The wonderful week of Zach Thomas ended with the newest Pro Football Hall of Fame member driving to one of his children’s games. It’s a soccer game in Naples this time, and Thomas planned everything to be his customary half-hour early.
“If it’s important to you, you get there early,” he says over the phone while driving.
Thomas always was an organizer of details big and small. He’d sleep 10 hours a night to be alert during Miami Dolphins team meetings, because that’s, “when you won games,” he said. He’d study enough that former Indianapolis quarterback Peyton Manning is still haunted by Thomas calling out offensive plays in games.
Early in his pro career, Thomas also felt so hyped on the bus ride into games he’d be exhausted by kickoff. So, he made three styles of playlists to regulate his Sunday mindset. The first playlist for the bus ride was a quiet beat full of 1980s love songs and Michael Buble to calm his world.
The second playlist for the pregame was a little faster — “something to get you going a little,” he says. That led to a collision of energy on the third playlist from the likes of rapper/producer Lil Jon and hard-rock Metallica for the 15 minutes between leaving the field after warmups and returning for kickoff.
“To show my age, they were on CDs,” he says. “But I was always looking for anything little to help me.”
He turns 50 this year, and another football generation has come and gone since he retired. Some don’t realize his journey was lined not just with rare talent but an equal obsession with finding any edge. No Dolphins player was quite like him in mining those edges.
He was forever fighting the linebacker stereotype at 5 foot 10. Dolphins special-teams coach Mike Westhoff fudged Thomas’s bench-press numbers up a little during a pre-draft workout for fear they’d get him scratched off the draft list.
So working the edges and obsession over details defined him as much as tackles. It wasn’t just playlists and hours of sleep. He slept in a hyperbaric chamber before that became vogue. He didn’t waste time with “dumb talk in locker rooms,” as he said, when it was used for studying or resting.
The game meant so much to him he’d regularly break out in fever blisters.
“Stress, to me, especially when it got to later in my career, became my friend,” he said. “If I wasn’t stressed in pregame or even during the week some I wasn’t going to play good. If I was really stressed going into a game, I was usually balling out. The best feeling is after a game like that, you were on such a high after having all those nerves.”
Sure, he misses that feeling. He remembers after his first NFL game when he wasn’t assured of anything in the way any fifth-round pick isn’t.
“I called my brother on a pay phone from a Chili’s [restaurant] it was so long ago,” he says. “I said to him, ‘Hey, Bart, how’d I do?’ "
The final review came a couple weeks ago upon returning home from lunch. His former coach, Jimmy Johnson, surprised Thomas by saying he was voted into the Hall of Fame. That began the tough stretch of holding a secret before the announcement during Super Bowl week.
“I only have 100 names in my phone, and I heard from 650 to 700 people,” he said.
Thomas made sure to call plenty of those who helped him succeed from Dolphins teammates right down to Max Plunk, the high-school coach in Pampa, Texas, who started it all.
“He drew up on a napkin everything, on a napkin that taught me to read defenses in a way that people labeled me smart and instinctive,” Thomas said. “I did the same read in high school right to the last game in the NFL. He changed everything for me. Most linebackers read back to linemen. He taught me to read linemen.”
Thomas told Plunk, “You better be in Canton. I’m going to make sure you’re there with my family.”
Thomas leads the life he wants now, working real-estate deals and driving his three children around with his wife, Maritza. He would have liked to coach. He just wanted to spend time with his family more.
“For me, it’s their time now,” he said. “I know how I am and how [coaching] is. I’d have to be all-in.”
He was all-in studying film, sleeping 10 hours a night and organizing three game-day playlists on his way to Canton. Now he’s that way making sure his 13-year-old son, Christian, arrives a half-hour early to his soccer game.
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