Philip Thomas often speaks so fast he seems to interrupt himself, but his soft, light brown eyes keep earnest contact. The muscular six-foot, 185-pound teenage athlete wears red-and-black Jordan-logo everything, including toothbrush-scrubbed sneakers, and a brand-new haircut . A tattoo of a Psalms passage adorns his massive left bicep.
Michael McElroy
Philip Thomas is the quickest high school defensive back you've never heard of.
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Philip's senior prom is tomorrow. And with a formality bordering on daintiness, he extricates a suit from a wardrobe bag and lays it out on a leather armchair in his aunt's immaculate living room. The ensemble is a four-piece mesmerizer, full of sharp angles and featuring a flashy black-and-gray checkered pattern that pro-football fashion eccentric Deion Sanders might appreciate.
Philip's aunt and adoptive guardian, Marion Cooper, a lean, strong-boned woman in an Obama inauguration T-shirt, provides the financial narration: Everything, including tie and matching leather shoes, cost her only $279 at Peter's Sportswear in downtown Miami.
It's the 18-year-old's first suit, and it represents something truly unlikely: a future far away from this primer-white duplex on the northern outskirts of Liberty City, far away from the Miami violence that claimed a friend in a drive-by, far away from a troubled childhood spent visiting prisons to see his oft-arrested mother and his half-brothers locked up on murder charges.
His prom is tomorrow, followed by graduation. He'll need the formalwear for a schedule that will soon include game-day dress codes. In June, Philip will travel to Canton, Ohio, where he's been selected to play football for the U.S. team in an eight-nation youth tournament. The next month, he'll report to orientation at Syracuse University in New York, where he's received a full football scholarship worth $250,000.
For a hyperactive kid who was banned from playing high school football for bad grades, and nearly dropped out of one of the state's most troubled high schools, it's a turnaround bordering on miracle. "A year ago, I never would've thought I'd be going to college," Philip says, now perched on the edge of a brown leather sofa. "Once I get that diploma, ain't nobody can take that away from me."
It's difficult to imagine a less promising beginning in life than Philip's. He was born November 19, 1990, to a 30-year-old crack addict named Sylvia Thomas. He was the eighth of nine children she had by four men.
He barely knew his father, a man named Michael Byrd, who succumbed to AIDS. At age 3, Philip began living on and off with his Aunt Marion. She had fours sons, two of whom — Pierre and Harvey — were no role models. In August 1995, 16-year-old Pierre and three teenage cronies wearing ski masks descended on a convenience store in Allapattah. Pierre, armed with a .35-caliber Magnum, shot the Indian-born storeowner in the chest and back and then cleared out the cash register. The owner survived. Pierre went to jail.
On an afternoon just seven months later, 17-year-old Harvey ambushed a street rival sitting on a milk crate and opened fire with an automatic pistol. The victim, a 20-year-old Haitian man, collapsed and died in a nearby front yard.
Both brothers are still in prison and will be up for parole next year.
Philip's mom, Sylvia, legally lost her right to raise him after she was arrested for trying to sell four Valium pills to undercover City of Miami vice cops in Liberty City the night before Christmas Eve 1997. She'd been arrested twice before that, for coke possession and trespassing.
So Philip's sternly protective Aunt Marion adopted him. "Philip is family," she says. "I chose to keep him from going into the system."
Philip found someone in the family to look up to: his half-brother Clevan, ten years his senior. The older boy's father had been shot and killed by his best friend in a drunken argument in 1983. Clevan had been a standout defensive back at Miami Jackson Senior High and received a full ride to Florida State University. He quit school before his senior year to enter the 2001 NFL draft, but then tested positive for marijuana use. "I fired my agent; I blamed my girlfriend," says Clevan, who later became an arena football star. "My mind wasn't right, nor was my heart."
So Philip didn't need a D.A.R.E. class to understand addiction and crime. He had family history and jail visits. "The hardest part is when you get up to go, you realize they're not coming with you," he says.
As an adolescent, Philip was a handful — a deeply lonely kid at turns unrestrainable or sullen. "He was just so destroyed about his family," Marion says. "He would act out at school. Every three days, I would get a call from a teacher or a principal."
She refused to medicate him. "They wanted to put him on Ritalin because they thought something was wrong with him," Marion says of school administrators. "I told them: 'Yeah, something's wrong. He never knew his dad until he was lying in the casket, and his mom's got her own demons.'"
In 2005, Marion enrolled Philip in Miami Norland Senior High School. A natural athlete who had played on organized teams throughout his childhood, he made varsity as a freshman. The defensive back adopted Clevan's jersey number 8 and his specialty: making interceptions. But he began getting into fights with other kids, and at year's end, his aunt yanked him from the school.
