His Life Filled with 33 Years Triumphs, Trials
Feb. 8, 2000
People wander in and out of Jackson Memorial Hospital now, some crying, some laughing, some trying hard to look brave. Newcomers drift through the halls aimlessly. Regulars walk with purpose, like police officers on the beat. A few hours have pushed by since Derrick Thomas died so suddenly. Night falls. Rain drizzles. The hospital goes on. The hospital always goes on.
Derrick Thomas was just one man in this gigantic assembly of hospital buildings. Just one story. In the Jackson Memorial children's ward -- the kind of wing that Derrick so often visited during his life -- little kids deal with the most terrible kinds of pain, cancer, leukemia, paralysis.
Across a half-dozen halls, across parking lots, old people cling to their last days, coughing, aching, breathing hard. Babies are born. People die young. They all have stories.
Derrick Thomas was just one story. He grew up in this city, Miami, an angry kid who never understood exactly why his father did not come home. He would wait for his father all of his childhood.
Every single day, he used to say, he had this faint feeling that Robert Thomas would just burst through the door suddenly. Even after Derrick had given up all real hope, even when he felt all this wildness running through him and he just had to let it out on the Miami streets, even when everything in his entire body told him that Robert Thomas would never come home, that faint feeling would never quite go away. Derrick Thomas stared at doors.
Air Force Capt. Robert Thomas had been some kind of man. He had been a brilliant student, a teacher for a short while, and, at last, a hero. He was the last man to eject from a burning plane as it fell over North Vietnam. Derrick Thomas last saw his father when he was 5. When Derrick was 13, his father's body was flown back from Vietnam.
Derrick Thomas held his father's spirit close after that.
And surely it was his father's spirit that helped push Derrick Thomas to become the man he became.
He played football fiercely. He lived fiercely. He partied hard and read books to children in the library on Saturday mornings. He rushed the quarterback with terrible and wonderful vengeance, and he carried the biggest presents to the sickest little kids at Christmas time.
He was like a big kid himself so much of the time, smiling hugely, mocking everybody around him. He was party coordinator at the Pro Bowl in Hawaii, the guy who yelled loudest at his teammates at halftime, the man who every year predicted he would set the NFL sack record.
He always played his best games closest to Veterans Day, after the jets roared over Arrowhead Stadium.
No, Robert Thomas was never too far away. You always wonder what drives a football player to bare his whole soul on the field, to fearlessly throw his body into the blur, to play with that kind of fury. For all those years, Derrick Thomas chased after quarterbacks relentlessly, he knocked footballs free, he turned around so many football games with just one bold play.
No matter what anyone thinks, you can't play football like that just for money or fame or ego or the cheers. There has to be something more.
"My father," Derrick Thomas said softly in those rare moments when you could get him to talk softly.
The sadness always strikes a little harder when an athlete dies young. It's hard to say exactly why. Maybe it's because Derrick Thomas made so many people in Kansas City feel a breath more alive, he made folks jump out of their chairs and scream at the television, he made Sundays a bit brighter. When he was at his best, his very best, Derrick Thomas always seemed to move just an instant before anybody else on the field. And it was thrilling. It's hard to imagine Derrick Thomas is gone. It's hard to understand.
The hospital goes on. An ambulance siren wails. A worried mother sobs softly in a waiting room. A doctor promises to do the best he can.
This is plain life and death, even for remarkable athletes, even for remarkable men, and the only comfort left is that Robert Thomas sits in heaven and waits for his oldest son to burst through the door.
from kc star
