LUBBOCK, Tex. — Their home is in the Panhandle about a three-hour drive to the northeast in an unincorporated area outside Pampa, the big city, and White Deer, a plot of land so isolated that as kids they would play in the snow in their underwear without fear of being seen by neighbors. So remote that, as Spike Dykes, their football coach at Texas Tech, says, "You gotta be wantin' to go there to get there."
So Lubbock is a huge metropolis to the Thomas brothers. No wonder. It's the cotton capital of Texas and home to about 187,000 people. And then there's the graffiti on one of the windows of the Industrial- Mechanical Engineering building on campus--someone wrote "Hi YA'LL!" in the dust.
Perspective is everything in this case. But have the Thomases hit the big time here? That is not up for debate, not after free safety Bart and linebacker Zach became the first brothers to be consensus All-Southwest Conference picks in the 80-year history of the league. Not after Zach, a junior, was named first-team All-American by UPI and the American Football Coaches Assn. and the SWC defensive player of the year.
To think that neither is supposed to be in this town, at least not to play football, or on this level. And certainly not preparing for this game, the Jan. 2 Cotton Bowl against USC.
Bart should be finishing, or have already completed, his career as an option quarterback at Air Force, preparing for his ultimate goal to be a fighter pilot. Either that or wondering what could have been after retiring before last season to concentrate on school and helping his wife raise their infant daughter.
Zach probably should have used up his eligibility at some junior college and then gone to that final resting place for all slow-footed, undersized linebackers. Division II.
Instead, the small-town brothers are going big city. They are going to Dallas.
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No one is surprised that Bart Thomas succeeded. He has always been the natural athlete--all-state as a quarterback and defensive back on the team that won the Texas 2A championship, basketball MVP for his district, record-setter in the pole vault for his division. For good measure, he'll stand flat footed and turn a few back flips.
The twist is that it happened here. Coming out of high school in White Deer (population: 1,110), he considered Air Force, Arizona and Texas before deciding on the academy and the desire to fly jets. Texas Tech was never really in the picture, and never pushed hard, because the Red Raiders wanted him as a defensive back and Bart made it clear to everyone he wanted to play quarterback.
Enter fate. During a pickup game at Air Force with some of his college teammates in waiting, before he even got to two-a-days, Bart planted his right leg to make a cut and tore his anterior cruciate ligament. He had not enrolled in classes yet, so the clock on his eligibility had not started and school officials wanted him to attend a prep school rather than miss the first semester of his freshman year because of the surgery and rehabilitation.
Bart decided against that, effectively making him a free agent again. Concerned about the serious injury, every school that had interest in him before backed off except Texas Tech, still promising nothing more than defensive back, and Arizona, still offering quarterback. Dykes was the first coach to call him in the hospital, and that stuck with the patient/prospect.
"He had faith in me," Bart said. "I was lucky for that. Coach Dykes, I realized how good a guy he was after that deal."
Said Dykes: "Recruiting is nothing but feel anyway. There's a few players around that are great players and everybody knows them. There's the blue-chip guys, the Tony Bosellis (of USC), coming out of high school that you know are going to be great players. The majority of the people playing are the guys that you don't know whether they'll make it or not anyway."
If it was a gamble for the Red Raiders, the payoff started to be realized in 1991, when Thomas played a prominent role on special teams. The next season, when Zach arrived, Bart became the starting strong safety in the second game and held it most of the rest of the way, finishing as the team's fifth-leading tackler. He was moved to free safety in the spring and was the projected starter for 1993. That's when daughter Taylor was born, on May 1.
The responsibilities of fatherhood quickly became overwhelming, and Bart started to think in the summer about quitting football to devote the extra time to the family. He decided to wait until two-a-days before making a decision. It took one day of fall practice to determine that his interest in the game had waned, so he quit.
At the time, he thought he had permanently retired. He took a heavy load of classes. He helped his wife, Jill, raise Taylor. He watched the home games in person and the road games on television. He was miserable.
