Feb 10, 2000
A case could be made that I was one of the worst representations of the number 55 in the history of football.
Slow, small and not very physical in only my second year of organized football, I chose 55 solely because of Derrick Thomas. It had a nice ring to it: Much more fun to say than the number 58 that Thomas wore with the Kansas City Chiefs.
At five-foot-eight, 165 pounds and a forty-yard dash time of just under two calender days, I was woefully unequipped to play along the defensive front seven.
Thomas had no such problem. At six-foot-four, two hundred and fifty pounds, Thomas was a physical freak of nature. The Miami native ran a 4.4 forty and featured the best first step for a pass-rushing specialist this side of Lawrence Taylor.
Although I followed Derrick in the pros, my more powerful memories of Thomas was at the University of Alabama: My future Alma Mater. I had just begun to follow football in the late eighties as I began to grow out of my bookworm/awkward phase and take on a genuine interest in sports. Though much of that time period is just a blur in my memory, I remembered how ticked off I was when Alabama was paired up against Army in the Sun Bowl and how Thomas wouldn't be able to use his incredible speed to get to the quarterback against a wishbone team. I remember Alabama's 8-3 win over Penn State and how the television crew that was working the game noted sometime late in the fourth quarter "At the conclusion of the game we will be selecting Derrick Thomas and a Penn State player as our players of the game."
Though Thomas was a Florida resident, I doubt that any state has felt the devastating blow of Thomas's death any worse than my home state of Alabama. That tends to happen when you play football for the University of Alabama. When you put on that crimson jersey, you are forever etched into the minds of our fans as being larger than life. Players are treated as family and when you dominate in the fashion that Thomas displayed during his tenure at the University, you have reached legendary status.
Thomas was the exception rather than the rule. While the success of playing professional sports automatically gives many athletes a free pass to thuggery, Thomas matured and simply became a better person with age.
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