Growing Up on the Gridiron

by Vicki Mayk

  After Seau’s death, Owen’s mother, Kathy, would write on the “RIP Owen Thomas” Facebook page, addressing her son, who had also been a linebacker: “I guess you and Junior Seau have something to talk about. I’m so sorry we failed to protect you both. We’re trying to do better for new kids coming along.”

  Her testimony—and Ann McKee’s—had advanced the debate about concussions and safety measures for young athletes among lawmakers. But federal legislation addressing the issue—introduced in April 2015 as the Protecting Student Athletes from Concussions Act—would be first referred to the House Committee for Education and the Workforce and then to the subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education where it would languish. A similar bill would be reintroduced in July 2017. Both the 2015 and 2017 versions would require states to enact measures compelling public schools to develop plans for concussion safety and management. Initiatives to improve education about preventing and diagnosing concussions would come from laws and initiatives on the state level and from rule changes and educational efforts advanced by organizations as diverse as the Centers for Disease Control, the NCAA, and youth football programs. The NFL made a show of announcing its own program to prevent head injuries in youth football. In August 2012, the league announced the Heads Up Football program, offered in conjunction with USA Football, an online coaching education site. An NFL statement announcing the program said it “emphasizes a smarter and safer way to play and teach youth football, including proper tackling and taking the head out of the game.”

  Perhaps the closest thing to an effective law related to concussions is the Zackery Lystedt Law, named for a thirteen-year-old football player in the Tahoma School District in Washington State who nearly died after being allowed to return to play too soon after sustaining a concussion. By 2017, all fifty states and Washington, DC, had enacted versions of the law, which requires coaches and other staff to have yearly training to recognize concussions, and requires athletes to leave games if they are suspected of having a concussion. The law also stipulates that a licensed healthcare professional must clear a player to return to play.11

  Research published in 2017 in the American Journal of Public Health showed the rate of recurrent concussions had decreased. But the same research study also showed that there has been no decrease in new concussions among young athletes. The finding would come as no surprise to many who love football. The helmet that gave silent testimony while Kathy Brearley spoke to Congress in 2010 reflected the reality for many young players: they were willing to risk injury for the glory of the game.

  In the years following Owen’s death, his friends gave their own testimony about his friendship on the “RIP Owen Thomas” Facebook page. Although tributes would come from many who knew him—and even from acquaintances he’d known casually—the page clearly became a place where men who were part of the brotherhood of football players at Parkland and at Penn came to remember the fallen warrior. Many would address Owen directly on the page, as if there were a direct line to Valhalla.

  Some wrote briefly, their few words still poignant. Penn housemate and Quakers teammate Adam Triglia would simply state, “Miss you, brother.”

  Andy Roth, whom Owen continued to recognize as part of the brotherhood even after he left Parkland football, shared a photo of his motorcycle, emblazoned with number 31—Owen’s Parkland jersey number. Andy would return to the page again each time the artwork on the cycle was refurbished. Another photo showed an elaborate tattoo with Owen’s initials, a heart, his high school football number 31, and angel wings stretching across the shoulder blades of former Parkland teammate Erik Rueda. “You will ALWAYS have my back FOREVER. . . . Miss you my brother I love you and miss you so much every day,” he wrote.

  For many, posting online was a way to process their grief—a space they would return to each April on the anniversary of his passing or on any day when he came to mind.

  Mike Fay used the page to talk about the end of one of the most significant friendships of his life. He wrote, “I was just watching some videos today of me and OT in the past and it just reminded me how much my life revolved around him . . . it was subtle, but Owen was a major crutch in my life . . . he helped me stand. I felt my heart ripped out when I watched his big smile all over my video camera but in the end all I could do was smile, look up, and say ‘we win.’ I’m not sure why those words came out of my mouth at that moment but I’m pretty sure it was because I finally realized that Owen’s death was not a defeat . . . it could not be a defeat, because we had already won long ago.”

  At the start of college football season, Owen’s older brother Matt came to the page to reminisce about watching the start of college football season together on the television in their parents’ basement. “Miss you, little brother,” he’d write.

  The passage of time slowed the number of notes posted, but it did not stop them. One social media post about Owen even went viral. Justin Reilly, the spoken-word poet from Penn’s Excelano Project who had performed a poem in Owen’s honor at the memorial on the Penn campus, posted a YouTube video of himself reciting it. A year after Owen’s death, he reported that the video had been seen on four continents and been shared from two thousand Facebook and Twitter accounts and three hundred blogs and websites, amassing six thousand unique views. Reilly wrote, “The popularity is a testament to the love that so many people have for you. You touched so many people in your short time on this earth.”

  CHAPTER 11

  DIVINE PROVIDENCE

  ON A SUMMER SUNDAY a year after Owen’s death, members of Union United Church of Christ arrived to find a camera crew hovering inside the red-carpeted vestibule of the church. A microphone on the end of a boom was ready to insinuate itself, giraffe-like, into the center aisle to capture the service.

  Filmmakers looking for a location might well choose the church. It has an almost storybook feel, an appearance that one associates with classic Americana. Its simple redbrick exterior is topped with a pristine white steeple. A bell chimes the hours throughout the day, the melodies overriding traffic noise as they float over surrounding fields and suburban housing developments. A grove flanking one of the church parking lots is dotted with mature trees. A playground sits adjacent to a refreshment stand. To the rear of the building, a graveyard stretches for several acres. Its tombstones, some dating back nearly a hundred years, chronicle the generations of families who attended Union UCC. Tom Thomas, having served as pastor for more than a quarter century, will be buried there with his family. That spring, Owen became the first in the family laid to rest.

  The crew, arriving on a summer weekend to shoot a documentary based on Chris Nowinski’s book, Head Games, was happy, no doubt, about the semi-rustic locale. Owen was not part of Nowinski’s book about concussions and young athletes. When it was published in 2006, he was still in high school playing for the Parkland Trojans. Indeed, the book predated Nowinski’s founding of the Concussion Legacy Foundation and the establishment of the CTE brain bank at Boston University. Owen’s death and subsequent CTE diagnosis had made his story an important segment in the documentary.

  Attendance was light the day the film crew arrived—typical of summer Sundays. Pastor Tom took his place in front of the assemblage in his white robe topped by a green stole and intoned the United Church of Christ’s signature greeting: “No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey—”

  “—you are welcome here,” the congregation responded.

  Tom began making the weekly announcements that typically preceded the service: news of fundraisers, the church picnic, the summer sale of vegetables benefiting local food banks. That morning, there was an unusual note: “You may notice a film crew here during worship today,” Pastor Tom said in his soft baritone. “They are here making a documentary that will include my son Owen.”

  When the documentary Head Games was eventually released in 2012, members of Union United Church of Christ saw a scene that captured that typical Sunday mornin
g. A long shot showed the congregation singing the opening hymn before cutting to organist Blake Hoppes at the keyboard. There was a close-up of the mural of Christ being taken down from the cross that dominates the altar. Finally, there was a close-up of Tom Thomas in profile, his words that Sunday morning proving to be the perfect transition to Owen’s story.

  “There is a concept of divine providence,” Pastor Tom said to the congregation. “Some of us deal with disease, illness, hardship, or heartache. We grieve the loss of those we have loved.”

  As Tom spoke, the visual transitioned to a framed triptych of photos of Owen that hangs in the Thomases’ house. In them, he is forever the young man with silky, shoulder-length red hair and piercing blue eyes. He is forever no older than twenty-one.

  The documentary recounts his athletic career, death, and subsequent CTE diagnosis in a ten-minute segment. It includes interviews with his parents, his brother Morgan, Parkland High School’s athletics director Jeffrey Geisel, and University of Pennsylvania athletic trainer Eric Laudano. Perhaps the most striking utterance in the documentary comes from Morgan, who says, “Owen and I were similar in this aspect: If we did have a live head ringer, we would not go report that to the trainer. We would just shake it off and go back in there and play.”

  Interviewed in the film, awarding-winning journalist Alan Schwarz, a University of Pennsylvania alumnus who is credited with exposing the NFL’s cover-up of head injuries, all but shouts at the camera as he stresses the importance of Owen’s role in the unfolding story of concussions in sports.

  “The Owen Thomas finding is not significant as it related to the cause of death,” Schwarz says, his energy on camera palpable. “He could have died in a car accident and the significance of the finding would have been exactly the same. It would have been important to recognize, ‘Holy Cow! CTE can actually begin before someone reaches the National Football League!’”

  Schwarz’s comment underscores how Owen’s CTE diagnosis resonated in his circle of friends—the brotherhood of football boys with whom he’d played the game. The idea that football, the activity central to their lives, could have played a part in his death, was unfathomable. The unspoken question, seldom articulated, among all of them: “Could I have it too?”

  John Zaccaro, who had been a linebacker with Owen on the Parkland Trojans, struggled to reconcile memories of the jarring impacts he himself had felt on the field with the thought that the same type of collisions may have contributed to his friend’s death. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy had gone from being something that happened to a few old, dead pros in the NFL to a disease that had touched him in the most personal way. A handsome young man with short dark hair and liquid-brown eyes, John appeared suddenly older and a shadow fell across his face. He knew what it meant to “have your bell rung,” the classic phrase players used to describe the aftermath of a hard hit.

  “I mean, there were times when I definitely saw stars and been hit pretty hard. . . . You kind of feel like you’re drunk. You kind of do. You feel like you don’t know what the hell’s going on. You’re stumbling around out there—you’re like, ‘What?’” John deliberately slurs the last word, imitating the speech of someone who is inebriated. “It’s different when you get your bell rung real good, but [it’s not a concussion]. You quickly see a couple of little stars, and you shake it off. It’s hard to explain. Maybe that could be just as bad. I don’t know.”

  John shook his head, his eyes troubled.

  “I’m not saying that it had nothing to do with [Owen’s death]. I’m just saying.” He paused, and when he spoke again, his bewilderment was apparent. “It was just such a shocker to us. Such a surprise to us. He was such a beast at football. How could he die from football? He was so good at it. How could it turn into that? He was extremely, extremely smart so . . . I don’t know. He wouldn’t be purposely leading with his head. He was smart in every aspect of his life. He was smart about the way he used his body. Know what I mean? He was smart about not taking unnecessary hits. Not leading with the top of his head. . . . It’s just hard to believe.”

  Jamie Pagliaro, who’d played softball and football with Owen from elementary through high school, returned to play during his senior year at William & Mary. He was team captain, just as Owen would have been at Penn if he had lived. “I tried to do what he did at Parkland. And what I know he would have done at Penn that last year,” Pags said. “Be the voice and let them know that you are going to follow them into battle.” He paused. “I dedicated that year to Owen.”

  Owen became a kind of guardian angel over Pags’s last season of play, a spirit he called upon for help. “I remember we were playing the number one team in the nation, Delaware, and their kicker comes up to kick the field goal. We were up by two, my buddy was looking at me and said, ‘We need to block arms.’ I said, ‘Hold on,’ and I said, ‘Owen, please make him miss this field goal.’ He kicked it and missed it. We won the game.”

  Jamie grinned and suddenly, his face softened.

  “I felt him. He was always there with me.”

  Marc Quilling entered his senior year at Lafayette College wearing a black rubber wristband with red letters: RIP Owen Thomas. He’d had the bands made as part of a fundraiser to support erecting a special tombstone for Owen. He was wearing it when he found himself playing for the Lafayette Leopards at the Penn Quakers 2010 home opener. Although he was not named starting quarterback for his last college season, an injury to the starter in the Leopards’ first game placed Marc in the lineup against Penn. It meant he’d be quarterback at a game where the opposing team would remember his dead friend with a moment of silence before the kickoff at Franklin Field.

  “The week leading up to the game, I tried to mentally prepare myself, knowing they would do something to honor him—even talking with my head coach and position coach one-on-one in their offices,” Marc said. “Before the game, emotions were high and they did a video tribute and moment of silence during which I couldn’t really hold it together.”

  He paused, his voice almost hoarse with sadness. “I can honestly say that was the only game of my life when I wasn’t mentally all in. There were too many thoughts and emotions running through my head. I was wishing I was playing against my best friend, with his red hair hanging out of the back of his helmet. I ended up playing my worst game ever, but it was also against an extremely strong, motivated team,” Marc said. Suddenly, his tone is bemused. “Thinking back, if he was there, it probably would’ve been an even worse game for me, due to him trash talking me and trying to take off my head. I would’ve never heard the end of it.”

  It was an equally challenging game for the Quakers. An ESPN crew had prepared a segment about the team honoring their late teammate, number 40, Owen Thomas. The piece, airing on Saturday morning before the Lafayette game, included interviews with team members, coaches, and Owen’s father, Tom. In his on-camera interview, Tom said haltingly, “I pray for the strength to be a survivor.” The segment provided an extra push for a team that had already decided to dedicate its season to Owen and to its eighty-five-year-old “spirit coach” Dan “Lake” Staffierri, the team’s unofficial cheerleader for decades. The two had died within weeks of each other. At that first game, the Quakers scored a 19–14 victory over the Leopards.

  In the postgame press conference after the season opener, recorded by Penn’s student newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, a woman—never seen on camera—identified herself as a French reporter and asked Coach Al Bagnoli about the announcement of Owen’s CTE diagnosis. The announcement had come just five days before the game. Chuckling slightly, Bagnoli said, “None of us knew that they had requested his brain to be tested. So when it came out, we were caught a little off guard. Didn’t have much notice in terms of trying to notify our kids and everything.” Noting that the announcement came on a Monday, the team’s day off, Bagnoli said they had scrambled to notify the players using email and text messaging. “Obviously, it’s something we need to pay attention to but I
don’t think it affects the way we play or the way we practice.”1

  The off-camera reporter next questioned the two players sitting with Bagnoli, senior cornerback Jon Saelinger and sophomore quarterback Billy Ragone. “And you guys: are you afraid? Do you think of that?” she said in her heavy Gallic accent. Saelinger responded first. “I heard the news and I don’t really think about it when I’m on the field. My mom heard about it and said something to me and was concerned. I’ve played football most of my life and it’s not something you can really think about when you’re out there,” he said.

  The camera panned to Ragone. “It was shocking news to everyone that that was kind of a factor in what had happened to Owen but, just like Jon said, we’ve been playing this game since we were young. It’s second nature now and once you step on the field, nothing else enters your mind,” Ragone said.2

  Behind the scenes, not all of the Quakers were as calm in the aftermath of their friend’s death. None were more profoundly affected than the roommates from Baltimore Avenue, who had moved to a new house for their senior year—without Owen. Dave Macknet found the fall 2010 football season like no other in more than a decade playing the game. “I started playing when I was eight,” Dave said. “The scariest time I ever had playing football was the season after Owen passed away. Justin [Cosgrove] really struggled with this too. The fact Owen had this diagnosis of CTE made you question every hit you take, every hit you make. I was able to push that aside eventually but I had to take some time off during practice just to think about it.”