Jensen: Old friends raise money to honor Penn's Owen Thomas

Every summer now, they get together, keeping it casual. The idea is to grill some hot dogs, drink some beer, throw a few horseshoes, and tell some stories, remembering Owen. They call it the F.O.O.T. Ball - the Friends Of Owen Thomas Ball.

It's been just over six years since Thomas, their friend - the high school football star at Parkland High in Allentown, who went on to Penn and became an Ivy League football star - committed suicide.

"We didn't want it to get too big," said Mike Fay, a Parkland teammate who teaches high school English in the Lehigh Valley. "We talked about how let's just take one day, have some fun, and say: 'I remember Owen Thomas.' "

Later in 2010, Thomas' brain was found to have the beginning stages of a degenerative disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

At the time, CTE was relatively unknown. That's part of Thomas' legacy, how his death was a dramatic part of the increased national awareness of CTE, absolutely part of a path that has led the Ivy League to eliminate full contact in spring and preseason football practices, to drastically cut the number of sub-concussive hits that some experts say can lead to CTE.

His old friends from Parkland say they raise about $1,000 every year to give to the Concussion Legacy Foundation. They've got another fund-raiser in the works.

This year, they added a wrinkle, asking people to donate $31 to the foundation, in honor of Owen's high school jersey number. Their goal is to inspire 1,000 $31 donations.

At the F.O.O.T. Ball, they'll probably talk about that party Thomas, back from Penn, threw in his basement with everybody having a blast while Thomas sat in the middle of it having a blast himself - the whole time typing a paper.

That image never leaves his friends, how Owen was completely engaged in both the party and the paper.  "He was there the whole time, blasting Led Zeppelin," Fay said.

They'll talk about his drive - "just being the best at whatever he could be the best at," said Marc Quilling, who started playing football with Thomas before they were 10 and ended up a quarterback at Lafayette.

Fay wrote a remembrance of Thomas for the Concussion Legacy Foundation, mentioning how Thomas "was more than your average man, far more." Faye described "an A-type personality, a vibrant smile, and a bull of a body with a thick neck and flowing orange hair." A gentle giant, "also the brightest mind in all of his classes," how his friends only knew about the 4.0 grade point average if they asked.

"To his opponents on the football field, Owen was a mythological creature," Fay wrote. "The fiery tips of his sweat-glossed hair, which flared out of the bottom of his helmet, were his calling card; running backs did not run towards that hair, nor did quarterbacks throw."

He was a unanimous pick for high school captain, Fay wrote, since his teammates thought of him "similar to the way Scotsmen felt about the brave William Wallace as he proudly galloped out in front of the modest Scottish army."

Thomas did not leave the field, even for special teams. As a sophomore, "he was our kicker, I don't know how - at that time he was in the lineup at defensive end," Quilling said. "He kicked with a boot strap. He'd pound it into the end zone."

Fay also wrote about the "heavy price that Owen paid to be such a fierce and dynamic person," how he would often lock himself in his room, working for hours, Beatles playing in the background, "until every assignment was completed flawlessly." Fay admitted Owen's academic work ethic was "baffling" to his friends. His ethic on the field was just as great.

The evidence of CTE provided his friends with some answers but not close to all of them. Quilling also remembers the pressure Thomas put on himself.

"Sometimes it makes me think it was his biggest flaw," Quilling said. "He told his dad he thought he was failing when it was B-minus or C-plus."

Fay remembers how in eighth grade he got dehydrated at football practice, started throwing up, and couldn't stop until "I had nothing left to give." Thomas, his teammate, said to him: "C'mon, stop putting on a show."

Even at the time, Fay thought that was kind of incredible, but he realized Thomas wasn't being tough just to sound tough. He wasn't being mean. "It was, 'C'mon, suck it up, get back in the ring.' "

They weren't friends yet, not until high school, when they became tight friends.

"Even then, Owen had that very independent and confident demeanor about him," Fay said. "He wasn't the type of friend who'd say, 'I'll go with you because I've got nothing better to do.' He wasn't selfish, but he didn't do anything just because. He was an interesting type of friend. Everything with him had a purpose. But the rare moments when we could just have down time, he was a real big dreamer. . . . Thank God I was with him to see those times."

So the evidence of CTE provided some clues to Thomas' suicide, Fay said, but not all of them.

"His death is still baffling to me," Fay said. He'd seen him a couple of weeks before he died. "I didn't see any signs. To me, it was still the same old Owen. If anything, it does explain, it provides a reason - it affects your rational thoughts. . . . I think he was in a bad place, had those thoughts. He was such a driven person. . . . I suppose [CTE] had some role, but I'm still mystified about it."

As of early this week, the Concussion Legacy Foundation had received 20 donations of exactly $31, plus four more that brought the total so far donated in Thomas' name to $790. This effort began in the last two weeks and will continue until a group gathers in July and remembers their fearsome friend whose impact was clear in life and keeps growing in death.

"He played the brand of football that people wanted to see," his former teammate, Fay, wrote in his remembrance, recalling a pit bull without a leash on the field. "The brand of football that made it America's favorite pastime."

mjensen@phillynews.com

@jensenoffcampus