Dave Hyde: Zach Thomas’ long road to Canton — ‘I finally got that win’
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — When the road to Canton began, Zach Thomas was a high school junior. He sat in a fast-food restaurant with his new coach at his new school. He told everyone he transferred to Pampa (Texas) High because the academics were better. He really wanted a better chance for a college football scholarship.
“Here, let me show you something,” said Max Plunk, the linebackers coach, grabbing a pen and napkin in the restaurant.
Thomas already had made a first impression. The opening practice, the head coach, Dennis Cavalier, held a tackling dummy in a drill. Thomas hit it so hard the coach stumbled backward and fell into a bordering street. His glasses broke. His nose was scraped. He was bleeding. He was thrilled by this player.
Thomas always was strong as a kid. He began lifting weights daily in fifth grade. He actually took weights on family vacations, once dropping them in the water in a trip to Captiva and delaying everyone as he dove in after them.
“This is what a linebacker reads,” Plunk said that day in the restaurant, drawing on the napkin how the guards and center moved according to the play. An inside run, they did this, he drew. A pass, they did that, he showed.
Most linebackers read the running backs with a progression to linemen. Thomas translated offenses by the linemen’s actions from that day in high school through his last NFL game.
“I was called ‘instinctual,’ or ‘smart,’ but it was just the way I learned on that napkin,” he said.
That’s just one day, one moment, one scene frozen under amber. There are others that, when strung together, like Christmas lights, line his road to Saturday’s Hall of Fame induction in Canton.
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Draft day, 1996. Thomas waits to be drafted. And waits. Too slow at 4.8 seconds in the 40, he hears. Too small at 5 feet 11. And that impressive strength in high school? When Miami Dolphins scout Mike Westhoff worked out Thomas at Texas Tech, he purposely fudged the bench press totals for fear the low total would knock him out of draft contention.
The first and second rounds go without Thomas being taken.
He lists the linebackers. Kevin Hardy, John Mobley, Reggie Brown …
The third and fourth rounds go by. So do more linebackers. Steve Conley, Terry Killens, Tedy Bruschi …
Thomas is picked by the Dolphins in the fifth round, the 17th linebacker selected. That isn’t lost on him. He memorizes the names of all the linebackers taken before him and recites them as a motivational mantra through his career.
Twenty-eight years after the draft, a week after being inducted into the Hall last winter, Thomas says he thinks he can still recite the names.
He gets 15 of the 16 linebackers drafted before him.
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Third moment: Thomas stands on the sideline as the national anthem plays before his first NFL game in 1996. His eyes water. The hair on his arm stands up. He’s made it. The NFL. His parents can’t believe it. He can’t in some ways, too.
It’s all gravy from here, he thinks.
That day’s achievement is understood through the flip-side of it. Twenty years later, Dolphins coach Jimmy Johnson and his wife, Rhonda, have dinner with his former player and NFL coach Jack Del Rio and his wife, Linda, plus the actor Gene Hackman. It’s a good night until …
“I’m still mad at you,” Linda says.
“For what?” Johnson says.
The morning after the first preseason game Johnson called Del Rio at home to come to his office. Del Rio wondered why. “Maybe he wants to make you captain,” Linda said.
Johnson cut the veteran linebacker that morning.
“You’re the starter,” Johnson said to Thomas that day.
It still strikes Thomas. “To believe in the 154th pick of the draft like that …”
He can still hear that first national anthem — still feel it even. It brings tears to his eyes and makes him stop. He tries to talk and still can’t. He takes a drink of water.
“That always gets me,” he says now.
He’s concerned about crying in his Hall speech — concerned, mainly, about taking time and attention from the other inductees since he’s the first to talk.
“I’ve been trying to read things on not crying,” he said. “So I look at your feet, not your eyes, when I talk about my family. Forgive me.”
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Fourth snapshot: The Dolphins play Indianapolis. Short-yardage play. It’s quiet in the Indianapolis dome, settled. Thomas listens to Indianapolis quarterback Peyton Manning call out signals deep into their Hall of Fame careers.
Manning didn’t have many short-yardage plays, Thomas knew. The formation had two running backs and one tight end. That limited the play possibility even more, his midweek studies showed.
Thomas always studied, too. He got 10 hours of sleep at night to stay alert in team meetings. He filled notebooks watching film on his own. Those notebooks became legendary inside the organization.
Seth Levit, who worked in the media-relations department, once went to a movie with a friend and Thomas. The friend sat in the backseat beside a pile of Thomas’s notebooks and riffed through pages. He asked Thomas questions. Finally, he looked at the cover. It was for a preseason game Thomas barely played in it.
Thomas, by comparison, had a prepared book on Manning. As the quarterback called out signals that day in the dome, Thomas called out the play for his defense.
“You should’ve seen his eyes,” Thomas says.
Thomas blitzed and made the play — “got to make the play, too,” he says.
Manning and Thomas stood up together. Thomas is quick to point out Manning’s skill, his career. But this moment was his.
“He went wild, saying, ‘He’s in my playbook,’ ” Thomas said. He shakes his head. “I wasn’t in his playbook.” He was just on the same page in that moment.
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Fifth snapshot: Thomas is at the kitchen table in his Hillsboro Point home. He’s 50 now, married to Maritza, the father of three children. Johnson was there a few months earlier to announce Thomas was voted into the Hall. The Hall’s sculptor was there more recently to create the bronze bust of Thomas (“He pretty much had to make a square,” he says, pointing to his face.)
But opening the box that contained the gold, Hall of Fame jacket before his three children matters most of all.
“Y’all ready?” he says.
“Yeah,” they said together.
Thomas talks of timing in his career. He didn’t marry Maritza until near the end of it. He started his family after retiring. That’s a good thing, he says, because he wouldn’t have had time for them and football.
“No. 370,” he says, reading the badge on the lapel representing his membership in the Hall. “There’s only one 370. That’s your dad.”
He got two college-scholarship offers. He was a fifth-round pick. He didn’t win a title as a Dolphin. But as he stands there, holding the jacket, looking at his children, he knows where he stands at the end of a long road.
“I finally got that win,” he said.
