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One of the things you should know about Washington Redskins’ running back Chris Thompson is that he possesses serious strength and resolve, which is likely what brought him through the incredible injuries he has sustained in his young life. But he also laughs easily and often. He is easy going and polite. I recently was given the opportunity for a one-on-one with him and, given his life story; it is no surprise that he has come so far. But it is amazing that he is so agreeable and unassuming when you see what a beast he is on the field.
Thompson’s affable nature could be attributed, in part anyway, to a childhood during which his favorite shoes were covered with the infamous “Barney” and on which his favorite t-shirt had Bart Simpson. During our recent interview, he described his mother and step-father as having fallen in “love at first sight.” He smiled widely as he told the story of his mother changing his step-father’s life for the better.
Anyone who has spent any time with this young man knows how grounded and charismatic he is. He even admitted to a group of teenage football players from a local high school recently that some of his friends say he is boring because he doesn’t party a lot.
“I never gave anybody any problem,” he said. “Once I got to Florida State a lot of my friends and stuff wondered, ‘Man, why does everybody love you?’ Well, I just don’t give anybody any problem. I treat everybody with respect and everything.
“When I go back home to my hometown,” he said without a trace of ego, “all the kids want to talk to me and I love that. That’s my motivation too… just going back home and seeing the little kids running around playing football. A lot of them will come back and say, ‘I want to be like you when I grow up.’ That means the world to me.”
Thompson has pretty much done everything right as he has moved through life and yet has endured three injuries serious enough to threaten his career in football, for which he has worked so hard. How did he come back?
We marvel at how athletes return from some really serious injuries to play just as well — sometimes better — than before they were hurt. Thompson endured Pars fractures his sophomore year at Florida State University (FSU), a broken back in his junior year, a torn ACL in his senior year and a shoulder injury his rookie year with the Redskins. Some people would say he is injury-prone. Most would say he is resilient and durable. Every time he has been injured, he has recovered and come back even stronger. After he broke two vertebrae in his back in 2011, the former Seminole returned for a career year in 2012 before tearing his ACL towards the end of the season. It’s amazing that he came back at all from a terrifying injury like he sustained… to come back stronger and faster is a testament to his faith and determination even as he questioned whether or not he wanted to continue at the game.
“There were a couple of days when I was just sitting at home thinking ‘I don’t know if I even want to do this anymore,’” Chris admitted. “’What if I get healthy, go out again and end up hurting myself even worse?’ I was worried that I would even think about it too much and not be able to completely play ball and be scared to get hit here and there and everything.”
But something kept him going. It might have been his faith in God. It might have been his very supportive parents. It might have been the gift of a beloved toy truck from FSU head coach Jimbo Fisher’s young son, Ethan (fighting his own issues with a blood disorder called Fanconi Anemia), that pulled him through. It might have simply been the love of the game. Most likely it was a combination of all of these things.
Whatever gave Chris Thompson the tenacity to recover from his injuries and maintain his great attitude will benefit the Washington Redskins in 2014 as long as he is given a chance. When considering the career year the RB was having the year following the back injury; it would be foolish to not to give him every opportunity to compete for the starting job opposite Redskins running back Alfred Morris.
Thompson’s bio on the FSU website reads: “Senior tailback who was in the midst of an outstanding season when he suffered a year-ending knee injury (a torn ACL) in the eighth game at Miami…ranked sixth in the ACC in rushing with 687 yards despite missing the final six games and was on pace to become FSU’s first 1,000-yard back since Warrick Dunn in 1996…played a key role in FSU’s resurgent running game, which averaged 205.9 yards a game and produced a single-season record 40 rushing touchdowns… major contributor to an FSU offense in 2012 which will go down in school history as the most productive ever racking up a school record 6,591 yards which surpassed the 2000 team for the most yards…”
That year, Chris was the co-winner of the ACC’s Brian Piccolo Award as the Most Courageous Player in 2012 after returning from the broken vertebrae to have the kind of season he would have had… and he deserved it.
After the injury to his back in 2011 versus Wake Forest, it was only appropriate that he would be let loose by his coach against the Demon Deacons in 2012. That day Thompson, voted Offensive MVP of that game, had a career-best 197 yards and touchdown runs of 74 and 80 yards — all just in the first half. It’s too bad the coaches took him out of the game for the second half as he likely would have racked up 400 yards before it was all said and done. But seeing as how the score ended up 52-0, Coach Fisher would certainly have been accused of piling on had Chris stayed in the game. (And don’t pay any attention to the first 30 seconds of this video… It’s amazing beyond that)
The question remains: what gives an athlete like Chris Thompson the determination, strength and courage to keep fighting when faced with the hard work required, the pain to be endured and the lack of assurance that it will all even pay off in the end? Why did he decide to push through that terrible back injury, the torn ACL and the shoulder last season to be ready in 2014 to play the game of football?
In Chris’ case, it while it is probably the formerly discussed combination of things, I have no doubt that it is also because of something that happened before he even graduated from high school… an event so amazing that it would forever change his outlook on the world. As he relayed this astounding tale to me, I had to work hard to wrap my brain around his words. He described the event as “probably the worst thing that ever happened in my life.”
Let me set up the background to the tale as it was portrayed it to me.
While Thompson was in high school, he went on a scouting trip with one of his teammates, a defensive player named Jacobbi McDaniel (a year younger than Chris, the defensive tackle is currently ranked 24th on WalterFootball.com’s 2014 NFL draft prospects: Defensive Tackles) who also eventually attended FSU. They were driving from their homes in Florida to the U.S. Army High School Bowl/Combine in San Antonio, Texas with three of their coaches.
Here is Chris Thompson’s telling of his story:
CT: “We were in a van, on the way to Texas, and I jumped in the back seat so I had the seat all to myself… I was laid out asleep the whole entire way. The trip went good… I performed pretty good in Texas.
“So, on the way back, I jumped in the back again. Jacobbi tried to beat me back there so he could lay out on the way home but I ended up beating him back there again, so…
“We’re on our way home. We stopped and got some gas and I jumped out for a quick minute to stretch and go use the bathroom and Jacobbi ended up beating me back there into the back seat so that he was laid out! I ended up just sitting down beside one of my coaches.
“On the way back, I was watching this Mel Gibson movie ‘Apocalypto’ which is one of my favorite movies. It started to get good and I was getting into it. Well, then I… well… I suddenly heard this voice [that said]: ‘Turn the DVD off and go to sleep.’”
Me: “Just to be clear here… you heard the voice in your head?”
CT: “Yea. I heard it in my head just like this: ‘Turn the DVD off and go to sleep.’
“But I was like (to myself), ‘No, no! This movie’s just getting good and will be over soon anyway.’ But this voice came back and came on again…. ‘TURN the DVD player OFF and GO TO SLEEP.’
“So I did. I turned it off. I just did. And I went right to sleep.
“But here’s the thing, when I woke up I was STANDING on the SHOULDER of the HIGHWAY. I was standing about five feet from the interstate… when I opened my eyes.”
Me: “What? Shut up! What???”
CT: “I don’t know. I was standing like five feet from the interstate when I woke up. I turned off the DVD, went right to sleep and, when I woke up I was standing five feet from the interstate.”
Me: “With cars just flying by at 60–70 miles per hour? Where was the van and everybody else?”
CT: “I had no clue. So I’m just standing there. When I opened my eyes, I’m just standing up — on the interstate. So I’m lost. I’m like, ‘Did I step out and use the bathroom or something? What’s going on?’
“So I start walking and I realize my feet were hurting real bad. And I look down and I notice I didn’t have any shoes on. So then I’m like, ‘OK… what’s really going on???’ I was completely lost and scared. So I keep walking and I see these lights… I see red and blue lights flashing. So, I’m like, ‘OK… something serious has happened.’ I don’t know what happened or how I got there but I know it’s not good.
“I kept walking and I looked down. There was a real deep ditch.”
Me: “Right there along the highway? Like a deep ravine?”
CT: “Exactly. And as soon as I look down, I see our van wrapped around a tree. And I can’t find my coaches or anybody. Nobody is in there. And I see the van just wrapped around the tree and I see blood on the side of the van and I’m so upset. I know somebody’s hurt, although I hoped not dead.
“Finally I see one of my coaches – he’s walking around panicked. The coach… the one that was driving is the one I saw walking… I think he was trying to find everybody. The other two coaches were laid out on the ground with the paramedics helping them. And my teammate, Jacobbi… they were helping him too. Those three were laid out.
“So the coach that was driving, he’s walking around panicking, looking for me because nobody knows where Chris is. They were thinking that maybe I had been thrown from the van into the trees or something. I finally got to him and he grabbed me and he saw I was crying and everything and he was just trying to make sure I was alright.
“But everyone was accounted for now and alive. You know, there were some injuries but, I took another look at the van and, where it wrapped around the tree was right where I was sitting in it. We hit that tree right where I was sitting.”
(There’s silence here for a few minutes as I’m stunned)
Me: “Chris… it’s amazing that you are even still with us in this world. How on earth did you get out of the car??? How did you survive?”
CT: “I do not know. The seat I was in was totally laid flat and pushed up to the ceiling of the van and… I don’t know… it was a huge tree that we hit and it hit right where I was sitting. My teammate [McDaniel] that had been laid out in the back, his head smashed through the window. But he had dread[lock]s at the time and they protected his head from having any kind of brain damage. The way he hit, he could have had brain damage had he not had that hair. I think about what could have happened if I didn’t step out back [at the gas station] and he didn’t beat me to the back seat… that could have been me. And I didn’t have dreads.”
Me: “Chris… Honestly, do you have any idea how you got out of the car?”
CT: “I still think about that to this day. I have no memory of it. Like, every now and then I feel like I can remember a car hitting us because… it was a car that hit us. [The coach that was driving] said this lady beside him, her tire came off of her car and she hit us. Our van spun around and then flipped three times down into this ditch where it hit the tree.”
After he told me the story, Chris and I sat for awhile, trying to brainstorm how he came to be out of that van and on the side of the highway. In the end, he said he firmly believes in this version of what happened:
“I honestly think it was an angel that just grabbed me and just pulled me out of the car. I mean, the coach I was sitting beside… he got knocked out of the window and he had some serious injuries.”
As far as Chris’ feet hurting when he came to and his shoes being gone… that is another mystery that remains unsolved. He had no injuries other than a scrape on his arm. His running backs coach had some of the worst of the injuries that any of them sustained, unfortunately, and was told that he would never have children because of them.
He has just had his third child.
Some things just cannot be explained unless one is willing to look beyond the obvious and into the murky world of the incomprehensible.
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When you consider the Washington Redskins’ franchise last year — the 3-13 record, all the many rumors that came out at the end of the season (and what they might indicate was really going on with the team), the mess that was the Special Teams unit and quarterback Robert Griffin, III’s issues with his knee; there’s no guarantee that how any player performed was the best that he could do. Quite honestly, 2013 for the Redskins was a glitch in the time-space continuum as far as some are concerned. Perhaps it was simply an anomaly and should just be written off.
Chris Thompson hasn’t really had a chance to show the NFL all that he can do. But the talent he showed at FSU is not an illusion. As I suggested earlier, hopefully Coach Gruden will give him the opportunity to compete for a starting position during OTAs, mini-camps and training camp. I have a feeling he already knows the potential that the Florida State grad has. If he will give the offensive back the opportunity, given the resolve, the strength and the natural talent that Thompson has, the Redskins’ coach will certainly see that he has a star on his hands. One that, should he need to, could probably dig down pretty deep for whatever strength he might need in whatever situation might arise.
Hail.
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