CSUN’s Thomas Is Otherworldly : Shrugging Off Physical Setbacks, Lineman Cheers Lives of Others

E.T. can’t call home because he has no telephone. Money is tight and he can’t afford the additional expense.

E.T. shrugs off the inconvenience. He is moving soon anyway, he says, going back to live with his family in Los Angeles to save some money.

The life of Eric Thomas, full-time student and part-time football player at Cal State Northridge, is distinctly void of frills. Even so, he considers himself rich based on his experiences working as an intern in the psychiatric ward at Pine Grove Hospital in Canoga Park.

He has met many well-educated people at Pine Grove. Some are psychiatrists and therapists. Just as many are patients.

“We have people with Master’s degrees, established people, whose goal some days is to finish a picture without coloring outside the lines,” Thomas says as he sits in the North Campus bleachers before a practice.

“You think you have it hard. Then you meet people who accentuate what society considers the American Dream, and they’ve lost it all.”

He shakes his head.

He is a year away from earning a degree in recreational therapy, but Thomas already has started his life’s work. He yearns, simply, to be “a bright spot in someone’s day.”

Thomas relates to the patients at Pine Grove just as he might any person forced to view the world from the ground floor up.

He’s been in the basement himself. Twice.

On July 14, 1989, Thomas was on his way home from a friend’s wedding rehearsal when he stopped at a fast-food restaurant. As he walked out the restaurant’s front door, bag in hand and heading toward his car, he heard two gunshots.

Instinctively, Thomas lunged for cover, but as he did a third shot rang out. A bullet struck him in the back.

More shots were fired and as he lay sprawled on the ground, he could hear the robbers scurrying behind him.

Then it became quiet. Thomas looked up to find three men standing in front of him, one of them holding a silver handgun.

“Are you all right, big man?” one asked. “Oh man, you just got in the way.”

Thomas told them to go away even though he was certain they would fire at him again. He was a witness, and he could identify them. But the men, after apologizing, fled.

While being rushed to the hospital, Thomas still had the faces of his assailants etched vividly in his mind. He vowed they would not get away with their crime.

In the operating room, Thomas recalls the doctor saying that surgery would be delayed until police could interview him.

But when the police arrived, Thomas says, they instead became his accusers.

They were sure he was a dope dealer. What gang was he in? They knew he had connections.

“I’d never experienced racism like that before in my life,” Thomas said. “It did not matter that I was a college student, that I was a Christian, that I was a football player and I was going to get a scholarship and go on and get an education. That didn’t matter.

“All they saw was a young black man sitting there with a bullet in his back, so instantly I was a gang-banger.”

They didn’t question him about the robbery.

During surgery, doctors traced the bullet’s path as it ripped through a lung, tore through other tissue and missed a main artery by less than a quarter of an inch before lodging in his liver. Any attempt at removal would be too dangerous.

Thomas was told that his liver would form scar tissue around the fragment, forever holding it in place.

During Thomas’ one-month stay in the hospital, a therapist played a game with him that helped increase his lung capacity.

By blowing into a machine, Thomas could make parts inside move to different areas. He earned points accordingly.

“I got so caught up in the game and the points I didn’t really realize I was helping my body heal,” Thomas said. “When I saw that therapist, I got a smile. Later on, I realized how much his visits meant to me and how much I looked forward to them.”

By the fall of 1990, despite the bullet embedded in his liver, Thomas was back on the football field for Santa Monica College, earning second-team all-conference honors as a sophomore.

He earned a scholarship to Kentucky State, but in his first weeks of training with the team during the summer, Thomas noticed blood in his urine.

The bullet was moving, doctors said. Thomas became violently ill with jaundice. His eyes and palms were yellow, his urine was brown, he itched constantly and he was plagued by severe headaches.

He returned to California and the first door he opened was that of a church.

“That was when I made a commitment to God that if He helped me get along with my life I would give my life to Him,” Thomas said. “I told Him I would try to be an example to other people that no matter what happens in their life, if they trust in God they can come out ahead.”

For more than a month, Thomas was in and out of the hospital. He lost 50 pounds and felt like he was “wasting away.”

Then, in a final test before surgery in which doctors feared complications, there came a startling discovery. The bullet had left Thomas’ liver and was floating inside his bile duct.

Thomas asked how that was possible, but his physicians were equally as puzzled. By inserting a scope down his throat, they were able to drill a small hole in the bottom of his bile duct, allowing the bullet to eventually pass through to his intestine, from where it was discharged naturally on Oct. 23, 1991.

Thomas enrolled at Northridge in the spring semester of 1992 and tried out for the football team as a nonscholarship player.

His weight was returning to normal, but not his strength. He was unable to lift 105 pounds from the floor to his chest.

“That was the toughest thing, being 275 pounds and not being able to do that,” Thomas said. “Only two people here besides the coaches knew what I’d been through. People were looking at me like, ‘What’s that guy’s problem?’ ”

Respiratory problems prevented Thomas from playing last season, but by the spring of this year his weight was back up to near 300 and he was able to bench-press 395 pounds.

This season, Thomas is the understudy to Jon Beauregard at right guard for the Matadors. But though he has played somewhat sparingly, he had a major role in what is the highlight of Northridge’s season.

In his only start, against Nevada Las Vegas, Thomas helped clear the way for a school-record rushing performance by Robert Trice.

With Trice gaining 278 yards and scoring three touchdowns, the Matadors upset the heavily favored Rebels, 24-18.

Thomas suffered a strained right knee and a sprained left ankle, but refused to come out, playing every offensive down.

The next few days, he struggled to walk, bouncing gingerly with each step and accepting the ribbing of friends and teammates.

“It hurt, but I wasn’t coming off,” he said with a wide smile. “I was too happy just to be back out there.”

His performance against the Rebels convinced Thomas that his comeback was complete. “I felt like everything I struggled with, all the work and the prayers for me to heal, had come to pass,” he said.

Beauregard, who was benched against UNLV after temporarily leaving the team, has returned to reclaim his starting job. But Thomas is waiting in the wings, hoping that the NCAA will grant him an extra year of eligibility because of his medical problems last season.

“I feel like the old Eric Thomas again,” he says.

And he feels like a man whose purpose is clear. He has a favor to return.

Originally a sociology major, Thomas changed his field of study “even though there’s not a whole lot of money to be made” as a therapist.

“I see people who say ‘I can’t do this’ or ‘I can’t do that,’ ” Thomas says. “I want to take those people aside, tell them what I’ve been through, and let them know that they can make it, too.

“If only one person learns they can overcome things by my example, then I believe I’ve lived up to my end of the bargain.

“God has blessed me so much in life, I feel like it’s my duty to give some back.”