen was a sophomore. A quiet guy from Ambler, Pennsylvania, in nearby Montgomery County, not far from Penn’s campus, Daniel had started playing football in high school after growing up playing soccer. “I’d felt I’d maxed out my potential in soccer,” he recalls. As a teen who was shy and lacked self-assurance, changing to football had benefits. “When I switched to playing football. . . . It brought me into my own. When you’re fifteen, sixteen years old, people start to see themselves differently. The football mind-set is such a masculine environment. It brought out my personality. What football gave me in high school and moving on into college—it gave me such an identity. I think that helped me to maneuver socially and culturally.”

  It was another example of the brotherhood that the football team offered to members. The identity of football player traveled with young men from high school to college, easing the transition. The brotherhood’s culture was almost tribal in nature, linked by shared goals, traditions, and rituals. In the tribe that was Penn football, Owen emerged as a leader.

  “Anyone who walked in—it could have been the president of the university, it could have been his mom, his dad—he would have a big reaction, as if they were the most important person who had shown up that day,” Daniel recalled, describing Owen’s typical manner of greeting people. “And that’s just really true, the genuine feeling that you were a special person to him and that every moment was one to be sort of celebrated. That’s the kind of feeling that he left everybody with.”

  Owen’s positive presence was a plus for players working under a coach known for being tough. “You might say we survived playing football together under Al Bagnoli,” Daniel says wryly. Bagnoli had a no-nonsense approach that led to success. Considered one of the most successful coaches in the Ivy League, he coached at Penn for twenty-three years. During that time, he amassed nine Ivy League championships, six undefeated seasons, and three perfect seasons. One of the Ivy League championships would be won in Owen Thomas’s last season. The season following his death, the Quakers would win a second title.2

  Compliments could be hard to come by on Bagnoli’s teams.

  Even after a good practice or winning a game in which they had dominated the other team, the Quakers would find “Bags,” as they called the coach behind his back, cursing and critical, focusing on weaknesses in their performance. He rarely gave compliments. “The best thing Bagnoli ever said to me after a play was, ‘That wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be,’” Daniel said.

  Owen acted as a buffer between the coach and his teammates, and his ability to rally the team would lead to his election as team captain in spring 2010, days before his death.

  “He was someone who would take the younger kids under his wing and really capture their interest,” Dave Macknet said. “He would show them his passion for the game and for the team and for Pe
nn. And you can’t help but follow that passion.”

  On the field, Owen continued to be the powerful presence he had been for most of his life, displaying the hard-hitting style that was his trademark. As part of Penn’s kickoff return team, he was the center of the wedge, the group of players that forms a vicious, high-speed shield for the player returning the kickoff. The NCAA would ban the wedge block formation in April 2010, less than two weeks before Owen would die by suicide. NCAA studies showed that 20 percent of all injuries on kickoffs resulted in concussions, lending the impetus for banning a formation that promoted forceful hits. The NFL had banned it the previous year. The introduction of the wedge formation—earlier called the “flying wedge”—happened in an 1892 game between Harvard and Yale. Rules outlawing the wedge and its often brutal outcome were introduced as early as 1894. Eventually, forward motion would be outlawed behind the line of scrimmage to keep the offense from getting a full-steam-ahead running start.3 But lovers of the game acknowledge that it was the ultimate play for testing the mettle of players on kickoffs. It was the singular weapon among players on special teams.

  Owen had initially been frustrated about seeing little play as a freshman, but by his sophomore year, he was starting on defense. What was already nearly a decade of achievement in football would continue in college. As a sophomore, he started in all ten games as a defensive end, making ten tackles on the season—six solo. As a junior, he was once again a standout, earning All-Ivy second team honors, playing on a team that won the Ivy League championship. He led the team and finished second in the Ivy League with six sacks and had a season best eight tackles in the Quakers’ win over Bucknell. Owen was making a name for himself on the field. The website Bleacher-Report.com would single him out as one of the top Ivy League football players of 2010 on the defensive line.4

  CHAPTER 8

  FOOTBALL FAMILY

  IN HER HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE YEARS, Boston University researcher Dr. Ann McKee would easily have fit in among the friends who congregated at the Baltimore house with Owen and his Penn football brothers. Like most of those young men, she’d grown up in a football family in her hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin. The youngest among five children, she remembers joining her brothers for football drills and running tires set up by the high school football coach who was a family friend. Her father had played football at Grinnell College. Her older brother Chuck, seven years her senior, was a star player at Appleton East High School, where McKee later was a cheerleader—then the accepted option for a girl. As a kid, her pride in her brother’s gridiron prowess prompted her to mount signs on the family front lawn boasting, “Chuck McKee Lives Here.” Chuck later would play quarterback at Division III Lawrence University in their hometown, eschewing Division I offers to focus on academics. As a Wisconsin native, McKee was a “cheesehead” by birthright and embraced the title as a fan of the Green Bay Packers from childhood. In adulthood, she had her own cheesehead hat, shaped like a giant wedge of cheese, to prove it.1

  By the time she entered the University of Wisconsin at eighteen, she’d developed a love of art equal to her love of football. Painting was her passion. “But I quickly realized I wasn’t going to be able to support myself,” McKee says. “You know, I could be an art teacher. I had limited options.” Once again inspired by her brother Chuck, who by then was a doctor, she switched her major from art to science with an eye on a medical career. It wasn’t an easy choice. McKee had focused on English, languages, and the liberal arts during high school. “I just did a lot of extra work that first year,” she says, matter-of-factly describing the way she scrambled to catch up with college classmates who had focused on the sciences. It reflected a singular determination that would manifest itself again when she became a medical researcher pursuing elusive answers in the lab.

  After completing medical school at Case Western Reserve Medical School in Cleveland, she initially specialized in internal medicine, but sometime during her residency at Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital, McKee fell in love with studying and treating the brain. Her specialty became neurology.2 She eventually switched to neuropathology, a focus that surprised no one who knew her penchant for art. It is a highly visual field, a specialty in which McKee studies the patterns of proteins and abnormalities in the brain.3 Only an artist turned scientist like McKee would gaze at a specimen under her microscope and proclaim that it showed a “beautiful pathology.”

  Her first experiences with studying tau protein were in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, first as director of Boston University’s Alzheimer’s Disease Center and then as director of brain banks for the Framingham Heart Study and the Centenarian Study. It was while she was in those roles that she had happened upon the cases of two former boxers, one in 2003 and a second in 2005, who had initially been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Both exhibited a buildup of tau protein quite unlike what was found in that disease. Hearing about the intriguing case of former Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster by a then-unknown doctor, Bennet Omalu, piqued her interest still more. Omalu named the new disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. It was marked by the same kind of buildup of tau McKee had seen in the boxers.4 What was going on in the brains of those old fighters, that NFL superstar, she wondered? Her scientific curiosity and her reputation as a researcher would land her squarely in the middle of the hunt to find an answer.

  In 2008, when Owen Thomas and his friends were sophomores headed for their junior year at Penn, McKee became the director of Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy. She’d been suggested for the job by Dr. Robert Stern, a Boston University professor of neurology and neurosurgery who had worked with her on the university’s Alzheimer’s disease research. In forming the center, its cofounders—Chris Nowinski, PhD, and Dr. Robert Cantu—had parted ways with Dr. Bennet Omalu, deeming him too difficult a collaborator. They needed another researcher for their center, and McKee was the choice. Nowinski began to collect the brains of former athletes for her research at the center. On the surface, the work of gathering brains sounded ghoulish, like a bad horror movie. But finding donors who agreed to give their brains after death to study CTE was critical to advancing research and advocacy efforts. Without collecting the brains of former athletes, research about the disease would advance only glacially.

  The first brain he got her was that of John Grimsley, an ex-linebacker for the Houston Oilers. McKee found his brain was riddled with CTE—a discovery that astonished her and sent her flying to share the news with her brother Chuck, the former football player. That case, and the ones that followed, confirmed a pattern: men who played football and suffered jarring hits and concussions were getting a debilitating neurodegenerative disease that was changing their personalities, destroying memory, spawning impulsivity, sending some into spiraling depression, and leading to early death.5

  McKee’s first public appearance as the face of CTE research was at the press conference Nowinski staged at the 2009 Super Bowl. There, she announced that CTE had been found in the brain of Tom McHale, a former Tampa Bay Buccaneer who played nine years in the NFL. McHale was only forty-five at the time of his death, she told reporters, but he had a brain like that of an elderly boxer. The announcement caused barely a ripple, swallowed up by the hoopla of the Super Bowl. But Nowinski, McKee, and company would soon be called to meet with the NFL.6

  The NFL and its representatives were slow, even dilatory, about giving credence to the research about CTE. If you ask McKee, she’d say the organization had been especially sluggish about according credibility to a woman. It was widely reported that she felt the league was “dismissive” of her work at a predominately male meeting held at league headquarters on May 19, 2009, that included Nowinski and Daniel Perl, director of the US Department of Defense’s Center for Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine, where the focus is on brain trauma among combat veterans.7

  In those early days of CTE research, McKee kept two facets of her life in precarious balance. Her lifelong lo
ve of football and her research into the damaged brains of former football players coexisted. She still felt a strong affinity for the game that was part of her family—so much so that she was disappointed when her only son, Graham, chose to play soccer over football. Her respect for the sport and the athletes who played it helped to fuel her determination to find answers about the brain trauma found in some of its stars. But on Sundays, she still watched the Green Bay Packers, still kept a bobblehead of Packers quarterback Brett Favre in her office.8

  Although Owen continued to excel athletically, the academic success that he had achieved at Parkland High School often eluded him at Penn. What once had come easily now required significantly greater effort. Many in Parkland actually had grade point averages higher than 4.0 because grades earned in Advanced Placement and honors classes were “weighted,” carrying more points when calculating averages, to signify it was a more difficult class. It was a practice adopted by many school districts catering to a generation known as millennials who researchers have characterized as feeling a sense of entitlement.9 Acknowledged and rewarded just for showing up during their formative years—when earning awards for participation instead of achievement became standard—the generation supported a system that awarded them special grades for doing more difficult work. It was a system that could also lead to disappointment.

  An Ivy League school like Penn is filled with students who were academic superstars in high school. Like Owen, Jake Peterson experienced the letdown of being just another good student among many. “To be honest, it was hard for me at Penn, to come in and always have been the top student. Then you come in, and everyone’s smarter,” Jake said. He noted that students not involved in athletics would have additional hours to study.

  Like Jake, Owen struggled when he entered college. When his high school friends compared notes about their first semesters at their respective schools, they remembered he complained about a math class. “I just can’t get it,” Owen said. It was a surprising statement from the friend they considered the most academically gifted in their crowd. His father, given permission to access Owen’s account for financial aid paperwork, saw that the former straight-A student had earned a D in calculus.