That first night, when he picked up his equipment, Tom Fox felt the eyes on him. He was a curiosity piece, an object of speculation, a 32-year-old man wandering among the fresh-faced kids who played football for tiny Blackburn College.
“It was a little awkward,” he remembered. “It was kind of like everyone’s looking at you, `What the hell’s this guy doing?'”
Some thought Fox might be a new coach. Other suspected he was the father of one of their teammates. Then they saw him try on a helmet and slip on shoulder pads, and some of them thought he was some ancient alum back to reminisce and relive the halcyon days of youth.
But at 6 the next morning, there he was out on the field, in shorts and a T-shirt, lining up to take the conditioning test right along with them. It was no easy matter–16 110-yard sprints with just a 30-second rest between each, all to be done in less than 17 seconds.
“I didn’t think he would last, I really didn’t,” said Donald VanGiesen, who was then a 20-year-old sophomore.
Fox remembers that after the fourth sprint, he gazed at the other end of the field and saw three sets of goal posts instead of only one.
“My God, what have I gotten into?” he thought.
– – –
Two years after he nearly passed out on the field, Tom Fox is a 34-year-old junior and the starting quarterback for Division III Blackburn. Earlier this season he lost the job to Aaron McPherson, an 18-year-old freshman, but when McPherson went out with a separated shoulder, Fox again took over as the leader of the Beavers.
The NCAA does not monitor the age of its players officially, but Fox is believed to be the oldest competitor in college football.
He certainly is the only college player who has a 13-year-old daughter (Kara); who never played the sport in high school; who attended Nick Bollettieri’s tennis academy in Florida (where his classmates included Andre Agassi, Jim Courier and Monica Seles); and who came to the game after long years as the owner of a bar-restaurant called The Banque Club in Hamilton, Mont.
“I really feel I haven’t done much,” Fox said, but that is hardly true. This is the stuff of cinema, the triumph of imaginative reality over unimaginative realism, the tale of a realistic dreamer.
“He has a sense of adventure,” said his father, also named Tom. “He was always coming up with original ideas. He always has been a different type of thinker. If everyone else is going to college after high school, he’s going to run a bar. But he always was encouraged to do whatever he wanted to do. We never tried to force him to go in one direction.”
Blackburn coach Jim Mathieson, himself 68, added: “Most people get an idea and just grab it. But he grabbed it and ran.”
Tom Fox was born in Rock Island. When he was 6, his parents packed up and moved to Montana, where his father owns a wholesale lumber brokerage firm. As a boy, Fox hunted and fished and took up tennis, and each summer went with his family to an island off Belize. He often refused to go on jaunts with his parents, preferring instead to stay behind and play with the native children.
“His upbringing was very cosmopolitan,” said his mother, Mary.
Fox’s boundaries were stretched even further when he enrolled at Bollettieri’s academy as a high school sophomore. He applied himself diligently, arising early and putting in extra work. But he was also a realist and quickly understood that his talents would never match those of Agassi or Courier.
He bridled at the thought of being just another player, yet he remained for three years, pounding away.
“To see the work ethic, the discipline that guys like Agassi had, to see that, I learned a work ethic down there,” Fox explained. “But more than anything, I had roommates from 21 different countries at one time or another and I learned an awful lot about people.”
He left Florida after nearly three years and returned to Montana, where he graduated from high school and turned down the college offers that came his way. He was burned out on tennis and wasn’t ready for more school, so he married (he’s now divorced), had a baby and went to work for his dad.
Later, in the early ’90s, he bought The Banque Club and settled into the life of an entrepreneur, tending his customers, locking up at 2 a.m. and then hanging and talking and drinking beer with his buddies until the sun came up.
But always, in there somewhere, was this itch–an attraction to football and this desire one day to coach the game. The thought stayed with him, burned within him even as the years passed and the beer, cheeseburgers and cuts of prime rib pushed his weight to 235 pounds.
“It was weird,” Fox said. “In the back of my mind I knew that this is what I wanted to do some time, but when you’re young, you feel like there’s plenty of time. Then one day I came to the realization that, `Hey, if I don’t do it now, if I didn’t do it when I was 30 years old, I wasn’t going to do it when I was 40.’ . . . “I knew that if I didn’t do it, and this sounds corny, but I knew that if I didn’t do it, I would have been miserable thinking about it the rest of my life.”
– – –
He sold The Banque Club in 2000, enrolled in some courses at Montana in the spring of 2001 and bought college guides to help him find a place where he might play football. Academics was not going to be an issue with Tom Fox.
“He tests just a point or two below the genius level,” his mother said.
But there are few schools out recruiting a 32-year-old who hasn’t played the game. Fox recognized this, and so his research quickly settled on Division III. He was working out, running 4 miles daily along mountain trails, toiling on a StairMaster as he watched football on TV, finally getting his weight down to 195.
First he thought he would try Menlo College in Atherton, Calif., but he discovered that team was too good and he would have a hard time making it. Then he looked at Mt. Ida College outside of Boston, and it accepted him. In August 2001, he packed up his SUV and headed east.
On his way out the door he grabbed his mail and that evening, after stopping to spend one last night with a friend, he rifled through it and found a letter from Mt. Ida. It was an advisory that any athlete who planned to play a fall sport must contact the coach to be certain he had a spot reserved at training camp.
When he called, an assistant coach told Fox there were too many young guys coming to camp, and that there was no place for him.
So he drove back to Hamilton and soon he was talking to his mom, who had considered attending Blackburn when she was a senior at Rock Island High School.
“It’s in a nice area, close to St. Louis, close to Springfield,” she told him. “Why don’t you give it a shot?”
He did, quickly reaching coach Jim Chinn.
“[The call] was quite a shock,” said Chinn, who was let go at the end of last season and is now the running backs coach at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. “My initial reaction was he’s coming with no experience whatsoever, he’ll be very raw, he may not even know where guys line up, that he doesn’t know how difficult it is. At the same time, we were willing to give anyone a chance.”
Fox learned the door was open on Aug. 10 and two days later he was at Blackburn, which has an enrollment of about 600 and is located 50 miles south of Springfield.
Three days after that he picked up his equipment, pushed himself through the conditioning test and finally went to work as a backup quarterback and the holder on place kicks.
Fox was more raw than even his coach expected.
“You should have seen him throw a pass then compared to what he does now,” said VanGiesen, now a fifth-year senior guard for the Beavers. “He didn’t throw a football very well when he first got here. You never saw much spiral on the football, let’s put it that way.”
But Fox was on the team. The work ethic he had picked up along the way was evident as well, and as Blackburn slogged through a winless season, that was enough to get him onto the field for some mop-up duty.
In that role, he led the Beavers down the field against Principia, finally setting them up with a first-and-goal at the 1-yard line. Two running plays failed and Fox ran to the hash mark, pointed to himself and started screaming, “I can get it in. I can get it in.” Chinn, who usually signaled in plays, nodded, and Fox did sneak it in.
“It doesn’t make any difference in the outcome,” Chinn remembered. “But over on the sidelines, guys are all around him and he’s crying. That was a touching moment.”
Those moments were rare in Fox’s first two years as Blackburn went 1-19, but after Mathieson replaced Chinn last February, Fox started haunting his new coach’s office, making it clear that he wanted the starting job.
Mathieson had not known he would be inheriting a quarterback affectionately called “dad” or “the old man.”
“I knew I was taking on a challenge,” Mathieson said with a chuckle, “but the age of the quarterback never entered my mind.”
Still, he quickly warmed to Fox.
Each morning during the summer, Fox ran and lifted and threw with tight end Joe Prior. In the afternoon he worked out again, this time with VanGiesen and some others. McPherson arrived from Arkansas in the fall, but when the season finally opened, it did not matter that the young freshman had superior skills. Fox’s efforts and bearing had earned him the job.
“He’s a great leader and his work ethic is phenomenal,” VanGiesen said. “I did not think a 30-some-year-old man could come in, but I tell you what–he competes with us. He’s more than willing to do anything we’re doing. Never have I heard come out of his mouth, `Man, I’m too old for this.’ I hear that more from myself than I do from him and I’m only 22.”
“That’s the heart of the story. What this guy has pulled off,” echoed Mathieson. “How many guys at 34 years old can get themselves in shape and have the character, have the desire to go through the preseason, practice in 90-some degrees. It’s football from 6 in the morning till 9 at night. And have a goal. And be committed. The total committment is the story.”
– – –
He is starting at quarterback and carrying a perfect 4.0 grade-point average, and so it does not matter that Blackburn, which never has had a winning season in its 16 years of playing football, is 2-6.
Tom Fox risked, broke free, set a goal and persevered, pursuing it without that sense of entitlement so prevalent in the modern athlete. That is rare and why his story is special, captivating and why outsiders constantly approach him.
“Can we have your autograph?” a couple asked him after a game earlier this season.
“Is it for your son?” Fox wondered.
“No,” he was told. “We just read about you and wanted to see you play.”
“You’re living my dream,” he has been told by some of the radio hosts who have called him for interviews.
“You’re doing what I want to be doing right now,” others have told him.
“I never imagined it would turn out like this,” Fox said. “I just wanted to put myself in the position to get on the field for one play and to be part of a team and survive the first season. I didn’t have any idea that I’d end up playing. I didn’t even know that it would be fun at all, let alone that I would have the time of my life.”
