Before the Uniform

 

Lately, I’ve been looking at old videos of my father, reading newspaper articles, and tracing dates that once felt insignificant. Funny how a date can sit quietly on a page for years until one day it decides to speak.

I never met my grandparents, John Franklin Thomas and Loretta Hilda Thomas. Looking at their photographs now hurts in a way I did not expect. Perhaps it is because they no longer look like someone’s grandparents to me. They look young. They look like people who should have had more time.

My grandfather died in May of 1968. Ten months later, my grandmother died in October of 1969.

Every time I say “ten months,” I think about childbirth.

The amount of time it takes to bring a child into the world is the same amount of time that passed between my grandfather leaving this one and my grandmother following behind him.

Ten months.

When I learned that, I stopped looking at my father’s football career the same way.

Most people begin his story when he was drafted by the Dallas Cowboys in 1970. They begin with the uniform. The statistics. The contract disputes. The headlines. The silence.

But what if the story begins before that?

What if the story begins with a young man whose childhood had already been interrupted by responsibility?

My parents became parents while they were still children themselves. My oldest sibling was born in 1964. Another followed in 1966. My father was attending West Texas State while my mother was at Bishop College in Dallas raising toddlers. Neither one of them knew exactly what they were doing.

How could they?

People like to say young parents “grow up fast,” but I don’t think that’s entirely true. I think they figure things out while life keeps moving. There is trial and error. There are mistakes. There are victories no one applauds because survival itself becomes the accomplishment.

Then my grandparents died.

When people tell my father’s story, they often talk about what he lost or gained in football.

I find myself thinking about what was lost at home.

When my grandparents died, my father lost his parents.

His brothers and sisters lost their parents too.

The family lost its foundation.

The weight became heavier.

And yet, almost immediately afterward, the world met Duane Thomas the football player.

What fascinates me is how little room there seems to be in sports history for a person’s actual life.

Fans remember touchdowns.

Newspapers remember controversy.

Commentators remember contracts.

Yet very few stop to consider what existed before a man’s feet ever touched the field.

My father once told me that people did not care what was happening in your personal life. They cared about your performance.

The older I get, the more I understand what he meant.

A young man can be grieving.

He can be helping support a family.

He can be helping his wife through college.

He can be worrying about younger siblings.

He can be carrying the pressures of racism in a changing America.

He can be trying to learn how to be a husband and a father.

Yet when Sunday arrives, none of that matters.

The crowd wants production.

The newspaper wants a story.

The organization wants results.

Everything else is expected to wait.

Stress, however, is not polite.

It does not wait to be invited.

It does not knock.

It barges in unannounced and makes itself comfortable.

Reading old articles now, I find myself wondering how often people mistook the symptoms for the story.

How often did they see frustration but not pressure?

How often did they see silence but not the reason for it?

How often did they see an athlete and miss the human being entirely?

My father used to tell me that famous people were people first.

I remember him introducing me to athletes and reminding me not to become starstruck.

“They’re people.”

Such a simple lesson.

Yet it may have been one of the greatest gifts he ever gave me.

Because I knew him as a person first.

Not as number 33.

Not as a headline.

Not as a controversy.

Not as a legend.

As a person.

As the man who loved words.

The man who painted.

The man who cooked meals so beautiful they felt like works of art.

The man who once looked at me and said, “I don’t know how to be a dad. I’m still figuring this stuff out.”

Maybe that is why this journey has made me emotional.

I am not discovering who my father was.

I already knew him.

I am discovering the weight he was carrying while he was being himself: Before the uniform.