77 by Terry Frei

Author:Terry Frei
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor Trade Publishing
Published: 2008-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

“Napoleon”: Tom Glassic

Number 62, Left Guard, 6-2, 254, 2nd Year, Virginia

Tom Glassic’s grandfather, Joseph, was a coal miner, as had been other males in the family tree. Joseph’s hacking cough was testimony to the hard work and maltreatment of the workers as he told his grandson of the old days, and he died of black lung disease shortly after Tom graduated from high school. “He slowly suffocated,” Tom says in his rustic home in the mountains west of Denver.

Theirs was a three-generation household in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Tom’s mother left the family when Tom was eight. Tom and his sister, plus their father, John, moved in with Tom’s grandparents. John was a truck dispatcher, grateful to have escaped the mining tradition.

Young Tom was tall and lanky when, at age 12, he tried to join the local Police Athletic League football team. Already his rebellious streak and reluctance to blindly respect authority showed.

“They put us through this horrendous workout,” he says. “They were all cops. They were all Vince Lombardi mentality type guys, yelling and screaming at little kids. Boy, it was rough. And the second day they came out with a scale and weighed us in and that’s when I found out there was a weight limit. You had to be under 115 pounds. I was 12 and I was 135 pounds and there was no fat on me, either. A cop came up to me and said, ‘You’re too big, get out of here, beat it.’ He didn’t say, ‘I’m sorry son, you’re too big, you can’t play, you’re too big for these kids, you’ll kill ’em.’ It was just ‘Beat it.’ So my first experience with football was very negative.”

When he got to high school, he had no intention of going out for the team. But his freshman homeroom teacher also happened to be the freshman football coach and on the first day of class, before he had even taken roll, he spotted the 215-pound kid.

“You. What’s your name?”

“Tom Glassic.”

“Stand up.”

Glassic pulled himself out of his chair.

“Be at the field house after school.”

Years later, Tom laughs. “It wasn’t, ‘If you want to play football be at the field house after school,’ ” he says. “I was too intimidated not to go. So I went and that’s how my career started.”

His high school career was injury plagued. He suffered broken fingers that ninth-grade year and played only two games. In the first scrimmage the next year, he was clipped. His femur snapped all the way through.

“Everybody told me, ‘That’s it, you’re not going to play football; you’re not going to play sports. You’ll walk with a limp the rest of your life.’ But it healed. So then the next year, when I was a junior, I blew out my knee.”

He managed to make it through his entire senior season healthy, and with such a late start, he got only two “afterthought” scholarship offers from Virginia and Rutgers, and South Carolina jumped in even later. He decided to go to Virginia, and immediately loved Charlottesville and the campus.

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