Southwest Florida Sports Awards speaker, Dolphins legend Zach Thomas learned work ethic young

The work ethic? Everybody knows about the work ethic. You don’t go from being the 154th pick in the NFL Draft to within inches of the Pro Football Hall of Fame without something driving you to be far more than anybody expected.

So all through Zach Thomas’ Miami Dolphins career, we knew his secret that wasn’t so secret was that he attacked each week the way he did ballcarriers: head-on.

What we didn’t know was why.

Previously: Miami Dolphins' Zach Thomas named guest speaker for Southwest Florida High School Sports Awards

Invitees:Are you invited to the Southwest Florida Sports Awards Show on May 26?

Turns out the seeds weren’t planted when he was drafted by Miami. They didn’t take root only when he earned a scholarship to Texas Tech or even when he was named starting linebacker on a state championship team as a freshman in high school.

Gotta go all the way back. Back to when Zach Thomas was entering kindergarten — or, more accurately, should have been entering kindergarten.

“I got held back a year even before I got started,” he says.

Auditory problems, the adults determined. Young Zach had difficulty distinguishing slight differences in words. It’s a condition affecting an estimated 2 to 7 percent of children. Since it does not involve hearing loss nor cause confusion with the meaning of words, there are steps to deal with it. Making sure teachers seated young Zach in the front of the class was one.

The other?

“I had to do all this extra type of training with my mom so I wouldn’t be embarrassed at school,” he says. “But that’s where it started, with the work-ethic thing.”

It’s a theme Thomas is sure to relate as the special guest at the Southwest Florida High School Sports Awards starting at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Suncoast Arena on the campus of Florida SouthWestern State College.

Over 12 seasons as the Dolphins’ middle linebacker starting in 1996, Thomas earned seven Pro Bowl invitations and was named All-Pro five times. He made the NFL’s All-Decade Team of the 2000s. Now 48, he has been a finalist to make the Hall of Fame three times, with a strong chance to clear that final hurdle as the 2022 season concludes.

Today, Thomas, wife Maritza and three children ages 7 to 12 live in a waterfront home in northeast Broward County. He’s a full-fledged soccer dad. One weekend it’s a tournament in Orlando, the next, Sarasota. Soon, the trips will be to Georgia and Virginia. It’s a world away from the challenges he faced as a preschooler in Texas.

"It's crazy," Thomas says. "Handicaps will make you work harder. I'm definitely grateful for that handicap because that's all I knew."

Just don’t ask him how he “overcame” the challenges.

“I don’t think I ever overcame it,” he says, laughing. “But I figured it out along the way. And it all came from just being prepared. I never wanted to not be prepared. It was a skill I kind of trained, that I would never go in unprepared. That led to my football due diligence.”

Generously listed at 5-feet-11 and 228 pounds, Thomas calls himself “a small-talent kid with big dreams.” He wasn’t the biggest, wasn’t the fastest, but made up for it with a determination to never let down the man on his right and left. Long after the memory of scores fades, one’s reputation in the locker room does not.

“What I remember — it won’t leave me — is whether you’re a good teammate or not,” he says. “It relates to everything. It doesn’t matter what business you’re in. … If I made the Hall of Fame but then I was a jerk, if I was all about myself, I wouldn’t want to be in the Hall of Fame, you know? I feel like you can ask any one of my teammates (if he was a good teammate). That goes a long way in how I was as a teammate. That’s what winning is to me. It’s always about the respect.”

What Thomas calls due diligence to uphold his end, others might refer to as extreme. Thomas was so legendary for watching endless film of opponents, it sometimes seemed he knew what offenses were going to do as well as they did. Just to mess with quarterbacks, he might call out their plays before the snap.

You don’t make 1,734 tackles by luck. If Thomas’ studying lasted into the night, he’d get interns to snatch dinner from the stash coaches had delivered.

But there was a self-imposed curfew as part of the plan.

“I knew if you’re going to be fresh the next day — you’re in a meeting room — then you’re going to focus better,” Thomas says. “That’s why I was getting nine or 10 hours of sleep. It was kind of a boring lifestyle, but I had an alarm clock to wake up and an alarm clock to go to bed, even. That alarm clock went off, I’m going to bed.”

His AM alarm opened the door to a new day and perspective he never took for granted.

“I’d be driving to work and I’d look around on 595,” he says. “I remember this, just seeing people miserable in the morning. I’d be tired and I’d go, ‘OK, they’re going to a job they hate and I’m going to a game — a job that is a game.’

“And I never left the playground. And that’s the way I looked at it. When you look at it like that, you’re grateful. You’re never unhappy.”

‘Small-talent kid’ Zach Thomas on the brink of biggest call of all, from Hall of Fame

The thought of Thomas makes plenty of people unhappy today. It’s nothing Thomas did. No. It’s what the Hall of Fame voters have done, allowing Thomas to come tantalizingly close to the ultimate individual honor without ushering him into Canton, even though his statistics surpass some linebackers who are in.

Yes, Thomas thinks about the Hall sometimes, especially as various stages of annual voting take place to whittle down the contenders. But that’s as far as it goes for him personally.

“I love to read comments of my fans,” he says. “Some people are disgusted that I’m not in, and I think that’s respect, man. I don’t say I deserve to be in, but I just have a lot of fan support when it comes to the Hall of Fame. I really get a kick out of it. People really get so pissed. I’m not pissed at all. That’s just not me.”

What is him?

“It’s all perspective, how you look at things. Just being grateful for everything I’ve got. Man, this game gave me too much to sit here and complain about the highest honor. I never really got too worked up when it comes to things I can’t control. But the one thing I can control is my attitude and being grateful. … I would never be the type to come out and complain about anything about football.

“The game’s been so good to me, I owe the game.”

Hal Habib covers the Dolphins for the USA Today Network-Florida. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.