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Dungy Will Spread Legacy of Thomas
Feb. 10, 2000
Someday, a few tomorrows from now, the father will move silently among the statues. He will rest his hands on the shoulders of his sons, and he will talk of men and memories that should have lasted longer.
Someday, on the other side of sadness, he will come upon a particular bust in the Pro Football Hall of Fame and something will catch in his throat. And then Tony Dungy will turn to his sons, James and Eric, and he will tell them of Derrick Thomas.
Dungy knew Thomas. Dungy was an defensive assistant in Kansas City the year Thomas arrived, and they shared a field for three seasons. Dungy saw the speed, the relentlessness, the smile. He saw the way Thomas came around a corner, too determined to stop, too fast even to hold. Few men ever chased a quarterback the way Derrick Thomas did, and few ever caught one as often.
Dungy will talk to his sons of the way Thomas played, the way he smiled and the way he left too soon. He will talk of a man's pride and his performance. He will talk of tragedy, of a father and son who both felt it. He will talk about the way the news of Thomas' death hit him on a Tuesday morning when a co-worker leaned into his office to break the news to him.
"This was Derrick Thomas," Dungy will say. "And you should know about him."
How do you measure a man? How do you remember him? By the smiles he brought or by the sorrow he left? By where he came from or by where he ended up? By the things he did on a field or the things he did away from it? However you measure Derrick Thomas, the sting is going to last for a while.
The lie of television is that it makes us believe we know the athletes who perform on it. That is why it is so hard for all of us to absorb the second numbing piece of news regarding Thomas in the past few weeks. Just when we were getting over the shock of possibly seeing him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, we are hit with his death Tuesday from cardiac arrest.
If Thomas' paralysis hit you as unfair, the news of his death was just plain cruel. For two weeks we had heard what a long road it was going to be for him, and it turns out the road wasn't long enough. He is gone now, along with that smile of his and the ones he created. Yes, he should have been wearing his seat belt. Of course he should have. But this?
The news of Thomas' death struck Dungy hard. He had planned to travel to Miami this week to see Thomas, to smile and swap old stories.
"I'll tell my kids what a tremendous player he was," Dungy said softly. "Not only that, but what a proud guy he was. He was a fun-loving guy who enjoyed the game. He knew what kind of talent he had. He always felt like he was going to take over a game and dominate it."
For instance, there was the playoff game against the Raiders in Thomas' third season, when he was going to make his statement to the country. Thomas had a couple of big plays early, but then his heartbeat accelerated, and Thomas had to be rushed to the hospital. Could that incident have been an omen of what happened Tuesday? Who knows?
Dungy also will tell the story of Thomas and Thomas' father, a story that bears repeating with Derrick's passing. He was 5 years old when Robert Thomas, a co-pilot on a B-52, was shot down in Vietnam in something called "Operation Linebacker." Seven years later, the government declared Robert dead. Derrick never accepted it. He visited with men who survived the mission, men who told him his father had gotten out of the airplane in time. He prefered his father's medals to trophies he had won. In the face of odds and logic, he prefered to believe that someday, his father would walk out of the stands and embrace him.
"When I think of him, I'll think of the feelings he had for his father," Dungy said. "He always thought what his father did was something special. He wanted to be viewed in the same way, as someone who went a little bit above the call of duty. I'll always remember the Veterans Day game (against Seattle in 1990), and when the planes flew over, you knew he'd have a special day."
Thomas ended up with seven sacks that day, a record. And from that point on, no one ever played the Chiefs without spending a good portion of the week trying to figure out how to keep Thomas from beating them by himself.
He had that great first step, a sprinter's step, and that knack for causing a fumble even as he plowed into the quarterback. The Kansas City strip, they called it. Thomas became the image of Kansas City across the league, this fierce linebacker who made big plays again and again. In 11 seasons he had 126.5 of them. Nine times he made the Pro Bowl. If you took a picture of John Elway in Kansas City, odds are Thomas was draped over him.
And so we piece together our memories of him, the images filling up a blank canvas until we can measure who he was and what we have lost.
Oh, he wasn't perfect. There was the Monday night meltdown against Shannon Sharpe and the Chiefs, for instance. But Thomas also had a good enough heart to win the NFL's top two awards for community work (the '93 NFL Man of the Year Award and the '95 Whizzer White Award.) There were those who suggested he could have played better against the run. But the Chiefs had gone to one playoff game in 17 seasons before Thomas arrived, then to seven appearances in nine years after he arrived.
We lost the football player two weeks ago. We lost the man Tuesday. We are less without him than we were with him. And what better way can a man be remembered than that? "A light went out," is the way Chiefs president Carl Peterson puts it, and that sums it up pretty well.
And so we tell our stories of the guy who talked fast and smiled big, who treated the game of football as if it were a party in his back yard.
Someday, when the world makes more sense, Dungy will move through the Hall of Fame with his sons, and he will talk of Derrick Thomas. He will talk of the things that made him special, that made his passing seem so wrong.
When he leaves, Dungy will tell his sons one more thing. To fasten his seat belt. For goodness' sake, fasten the belt.
from st. petersburg times
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