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Demaryius Thomas watches the butterfly flit across the front of his jersey, a flash of yellow and black in a sea of orange, and land on his chest. Thomas is motionless, solemn, his frozen stance an invitation to the visitor to make himself at home. But the butterfly has places to go, and Thomas watches him fly away, a hint of a smile tugging at his mouth.
It lasts only a few seconds, this random encounter between athlete and insect. But it says so much about Thomas: his quiet playfulness, his delight in the moment, his talent for concealment. Watching videos of him off the field, gently hosting butterflies or playing with children, it’s easy to forget about his true size — six-three, 225 pounds — and the exceptional toughness that carried him through a decade in the National Football League. The toughness was there from the start, and it helped him achieve more than most NFL receivers could hope for, but it couldn’t save him from an untimely death. In fact, the toughness likely contributed to his demise, to the extent that it kept him in the game three times longer than the career span of the average wideout.
Now that the Denver Broncos have broken their nine-year playoff jinx and decided to add Thomas to their Ring of Fame, I keep thinking back to the absurdly talented, perpetually contending group they were a decade ago, and particularly the heart of that team, Demaryius the Gregarious. There’s no shortage of YouTube clips showing him doing what he did best: outrunning and out-juking the coverage, finding a patch of daylight that might be only a few inches or thirty yards wide, a space he claims as if he suddenly materialized there, drawn to this particular spot along with the football, predestined to meet up at this exact rendezvous point. Then hauling in the catch. Motoring into the end zone. Spiking the ball with the vehemence of a Moses blasting water out of rock, that his people might drink.
Over the course of eight seasons, Thomas performed his miracles weekly for the Broncos, shattering franchise records, earning five Pro Bowl appearances, two trips to the Super Bowl, a slew of highlight reels. Sixty-three touchdowns in all. Close to 10,000 yards over the course of his career — not Jerry Rice territory, but remarkable for a receiver who frequently played hurt. It was an exhibition of speed and power, yes, and the sheer joy of doing what he did so well. But it was also about toughness and resiliency in a sport that exacts punishments beyond the purely physical, losses that are hard to calculate or even anticipate until it is too late. Football was Thomas’s path to freedom, to riches and glory and to changing other people’s lives for the better, but the toll could not have been higher. Dead at 33 is not much of a bargain.
“Bargain” is probably the wrong word. It didn’t start out as a Faustian arrangement at all, but as a means of escape. Sports have always been the stuff of hopes and dreams of the impoverished and disadvantaged, the elusive ticket to somewhere better. In the evangelical community in rural Georgia in which he grew up, Thomas was regarded as singularly blessed — meaning he had certain raw skills and the temperament to put them to good use.
They were what he had to offer after the police burst into his home and took his mother and grandmother to jail. Minnie Pearl Thomas, the grandmother, was allegedly the queen of a crack cocaine empire and drew two life sentences. Thomas’s mother, Katina Smith, refused to testify against her mother and was sentenced to twenty years. Since his father was in the military and frequently absent, eleven-year-old Demaryius became the man of the house. (Both women would eventually have their sentences commuted by President Barack Obama, in time for Katina to see her son play in Super Bowl 50.)
In high school, he played basketball and football and ran track and was considered enough of a triple threat to attract scholarship offers from Georgia, Georgia Tech and Duke. He picked Georgia Tech and persevered there, despite coaching changes on the football team that saddled him with a run-centric offense. He went to the NFL combine with a broken foot but was still deemed one of the top wide receiver prospects in the 2010 draft: unusually fast for a big man, yet surprisingly strong for a speedster. The Broncos thought enough of him to pick him in the first round and sign him to a five-year contract. He was joined in training camp by his combine buddy Eric Decker and a dynamic if erratic rookie quarterback, Heisman winner Tim Tebow.
Thomas didn’t get much of a chance to prove himself that first year. He missed half the season while his foot mended. In his first game, he collected eight catches for 97 yards and a touchdown. But more injuries — forearm, ankle, a concussion — kept him off the field most of the rest of the year.
In 2011, the team landed a new head coach, wily John Fox, and Thomas and Tebow finally got playing time. Thomas took lots of notes at team meetings. He worked hard at practice, getting schooled by all-pro Champ Bailey in route-running and secondary-shredding. Tebow’s passes wobbled, lurched and sailed more than they spiraled, but Thomas became an expert at climbing high or diving low to reel them in.
In a wildcard playoff game against the heavily favored Pittsburgh Steelers, Thomas had four catches for 204 yards — despite having sustained a broken leg just a month before. The capper came on the first play in overtime, when Tebow found Thomas wide open at midfield. Thomas stiff-armed cornerback Ike Taylor, outran two other defenders, and notched an 80-yard touchdown. It was the shortest overtime in the history of the playoffs.
The next year, Fox replaced Tebow at quarterback with Peyton Manning, swapping out a sporty but fickle roadster for a high-mileage but dependable Mercedes. Age and injury had whittled Manning into a largely immobile pocket passer, but that deficit seemed negligible compared to his veteran savvy for reading defenses and his still formidable arm. He expected punctiliousness and smarts from his receivers, and he got them from Denver’s rising stars: Thomas, Decker, tight end Julius Thomas, Brandon “The Slot Machine” Stokley, Wes Welker and, later, Emmanuel Sanders.
Manning had worked with Stokley at Indianapolis, but he soon developed an even tighter rapport with Demaryius, who became his favorite target for just about every play in the book: deep routes, crosses, checkdowns, quick outs and screens that relied on Thomas’s speed and refusal to go down. His ability to rack up extra yards after the catch meant that every pass to him had the potential of turning into a footrace to the end zone, defenders flailing away behind him and sometimes dragged in his wake as he crossed the goal line.
What Rod Smith was for Elway, Thomas was for Manning. The anointed one. The spark at the heart of an intricate but smoothly running machine. Together, they helped to shape one of the most explosive passing offenses in the history of the league. The numbers for 2013 were simply ridiculous: 55 touchdown passes for Manning, most of them going to Thomas (14), Julius Thomas (12), Decker (11), and Welker (10). A grab by Demaryius marked Manning’s ascendancy to most career touchdown passes ever, surpassing Brett Favre. The team shelled legendary defenses (seven touchdown passes against the defending Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens) and piled up victories.
Except when it didn’t. The 2013 season brought the Broncos back to the championship game for the first time since the Elway era, only to be pummeled by the Seattle Seahawks. Thomas was just about the only bright spot in the 43-8 shellacking, setting a Super Bowl record of 13 receptions for 118 yards, despite playing with a separated shoulder.
The team returned to the championship game two years later with a new coach, Gary Kubiak, and won it all this time — largely on the strength of an opportunistic defense led by Von Miller. Creaking to the finish line, his stats no longer dazzling or even mediocre, Manning promptly retired. Thomas did not, even though it was evident that his role on the team was changing. Kubiak stressed defense and ball control. Frequently double-teamed and no longer the primary target, Thomas was used as decoy, blocker, disrupter. He still caught enough passes to make it to the Pro Bowl, even though hampered by the team’s long-running and futile quest to fill Manning’s shoes at quarterback.
Thomas’s output dropped significantly in his last two years as a Bronco. How much of it was the musical chairs at quarterback, the coaching scheme or the aggregate wear and tear on a big man swarmed by defenders is difficult to say. But midway through the 2018 season, the Broncos traded him to Houston for a couple of draft picks. His first game as a Texan was in Denver, against his former team. The fans cheered him. He caught three passes for 61 yards, and Houston won the game by two points. A few weeks later, he tore his Achilles, landed on injured reserve and was released.
He bounced to the New England Patriots, then the New York Jets. He never got on the field for a real game in New England. He played eleven games for the Jets but notched only one touchdown. He was a journeyman now, a short-timer, the clock ticking away and the available moves dwindling. In 2021, calling it a “tough decision,” he announced his retirement from the NFL.
“I’m grateful I did ten, eleven years,” he said. “I’m so grateful for that, and now I can move on. I’m happy, I’m healthy. And now I can try to find my next itch.”
Six months later, he was gone. His body was discovered by a relative in a shower at his home in Roswell, Georgia. The official cause of death was a seizure, one of a series of convulsions he suffered as the result of a bad car crash two years earlier. But a post-mortem examination also showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the brain disease common among athletes who have endured too many blows to the head. Thomas had absorbed hellacious impacts over his career, from hard landings to gang tackles to high-velocity helmet-on-helmet concussions, and his symptoms progressed from headaches to memory lapses, paranoia and falls. Friends told the New York Times that he isolated himself in his last years and was taken advantage of by the sort of hangers-on who comprise the desperate entourage of fading sports icons.
He had reportedly made $75 million over the course of his career and had grand plans for investments, charities, a gathering place for family. But he was not happy or healthy, thanks to the crash and the damage football did to his brain. There will always be the clips of his electrifying performances, the hundreds of catches and collisions and celebrations, but to see them now is to realize that what made him such a magnificent player may also have contributed to his doom, a few days short of his 34th birthday.
At the height of his powers, Thomas was an inspiration to aspiring young athletes across the country, his thousand-watt smile a beacon of confidence, a constant reminder to seize the moment as it comes hurtling toward you and run with it. That smile is inextricably part of his legacy. More than most people, perhaps, he knew how important it was to savor joy because joy never lasts.
It lands for a moment, and then it flies away.