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Remembering No. 58 Derrick Thomas was more than a football player
Posted: Tuesday February 08, 2000 11:15 PM
We know Derrick Thomas' numbers. The 126 1/2 sacks and nine Pro Bowl appearances. He set the stage for a decade of dominance by sacking Seattle's Davie Krieg seven times in 1990, the most ever in one game. Thus the trappings of a defensive genius who helped turn around a floundering Kansas City franchise which had made the playoffs just once in the 17 years before Thomas arrived. And yet he was such an enigma, like so many, it seems. So ferocious on the field but so gentle and genuine off it. For inside that suit of football armor lived one of the game's truly good people. Early in his career with the Kansas City Chiefs, he began an inner-city reading program he called the "Third and Long Foundation" and as part of it, he read to children at local libraries every Saturday he was home during the season. How bright did he shine? He was Number 832 among President George Bush's celebrated thousand points of light. He was named the NFL's Man of the Year in 1993 and two years later, received the Byron Whizzer White Humanitarian Award from the NFL players association for his service to the community. In between, he received the Genuine Heroes Award from Trinity College in Chicago. No more apt name could be attached to any honor given this young man. Where did the fire come from? What kept it burning so brightly all these years? Surely part of it came when his father, an Air Force captain, died when his plane was shot down over Vietnam. Derrick was just five. Twenty-one years later, in 1993, he delivered the keynote address at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. There, before the numbing wall, stood the son searching for his father's name. The father who had died so tragically in a faraway jungle. And now seven years later, the son finds his own tragedy along a snowy road. Two young men tied by blood and devotion gone long, long before their time.
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