Keeping the Faith : Gerald Thomas Forsakes a Chance at Major College Football for His Beliefs

The River Ridge Mall Cinema sits about a mile down Candlers Mountain Road from Liberty University.

The other day, the theater showed “One Magic Christmas” and “Back to the Future,” but none of Liberty’s 6,900 students went to see the movies.

College rules forbid them.

Students at the fundamentalist Christian university are allowed to view only films that are brought on campus by school officials. They cannot smoke, drink or engage in premarital sex. Men must wear ties and women must wear dresses to class. Television is censored. Dating is monitored: Freshmen and sophomores can only double date and interracial couples of any age must have permission from their parents to date. Rock ‘n’ roll, disco, country and western and even Christian rock music are forbidden.

Liberty is Jerry Falwell’s school.

And Liberty is where Gerald Thomas, who turned down a chance to play major college football, has matriculated from Faith Baptist High in Canoga Park. Thomas is at Liberty to play basketball, having come to the conclusion that he’d rather expose his knees to the constant pounding of a gym floor than the aggression of an overzealous linebacker. He is the Flames’ third forward, averaging 2.9 points, 4.3 rebounds and 19 minutes a game for a 7-3 team.

Mostly, though, Thomas is at Liberty because that’s where he wants to be. He can believe what he wants to believe and be accepted without being an outcast.

“If I went to a secular school,” he says, “and somebody saw me praying in the hallway, it would lift some eyelids. Or, if somebody asked me to go to a frat party, it would put me in an uncomfortable position. Why go to a lions’ den when you can go where the Lord wants you to go?”

Liberty, founded in 1971 with classes at Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church, is a bastion of fundamentalism, open only to born-again Christians who must profess their faith orally and in writing as part of the admissions procedures. It is a fast-growing school with big plans for its athletic program, including upgrading the NCAA affiliation of the basketball team from Division II to Division I in the 1988-89 season, Thomas’ senior year.

Thomas enjoys it here in the “City of Churches.”

“I like the Christian fellowship,” he said of the environment at Liberty. “It’s so much different from what I see at a USC or a UCLA. That’s not to say those are not good schools. Obviously, they are, based on what the world sees as successful. But, for me, the Lord wants me to go where I can continue my Christian education. It will put me in the position to see the needs of Christian kids.”

An aspiring youth pastor, Thomas even likes the rules.

“If you want to be successful in life,” he said, “you have to have discipline.”

His favorite rule is the one requiring ties. Dozens of ties hang from the bookshelves in his room.

“I collect them,” he said.

Thomas was something of a legend at Faith Baptist.

He was a two-time All-Southern Section choice in football, a three-time All-Southern Section pick in basketball and won nine individual league championships in track and field.

“When he was here,” said Brian Neely, the school’s athletic director, “he was idolized by all the elementary school kids.”

One day, Neely said, he was walking through the school when he overheard some kids talking about sports heroes. One of them mentioned Steve Garvey, and another mentioned Dusty Baker. Finally, a third asked: “What about Gerald Thomas?”

In football, Thomas passed for 33 touchdowns and ran for 14 in three seasons as the Contenders’ varsity quarterback. In games in which he was healthy, the team was 30-1. Although Thomas’ passing statistics were not extraordinary--he never threw for more than 802 yards in a single season--his value to the team, Neely said, was his leadership. “He kind of dragged the team down the field with him,” Neely said. As a senior, he was the Delphic League MVP and led Faith Baptist to a 12-0 season and the Southern Section Eight-Man Large Schools Division championship.

In basketball, he averaged 16 points and 12.7 rebounds over a four-year career and, Neely said, “brought our program from nowhere.” His career point and rebound totals are school records. “And he was an unselfish ballplayer, too,” Neely said. “He wasn’t a one-man show out there.” In his senior year, Thomas was the Delphic League MVP and the Contenders shared the league title.

In track and field, Thomas won league titles in the high jump and shotput all four years, ran for two league-winning 440-yard relay teams and also won a league title in the triple jump one year. “With the proper training,” Neely said, “he could be a great decathlete.”

Given his athletic ability and his size (6-5, 220 pounds), several colleges thought he could be a great quarterback, too. Neely said he was approached by coaches from UCLA, BYU, Washington State and Colorado State.

Although Thomas played only eight-man football at Faith Baptist, Pierce College assistant coach Chad Fenwick said he was “loaded” with potential. The Faith Baptist track team works out at Pierce, so Fenwick had a chance to see Thomas up close. “He was very green,” Fenwick said, “but he had a lot of ability. He’s a big kid, he’s strong and he can jump and run and throw the ball.”

Harry Morgan, the Faith Baptist football coach, said last year that Thomas was wasting his time playing basketball and that, as a football player, he was sitting on a gold mine. “He could be making $5 million as a pro quarterback,” Morgan said. “There are a lot of 6-5 guys who can dunk. As a black quarterback, with his athletic ability and leadership qualities, he’s worth a lot of money.”

Major college basketball coaches seemed to agree that Thomas’ future was in football.

Thomas said Pepperdine was the only Division I school that showed any interest in him. And Pepperdine assistant coach Tony Fuller said the Waves were only interested because Thomas was recommended to the coaches by a Pepperdine professor. After seeing him play, Fuller said he was no longer interested. He said Thomas wasn’t big enough to be a power forward on the Division I level and wasn’t quick enough to be a guard.

“I personally thought he was a little heavy,” Fuller said.

All that probably didn’t matter much to Thomas, though.

He had decided early on that he wanted to attend a Christian school and that basketball was his first love. When Liberty, a member of the Mason-Dixon Athletic Conference, offered a basketball scholarship, Thomas jumped at the chance.

Regarding the scholarship offers he received to play major college football, Thomas said: “I just thanked the Lord that the schools were interested, but I didn’t give it any more thought than that. . . .

“My heart’s not there. I love basketball, and if I have to--I won’t say die--but if I have to break my back trying to make myself into a better basketball player, I’ll do it.

“Coach Morgan would probably laugh at me for saying this, but even if I got a $10-million offer to play football right now, I’d probably think about it and hold my breath for a couple of seconds, but I’d stick with basketball because I just see so many things in football that don’t agree with me. I enjoyed it in high school, but in college you just get off into a whole different thing--the importance placed on it and the level of injury. . . .

“I won’t say money doesn’t interest me, but it’s not my main interest.”

Thomas’ main interest is his faith.

His class schedule this semester includes Christian growth, Old Testament and evangelism. His goal of becoming a pastor comes as no surprise to his mother, Darlene Foreman.

“I thought he was going to be a minister when he was little because he was that kind of child,” she said. “He was a giving child. If he had a cookie, he would give the whole cookie to somebody else if they asked him for it. . . .

“He was a perfect child from birth. When Gerald was 4 1/2 or 5 months old, he was already walking. He was just like a perfect dream. He never gave me an ounce of trouble. He’s been a Christian child all the way.”

Thomas’ parents were divorced when he was less than 2 years old, and Foreman worked three jobs to support Gerald and her daughter, Myra, so Gerald spent a lot of time with his grandmothers. “There was not too much influence from anybody else because we kept to ourselves, more or less,” Foreman said. “His grandmothers are good, Christian people, so he was always in that environment.”

Thomas wasn’t introduced to sports until the family moved from Inglewood to Canoga Park when he was in the seventh grade. He went to magnet schools for advanced students, Foreman said, “and they were geared toward studying.”

His interest in Faith Baptist began, he said, when he was an eighth-grader at Columbus Junior High, which sits just across Farralone Avenue from Faith Baptist. He and his friends used to throw rocks at the school. One day, expecting a confrontation with a Faith student, Thomas was surprised when the student calmly asked him why he thought so little of Faith Baptist to be throwing rocks at the school.

“I liked the way the guy represented himself,” Thomas said.

And so he looked into going to school there.

Five years later, he is mature beyond his years, a well-mannered, articulate, immensely likable person who, said Liberty basketball Coach Jeff Meyer, “lives out the Christian faith very well for someone only 18 years old.”

Thomas was starting for the Flames at the beginning of the season. He pulled down 13 rebounds in the opener, but Meyer has since gone to a bigger lineup, cutting into Thomas’ playing time.

“The biggest question we have with G, and the thing we’re trying to communicate to him,” said Meyer, a former Purdue assistant, “is the fact that his intensity must be stronger and more consistent. We feel that he got by at the high school level with 60 to 70% intensity and really did well because of his natural abilities. G does a lot of things well, but he’s going to have to improve in every area.”

Still, Meyer said that Thomas, because of his personality, “will be a leader in our program and even as a freshman has made a very positive impact.”

His mother suspects that he’ll have an impact off the court, too.

“When he comes to the self-realization of the kind of effect he has on people,” she said, “he’s going to be a very dynamic man. He’s going to reach people. He’s that kind of a personality. . . .

“I always tell him, ‘Thank God for you,’ because I know what God felt like when he looked at Jesus and he was well pleased. I am well pleased with that young man.”

Even if he doesn’t play football.

‘If I went to a secular school and somebody saw me praying in the hallway, it would lift some eyelids. Why go to a lions’ den when you can go where the Lord wants you to go?’

Gerald Thomas