Hall of Fame vote returns Zach Thomas to football stage after years of quiet retirement

Zach Thomas is holding his wife Maritza’s hand as they sit in the gazebo by their pool. Their 4-year-old daughter Sienna playfully climbs over the couple as they talk, while 10-year-old Christian and 8-year-old Valentina kick around a soccer ball on the putting-green-quality lawn nearby. The endless waves rolling in behind their beachfront home are a hypnotizing sound track in the background.

This is Zach Thomas’ life now. Those children, his marriage, are his job.

That’s a momentous departure from the time Thomas sometimes refers to as “crazy” or “wild” — a span of 13 NFL seasons he spent as perhaps the most adored Miami Dolphins player of the day.

The former NFL middle linebacker spent his career smack in the middle of chaos.

That was him diagnosing plays before opponents ran them, fending off 300-pound centers before they slammed him, figuring the correct angles to ball carriers before they ran by him. And that was him exploding into tackles — a whopping 1,734 of them — before anyone got the better of him.

That was him during with the Dolphins and one season with the Dallas Cowboys, investing 14 hours every day during football season, studying tape coaches didn’t dig up, honing his body in ways few players tried (like hyperbaric chamber sessions and Botox treatments for concussions).

Those early mornings and late nights during the week were an investment so that the squatty guy who doesn’t look like a football player could often perform better than anyone else on the field those three violent hours on game day.

That was tension. That was stress — so much of it that Thomas would get blisters on his lip from the pressure. So much that Thomas says, “I made pressure my friend.”

The pressure now is getting Christian to his soccer practice and games on time. The work is dropping off and picking up the kids from school and deciding which life lesson to deliver on the drives back and forth. The tough decisions are picking which real estate investment to try and what workout to do to keep trim.

Yes, life has changed for Thomas since he stopped playing in 2009.

But soon the game’s old stresses and retirement’s welcome peace will be locked in a standoff.

That’s because while the rest of the country (and parts of the world) will be captivated by Super Bowl 54 on Feb. 2, Thomas will be more focused on Feb. 1, when he and 14 other finalists are considered for election into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

The Hall of Fame vote on the Saturday before the Super Bowl is a routine-changer for the Thomas family this year. Because Thomas, mostly private, always humble, is facing the possibility of returning to the NFL stage...

...This time as one of the game’s all-time greats.

“It’s important,” Thomas says as he makes sure Sienna doesn’t fall off a table. “It represents all the great teammates I had. These were guys that did a lot of the dirty work and I would go and clean up and I’d get all the credit. That’s humbling.

“When I look at back to being an 8-year-old kid starting football, I had big dreams and for it to play out like it has, I’m grateful. For me to sit here and say I deserve being in the Hall of Fame, that’s just not me. Saying that would make me feel I’m being ungrateful. I teach my kids to be grateful for everything they do and get.

“And I’m grateful to football. It gave me purpose, it gave me family, it gave me wealth. I’m making my own hours. I don’t have to work right now -- even though it is work and challenging with kids. But I definitely don’t want to disrespect the game by thinking I deserve any of it. The game’s been too good to me.”

Let’s just agree that it was a mutually beneficial arrangement for both parties. Because while Thomas reaped rewards and perhaps soon the biggest individual honor from the game, he poured heart and soul into the sport and made it more interesting and exciting for all of us.

And, oh yes, the stories he authored are fascinating.

Start with the time Nick Saban wanted to trade Zach Thomas. Yeah, no one knew that until now but it happened in 2005. And Miami’s Pro Bowl linebacker and defensive leader found out about it.

“He gets hired here and I’m thinking I’m ready to learn this new defense, a 3-4, and I guess he didn’t think I fit the part,” Thomas says. “So he wanted to trade me. I got wind of it from a bunch of people because I knew everyone in the building, you know? So they’re telling me, ‘They’re trying to trade you right now.’

“And I said, ‘Oh, really? To where?’ And they told me it was to Green Bay. This is when Maritza and I were still dating and she’s like, ‘We’re moving to Green Bay?’ And it didn’t go through. I don’t know what else they wanted.

“They were trying to get Javon Walker. I’ve been doubted my whole life and I’ve used that. But that motivated me even more than usual, the Dolphins trying to get rid of me, thinking I couldn’t play in that defense. But it worked out.”

Thomas talks about how much he loves Saban as a coach and greatly enjoyed playing in his defense. But all that enjoyment didn’t exactly bloom early in their relationship.

It certainly wasn’t that way when Thomas and Saban were yelling at each other during a practice in the fall of 2005.

“We’re in a practice and, you know we started the season [2-1], but then we lost a couple straight so he was upset,” Thomas says. “He wanted to rip into somebody. So I was getting a call from the sideline and another coach was trying to coach me on what I did wrong the play before. And I just gave him one of these ...”

Thomas holds up his hand as if stopping someone from talking.

“I was trying to get the call,” Thomas says. “So [Saban] stopped practice and made a scene. And I’m right in front of my defense. He pretty much told me, next time a coach is coaching you, you shut the [expletive] up.

“For me, man, it’s always about respect. He hadn’t even earned my respect at that point. And it was another reason to think he better do this somewhere different because there were so many other guys that he drafted that were just lazy that he needed to rip into and never did.

“So I just told him I’m a grown-[expletive] man and told him to shut the [expletive] up. So he told me he was going to bench me, or whatever. Then [Jason Taylor] jumps into it and everyone’s all wide-eyed getting into it back and forth.”

Bedlam at a Dolphins practice.

“And what’s crazy is after it died down, and I’m not naming the coaches, but a couple of them came up together and said, ‘You’re our hero, man.’ Because he treated them pretty badly,” Thomas says. “But I’m not knocking Saban. I didn’t like how he treated a couple of those guys, but he works in ways that no one gets too comfortable, too relaxed.

“I believe in that stuff. That’s why he’s a winner.”

Saban eventually brought Thomas into his office and the two made peace.

“He starts, ‘Zach, I’m trying to make a point to get it to the team,’ “ Thomas recalls. “And I said, ‘No disrespect, but there are so many other guys who have already gone home. And I’m going to be here when you get here to work and I’m going to be here when you leave. I told him, ‘I don’t think I’m the right guy to try to make a point with. I’m the leader of this defense, man.’

“I’m good with being called out, that’s fine. But the way he did it .... I hear Bill Belichick does it to Tom Brady. And maybe I should have bit my tongue, but that’s just not me.”

Thomas says he came to love Saban’s ability to prepare the Dolphins. And soon, Saban came to love the player he initially wanted to trade — so much so that the following offseason when the Dolphins were recruiting Pro Bowl center Kevin Mawae as an unrestricted free agent, Saban asked Thomas to accompany him to dinner with Mawae to convince the player to sign with Miami.

Mawae and Thomas, the great center and great linebacker, were rivals. They played 18 games against one another when the Jets and Dolphins played. The battles were epic.

And out of those games and the each player’s competitive spirit was forged a mutual respect so strong that when Mawae was inducted into the Hall of Fame last year, he used his acceptance speech to state Thomas also belonged in the Hall.

But the relationship didn’t quite start out with such high appreciation.

“Back then they were miking the refs and I didn’t know about it,” Thomas says. “So before every game I would tell the ref, ‘This is the most holdingest center in the league.’ And he heard about it, and before the next game he sent me a Xerox copy of his hands.”

Mawae, who has enormous hands, sent the Xerox to the Dolphins’ facility in Davie for personal delivery to Thomas.

“He was trying to get into my head’ and it fired me up,” Thomas says. “But it was all love.”

It was a love Saban maybe didn’t fully understand in the spring of 2006 when Mawae visited.

“We’re eating and Nick asks me what I think of Kevin,” Thomas says. “And I said all these compliments about Kevin but I also said we have a nickname for him. And Nick asks, ‘What’s that?’ And I said, ‘He’s a cheap-shot Christian.’

“And I explained with Kevin sitting there. I said, ‘He’s the guy that will play hard to the whistle but he’ll be away from the play and he’ll cut you, you’ll blow your knee out, and as he’s walking away, he’ll say, ‘God bless you.’ “

Saban was mortified. Mawae laughed and still laughs at the story to this day.

“I felt bad for a while because I thought that was a reason he didn’t sign with us at the time,” Thomas says, “But Kevin told me the Dolphins didn’t offer him a contract, and that’s the reason he didn’t sign.”

After Saban left, the Dolphins hired Cam Cameron as their next coach.

(No, this isn’t going to be a rip job on Cameron, whose 2007 team managed only one victory in 16 games).

Thomas played only five games in that wasteland of a season. But as the rest of the team was floundering, Thomas was flourishing, averaging more than 10 tackles per game and collecting tackles for loss, passes defensed, and quarterback hits. The problem is Thomas sustained multiple serious concussions that year.

“Those five games I played that year were probably the best five games I put together,” Thomas says. “If you’re grading my play, I was figuring it out so it was hard to sit out. But on the first play of the second game, [Dallas] brought in a LB at fullback to take me on. I was so fired up and I took him on.”

Concussion.

Thomas says he literally blacked out.

When he regained consciousness, Thomas wanted to keep playing as it was before the NFL’s concussion protocol rules. But that simply wasn’t possible.

“I went to the sideline, but I couldn’t sit down because I was falling asleep on the bench,” Thomas says. “I knew right then I was going to have issues when the symptoms kicked in.”

Thomas sat out three weeks. He played against the New England Patriots on October 21, 2007, and, yes, the Dolphins lost. Thomas was “bummed,” as he usually was after a loss.

Then on the turnpike ride home, with Maritza driving, the couple was rear-ended.

“Traffic came to a real fast stop,” Thomas says. “And the truck behind us didn’t even hit their brakes before they hit us. I was on the passenger side and I was talking to my brother on the phone and I didn’t know if the phone hit me in the head or it was the headrest that felt so hard.”

Thomas knew he had another concussion. And then the real pain began when he saw the people who hit him were wearing Patriots gear.

“And they just beat us at home,” Thomas laments. “Couldn’t believe it.”

The following season the Dolphins had a new administration in charge — again.

Bill Parcells took the reins of the team, along with head coach Tony Sparano and general manager Jeff Ireland. And they decided it was time for Thomas and the Dolphins to go their separate ways.

“They brought me in and I had a 1-on-1 talk with Bill,” Thomas says. “He pretty much said that any linebacker he’d had, once they hit 35 it was downhill. And for me, I pretty much used that as, well, I’m different. I want to stay.

“But I understood. You’re rebuilding. I’m getting paid a lot. And I’m a veteran, I’m not part of their future. I understood the whole business part of it. So he did give me a 1-on-1 but they wouldn’t allow me to meet with [reporters] at the facility.

“I had to do it off premises, saying good-bye. And I felt like they mishandled that part. I love my Dolphins and you can’t control what coaches want to do to turn a team around, but I thought it was mishandled.”

Parcells cut Thomas. And two of his most decorated proteges, Bill Belichick in New England and Sean Payton in New Orleans, must have thought that a mistake because they tried to sign Thomas.

“I met with Belichick. It was a great visit,” Thomas says.

The conversation got far enough along that Belichick told Thomas he probably wouldn’t be able to take Tedy Bruschi’s jersey number 54, the one Thomas wore in Miami. Thomas jokingly countered he’d wear No. 53 instead, which in New England belonged to former teammate and roommate Larry Izzo.

“I got a laugh out of Bill Belichick,” Thomas says. “And I knew they had all those great leaders on defense. I kind of wanted to be part of that, but when I thought about it, I knew that would let all my fans down. Because I am a Dolphin for life. So I enjoyed the visit, but I couldn’t pull the trigger.

“Just couldn’t do it. They’re the Patriots.”

Thomas had not received much attention as a free agent before that visit. But as agent Drew Rosenhaus predicted to Thomas, if Belichick made him an offer, others would follow suit.

The Saints soon wanted Thomas, and in retrospect Thomas admits not going there is “one of my few regrets.”

Thomas went to Dallas instead. And it was something of a mistake because Wade Phillips was running a defense that was totally foreign to him.

Thomas signed a one-year deal with the Cowboys in 2008 and owner Jerry Jones asked him to sign for another year when that season ended, but Thomas told him he needed to get back to a system he felt more familiar playing. So in 2009, Thomas signed with the Kansas City Chiefs.

And on the first play of the first inside drill of 2009 training camp, Thomas blew up the lead fullback and sustained another concussion and he could not practice or play.

The Chiefs cut him in training camp. And even months later when they called to bring him back, Thomas was still not recovered. The symptom lasted nearly a year.

Thomas never played again, but he isn’t sad and doesn’t lament that ending. He instead celebrates the years that came before.

He recalls playing Hall of Fame running backs like Marshall Faulk and Curtis Martin and fondly speaks of his meetings against Peyton Manning and Tom Brady, which felt as much like a chess match as a football game.

Thomas, you see, kept notes that eventually grew into entire notebooks on teams and offensive coordinators. And while coaches prepared their defense by showing players clips of the opponent’s previous three games, Thomas would spend time alone going back years.

The Colts, in the same division as Miami then, were almost exclusively a one back and one tight end team. But for short yardage in previous years, Thomas noticed when Indy had two backs in, and the Y receiver flexed, the play was always a lead draw.

“So before the play, I see this and Peyton is calling signals, and I yell, ‘Lead draw!’ ” Thomas says. “Anyway, I blitzed myself. And if it wasn’t a lead draw, I’d have been in trouble, but I hit it and made the tackle. I look up and I could tell Peyton was wondering ‘how’d you know?’ “

“Peyton was the best in the business. He’s the man. But if I called out that one play in a game, he’d be thinking I know what’s coming the whole game. So now I’m in his head. It was definitely a chess match. And that’s the stuff I miss. You never replace that, going back and forth with one of the best in the game.”

Maritza is listening to these stories with a smile. She graduated Nova Southeastern University with a doctorate in Pharmacy degree but she never was a huge football fan, especially not in 2003 when she and Thomas met.

That first meeting happened at the Roundup Country Western nightclub in Davie. Zach was there with offensive tackle Todd Wade. She was there with friends because it was ladies night.

Whatever Thomas said to Maritza that night neither really remembers and it doesn’t matter because she didn’t give him her number. It wasn’t until months later when they ran into each other again in Fort Lauderdale that they clicked.

“After a preseason game, Junior Seau says, ‘You want to go out with me tonight?” Thomas recalls. “I would always say no, but I said, ‘I’m coming with you.’ So we would have never met if Junior hadn’t brought me out. I met her there and got her number this time.

“I swung for the fences, man.”

Maritza, of Colombian descent, went home to a family that was lukewarm on Thomas.

“I didn’t know anything about football,” Maritza says. “I didn’t know he was a starter. I guess when I came home and told my brothers, I said, ‘This football player was asking for my number.’ And they asked, who and I told them Zach Thomas.

“And one said, ‘That’s my favorite player. Or he was my favorite player.’ “

Maritza’s father Guillermo Lozano immigrated from Bogota when he was 19 years old. He and Zach had significant cultural differences — because Lozano’s first home in the United States was in Queens, New York, and he was a New York Jets fan.

Thomas dated Maritza for two years and then proposed, but not before asking Guillermo for Maritza’s hand in marriage.

“Now he’s a big Dolphins fan,” Maritza says of her father.

Zach and Maritza were engaged the bye week of the 2005 season on a St. Maarten beach with shooting stars as the audience. Yes, Zach got on one knee.

“Anything Zach does, he’s going all the way,” Maritza says. “And after retiring from football, we had Christian, we built this house. I feel like Zach’s focus now is being a great father and husband. That’s his goal right now and any goal he has he goes all the way.

“I feel he’s very unselfish because of all the things he could be doing, he chooses to be part of our lives and loves being at the kids’ sporting events and activities. It’s a blessing that he can do that.”