Finally, Hall of Fame Arrives for Derrick Thomas
Aug. 1, 2009
Before she leaves the cemetery, Edith Morgan needs to do one thing. The ritual has been the same for almost a decade. Hard to believe it has been that long.
She stands in front of her son’s grave, at the bottom corner of an open-air mausoleum in South Florida. Sometimes she speaks to him, sharing stories about holidays and family business and his children. But always, before she leaves, Edith touches the oval photograph of Derrick Thomas, No. 58 for the Kansas City Chiefs.
In the photo, he’s young and chiseled in his Chiefs jersey, arms reaching to the sky — eternally in his prime.
“Always a good kid,” Edith mumbles, folding a wisp of her hair behind one ear. “I’m so proud to be his mom.”
A midsummer breeze flows through Dade South Memorial Park, weaved into the hum of two busy highways in the distance. Visits have gotten a little easier since Derrick died nine years ago, two weeks after his SUV touched ice and skidded off Interstate 435 in Kansas City. But standing here still hurts.
Edith’s son was supposed to be in broadcasting or maybe politics. By now, he would be enjoying his retirement from the brutal hits on the field, maybe watching his kids play football. Maybe he would even have all the answers in his father’s death.
He should be here, she thinks, especially this week. Instead, Derrion Thomas will stand in his dad’s place Saturday when Derrick is inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.
His enshrinement has been a long-awaited blessing for family members, but in many ways, it also heightens their pain. Edith wants people around her when she relives the moments that defined her son’s career and life. She says she’ll need a lot of shoulders to cry on. She has mailed 1,400 invitations.
“Just so many stories,” she says, reaching a finger out to caress his photo.
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Twenty miles south of downtown Miami, in a neighborhood that shows its teeth after sunset, a group passes the time on the West Perrine street corner known as the Crossroads.
It is December 1972.
Past a collection of idlers sprints a 5-year-old boy who can’t sit still. He runs toward West Perrine Park, where he’ll spend the afternoon outrunning boys twice his age, then hurries toward his grandmother’s home on Southwest 172nd Street, long enough to grab a bite, blink his eyes, and …
“Bebe,” his mother says, calling Derrick by his nickname. “Slow down for a minute.”
She has something to tell him: another story about his father.
She had told him so many already. Like how Edith Morgan and Robert Thomas had met in high school and fallen in love. Robert was a math whiz, never tripping over algebra the way Edith had. She playfully called him “mathematician,” and he agreed to tutor her. They were dating when Edith became pregnant with Derrick. Later, they also had a girl.
But when Robert went to college in Tennessee, he met another woman and married her. Edith was left with two children and little support.
After college, Robert joined the Air Force and shipped off to Vietnam as a pilot. He wrote letters to Edith, asking about Derrick and Yolanda, his little sister. Young Derrick loved those stories. It made him feel closer to his dad, even if they didn’t see each other often.
In the winter of 1972, there is one story left to tell.
Robert had been on his way home a week before Christmas. Even though a cease-fire had been called, Robert’s B-52 was shot down by a missile north of Hanoi.
Your dad is gone, Edith tells Derrick. Military officials list Robert as missing in action, but odds are that he is dead. They just can’t be certain.
“I didn’t know then how much of an impact it had on him,” Edith says now. “It was something he could never really accept.”
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“Star,” the voice whispers into the telephone. “You asleep?”
Lee Lawrence rubs his eyes and sits up in bed. Only Derrick calls him “Star.” Lawrence grunts into the phone, and Derrick tells his friend, close since childhood and now in their teens, that he is coming over. It is 3 a.m.
Derrick has a television in the trunk of his Chevy Nova. He thinks it would be perfect for Lawrence’s bedroom.
“But,” Lawrence said, “where did you …?”
In the years after his father’s death, Derrick struggles to find his identity. He races BMX bicycles, blazes on the roller-skating rink and takes up track. But his real talent is stealing. Edith buys Derrick a moped, but he’s the only boy in West Perrine with wheels. So he goes, friend by friend, stealing mopeds so they all can travel in style. One day another friend asks Derrick to get him a car. No problem, Derrick says.
“What he had,” Lawrence says now, “you had. If you came and asked for it, he would get it. It didn’t matter what it was.”
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Two things happen the night South Miami High plays Killian Senior High during Derrick’s senior year. The first is that his teammates learn he can call his own shots.
A Killian player keeps jawing with Derrick. Something about a girl. Derrick gets sick of it and turns to Lawrence, a teammate, and says the chatter is about to stop.
“I knew when he was serious,” Lawrence says.
The ball goes up, and Derrick locks onto the boy. The loud-mouthed kid had flipped a switch inside Derrick. Now he has to be carried away on a stretcher.
“If he said he was going to do it,” Lawrence says, “it got done.”
The other thing that happens is that Derrick realizes football can take him places. The sport would lead him to the hallowed grounds of the University of Alabama and to the NFL. It also gives him an outlet instead of stealing. His mother says Derrick just wants attention. He learns that night against Killian that there are other ways to get it.
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They can hear him all over the casino. Derrick and his family are in Las Vegas for the 1989 NFL draft. He had been a star at Alabama. Now he is the fourth overall pick. He isn’t shy about celebrating.
The call comes from Chiefs president Carl Peterson. Kansas City had put Derrick through a killer workout in Tuscaloosa. He had left an impression.
“Players falling by the wayside, throwing up,” Peterson says now. “He kept saying, ‘What else can I do for you?’ ”
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Derrick hasn’t called, and that isn’t like him. It’s Mother’s Day in the early 1990s. Edith sits in a seafood restaurant near Miami and jumps when her phone rings.
It’s Derrick. He asks where she is. Thirty minutes later, Derrick’s friend Michael Tellis tells Edith she is needed outside. She had supported her children by working as a nurse, sometimes four consecutive eight-hour shifts at three hospitals. Money was always tight, and Derrick vowed that he would someday repay his mother’s sacrifices.
Edith walks out to the parking lot and sees Derrick leaning against a beige Cadillac DeVille with a green and gold bow on the hood. He had bought it for her in Alabama, driving it to South Florida with the metal dealership tag still attached.
“I’m running up and down,” Edith says now. “Derrick’s just standing there on the side, and he’s got that smile.”
He doesn’t have to say a thing.
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He dresses quickly and leaves the locker room. Derrick wants to be alone. His family is confused. Didn’t he just have another memorable game? What was there to be upset about?
“You don’t understand,” he tells them. “I lost the game.”
Derrick had set an NFL record with seven sacks in a 1990 game against Seattle. But he’d missed the most important one. He was a fingertip from sacking Dave Krieg in the fourth quarter, but Krieg was faster, completing the winning touchdown pass. Derrick blamed himself.
“The only one he’d talk about,” Edith says now, “was the one he missed.”
But games like that would send Derrick to his second Pro Bowl, the NFL’s all-star game in Honolulu. That’s good news for Derrick, but the honor is not all he’s interested in. Derrick has heard that at Pearl Harbor, there’s a memorial to American airmen lost in Vietnam. Robert Thomas was declared dead in 1979, but there was no funeral or memorial service in Florida because Robert’s remains hadn’t been found. Derrick never had a chance to say goodbye or turn that page in his life. Now, Derrick hears that his father’s bones might be in Hawaii. Finally, he thinks, closure.
He becomes determined to learn every detail of his father’s death. He questions other soldiers and researches wartime events similar to the one that killed Robert. What could have really happened to his dad? What might his final moments have been like?
“A ten-thousand-question guy,” says Lamonte Winston, the Chiefs’ longtime player development director. “Derrick was on a mission. He was always searching.”
Sometimes his interest swings toward obsession. Derrick refuses to attend funerals or complete his last will and testament, fearing it will somehow hasten his own death.
He arrives in Honolulu and attends the memorial. He calls his mother, saying his father died a hero. But he tells her that he’s not yet ready to move on.
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The superintendent’s office. That’s what Peterson calls his office, where Derrick is summoned if his vices take too strong a hold. No, the linebacker is far from perfect. He likes women and late nights, fathering seven children with five women. Sometimes going to see the principal, coach Marty Schottenheimer, isn’t enough.
Peterson calls Derrick to his office occasionally, and other times the kid just shows up. Peterson is tough with Derrick, telling him the future is a fragile thing.
“He was pretty rough,” Peterson says.
They spend hours in that office. Not talking football, but about life and what lies ahead. Derrick says he wants to leave his mark somehow on Kansas City. Peterson tells him that if he truly wants to be immortal, he must find a way to tighten his grip on the community. He should vow that if a child didn’t have a father figure, Derrick would represent that missing piece.
Sometimes, they talk about the missing pieces in their own lives.
“Two guys, stars in their own right,” Winston says. “Both of them walking around with some bit of emptiness.”
Peterson has a daughter, but he admits now that he’d always wanted a son, too. For kicks, Derrick starts calling Peterson “father,” a joke that sticks because his Chiefs teammates notice how much time he spends with Peterson. But it feels right.
The years pass, and Derrick keeps showing up. Peterson starts calling Derrick something, too.
“The son I never had,” Peterson says.
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Derrick nicknames the kid “Justice” because all Rahman McGill talks about is someday being a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. He is in the fifth grade.
Derrick sees something in Rahman. Something familiar. The kid barely knows his father but seems determined to make his way in the world. Derrick had started the Third and Long Foundation in the early 1990s, an organization that offers guidance to children from unstable homes. Rahman has been accepted, and he and Derrick become close. When Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas visits Kansas City, Derrick knows he has to introduce the boy.
“We’ve got to do it for the ‘justice,’ ” Derrick’s attorney and friend, Kevin Regan, recalls the linebacker saying.
Rahman wears a white shirt and tie. Derrick approaches the judge with the boy. Rahman takes it from there.
“Justice Thomas,” he says, “I’m going to be sitting next to you one day.”
The judge looks at Derrick, and all the men can do is smile.
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Derrick sits at an outdoor table in a restaurant on South Beach, debating literature with Miriam Williams, an English teacher and mentor he’d met in middle school.
He explains his passion — the truth about what happened to his father — and the books he’s reading to connect with him. He’d spent years visiting military bases and debating history. Now he spends his free time scouring books about Vietnam and the assassination of President John Kennedy. That was a puzzle, too, and it gives Derrick comfort that others are out there trying to resolve unanswerable questions.
Derrick reads as much as he can, and when words aren’t enough, he conducts his own investigation. He interviews witnesses from the Kennedy murder and the relatives of key players in the case. He asks them what they saw, how they felt, where they went for answers.
“He thought that if he could solve that mystery,” Williams says now, “he could solve the mystery of his dad.”
That night, Williams listens closely to her former student discussing his passion and his work. His purpose. Football barely comes up.
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A 1999 Chevrolet Suburban charges west on I-435 in Kansas City, the three men inside trying to win a race to the airport against a winter storm. It’s Jan. 23, 2000. No one is wearing a seat belt.
Derrick and his friend Michael Tellis have sideline passes to the NFC championship game in St. Louis. They want to make it by the second half. Then Derrick sees something.
“Oh, s---,” Tellis says.
There’s a wall of snow and ice shrouding the highway a half-mile up. The man in the back, another friend named John Hagebusch, reaches for his seat belt.
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The men surrounding him are just glad to see Derrick smiling, out of the hospital room he has grown to loathe, and close to the friends he loves like kin. It has been nearly two weeks since the accident. Derrick’s SUV had slipped on ice, and as he tried to regain control, the Suburban slid off the road and rolled. Derrick had been thrown from the car and paralyzed from the chest down. Tellis was ejected, too, and died at the scene. Hagebusch suffered minor injuries.
But Derrick is looking toward the future. He has been transferred to a hospital in South Florida. He vows to walk again, and he convinces doctors that he’s recovered enough for a weekend pass. He wants to enjoy life again. Derrick invites nearly a dozen of his closest friends to join him at a Miami steakhouse on a Saturday night in early February.
“He was in his element,” says Winston, the Chiefs player development man who attended the dinner. “Creating a moment for everybody.”
They sit for hours, laughing and telling old stories. Winston says he believes Derrick just wanted to see people look at him without pity for the first time in weeks.
Afterward, Derrick has a surprise for the group. He wants to show them a place they’d never seen. Everyone piles into Derrick’s RV. Destination: West Perrine. He’d been too ashamed of the poverty and crime to invite many outsiders for a peek behind the curtain. He shows the group 172nd Street, where his family lived. The park where he’d become an athlete. The grocery store and the Crossroads. And his dad’s old house.
“Why was he doing all this?” Winston remembers wondering. “He was so intent. It’s almost like he knew. He knew, man.”
Derrick returns to Jackson Memorial to begin rehab. He spends his free time making business calls and watching a Christian television network, something his mother had never known him to do.
“Getting closer to the Lord,” Edith says now.
On the Tuesday after his dinner with friends, Edith and a nurse are moving Derrick from his bed to a wheelchair. As a former nurse, Edith has done this dozens of times. The women lift the 250-pound man, easing him toward the chair. Derrick says he doesn’t feel well. Edith looks at her son, and his eyes roll back.
Edith doesn’t remember much about what happened next, other than the panic. An hour passes, then two. Derrick’s family and friends are confined to a waiting room. Then a doctor walks in. There had been a blockage in Derrick’s heart. He says they did all they could.
“In the nursing profession for 35 years,” Edith says, “and I couldn’t do anything to save him. My son died in my arms.”
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It had been their backdrop so many times. Now Peterson is looking through his fourth-floor window, toward the east end zone at Arrowhead. He sees the canopy of a white tent, thousands of mourners filing through to say goodbye to Derrick Thomas.
“A cold day,” Peterson says.
Peterson had believed Derrick would recover from the accident. A few days before Derrick died, Peterson and Chiefs doctor Jon Browne had toasted the 33-year-old’s progress during the flight back from Miami. Then Peterson got the call.
“You don’t want to believe it,” he says. “You don’t want to hear it.”
Peterson watches as a grieving city empties itself into Arrowhead. He watches as the mementos pile up in the end zone, people laughing so they don’t have to cry anymore. At 3:30 that afternoon, a B-52 military jet flies over Arrowhead — the same kind of plane that Derrick’s father flew in Vietnam. Everyone says Derrick would’ve liked that.
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Edith says one last prayer before entering the Tampa Convention Center. It’s the day before the 2009 Super Bowl, the day the newest Hall of Fame class is announced. The hall’s director, Steve Perry, is announcing the names. Edith has her doubts, so much disappointment in the past. But she dresses nice anyway.
Perry takes the podium and begins.
“Bob Hayes … ”
Six times. That’s how many of these mornings Edith has gotten up with a brick in her gut. Derrick was a finalist five previous times, each year falling short.
“… Randall McDaniel … ”
These things had become almost too much. She would fake a smile as the names were read. The years passed. No Derrick.
“… Bruce Smith … ”
One more. This would be her last of these gatherings. The 2007 announcement in Miami had crushed her dream. Derrick making the cut in his hometown would have been poetic. His name again went unspoken.
Edith leans into the shoulder of her friend Pat Terrell, sighing as Perry lists the names of other mothers’ sons. Then he says it:
“ … Derrick Thomas.”
Edith hears the name but has to ask someone else. Did he just …? She jumps from her chair. She hears Chiefs chairman Clark Hunt screaming from across the room. It is done. Derrick had died young, but now he’ll be remembered as one of football’s immortals. Amid all the commotion, Edith hears her cell phone ring. It’s Carl. She holds the phone to her ear, pressing it close to hear the voice cracking through.
“Our son,” Peterson says. “He made it.”
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Edith walks down her driveway, shielding her eyes from the South Florida sun. There are three cars parked here. The beige Cadillac hasn’t moved in a long time. It needs a new motor.
Edith can’t bear to part with it, and she admits she’ll probably never have that new motor installed. She just likes to keep it close, the rusted Alabama dealer tag and two decades of significance still attached.
“The last of the memories,” she says.
She’d like to say that things have gotten easier. But for all of the superhuman stories, Derrick left behind seven very real responsibilities. When he died, another generation of Thomas children was left to grow up fatherless. Derrick never signed a will, and Edith says the legal process of dividing her son’s estate into seven equal shares was a long and frustrating ordeal. Now, at least, Edith is able to joke about it.
“I have to do all the right things so I can make it to heaven and see him again,” she says. “So I can kill him all over.”
There are trust funds for Burgundie, Derrick Jr., Derrion, Derrius, Robert, Micayla and Alexa. Upon turning 18, Edith says, “they’ll be set for life.”
Burgundie and Derrion, who will walk on to the football team at the University of Missouri, are Derrick’s only children who are at least 18. One is in high school, two in junior high, and two more in elementary school.
Derrius is 12, and he was leaving football practice last week when he asked his mother how different his life would have been if his dad were alive. His mother, Terri Kendall, has raised her only son by answering the tough questions.
“Very different, I’m sure,” Kendall says. “There was never any question that he wasn’t going to be around.”
Kendall raises Derrius alone, and his only father figure is Kendall’s stepdad. She says she lives a modest life in Atlanta working for Delta Air Lines, and she admits that, for the first year after Derrick’s death, she was angry that he left her to care for Derrius on her own.
Another mother, who asks that she not be identified, says life has been very difficult for her family.
For her part as the grandmother, Edith laments that a number of Derrick’s kids were too young when he died to remember their father now.
“Only what they’ve read,” she says, taking a deep breath. “That’s tough.”
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Rahman McGill isn’t Derrick’s son, but he is one of his kids.
The lunch crowd at a Kansas City restaurant is gone, and the dining room is quiet. The 23-year-old man eases toward the exit. His eyes scan the wall’s framed photographs, decades of history and the famous patrons who have eaten here. Pictures of success and power, of talent and influence.
McGill stops when he reaches the 8-by-10 of Derrick Thomas at a table surrounded by children.
“There he is,” McGill says, smiling.
Rahman the fifth-grader has become McGill the man, the graduate student at Alabama State, the kid who has kept in touch with Clarence Thomas after all these years. Eleven years ago, the justice promised McGill a clerkship when he gets his law degree. McGill hasn’t let him forget it. McGill says he wants to go to Harvard Law School. Nothing is impossible. Derrick taught him that.
“All I needed was a push,” he says, “to get to where I want to be.”
McGill isn’t the only success. There are hundreds of Derrick Thomas kids — proof that, nine years after his death, his influence remains.
“It’s rare that somebody touches so many lives,” McGill says, moving toward the door. “So many lives. In this society, you need people like that. People pass away all the time. But some people you have to keep alive.”
from Kansas City.com
