Marcus Thames got the news he was dreading in October 2010. The Yankees had just beaten Minnesota in the ALDS, and while his teammates headed to Texas for the next round, the outfielder jumped on a plane back home to Louisville, Miss.
His mom had pneumonia, bad. She regularly contracted it, a result of her being confined to a bed most days, paralyzed from the neck down, but this was worse. As Thames recalled, the doctor was “kinda giving up on her.” He rushed down there, leaving baseball behind without telling her she was coming.
When he opened the door to her hospital room, his mom, surprised and feeling a little better, wanted to know why he had left the team.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, through the tracheotomy in her throat. “Go back and play ball, I’ll be fine.”
So he did. Less than a day after touching down in Mississippi, Thames was on another plane, this one to Dallas. He played in Game 1 of the ALCS, got two hits and an RBI. The Yankees won the game, lost the series. His mother was soon released from the hospital.
“She always wanted me to go out and finish,” Thames said. “Finish, finish, finish, because she wanted me to be strong.”
Thames, whose playing career ended in 2011, is sitting in the media room at Yankee Stadium as he talks. He’s built like a football player — big, not imposing — and carries a calm confidence. He controls the room without dominating it, and when he sits down for this interview, he leans back in his chair and extends his legs.
Thames took a short break from baseball after retirement, but soon found himself in the Yankees organization as a minor league hitting coach. He rose through the ranks and got the same job at the big-league level before last season. That’s a fine story, but today, he’s here to talk about his mom.
Veterine Thames was athletic. She was easygoing and social, according to Stacy, the oldest of her five children. The accident happened in 1982, on the way back from a party, with the kids at their grandmother’s house. Veterine was a passenger in the car, with Marcus’ father, G.W. Hughes, driving. Marcus, 5 years old at the time, has no memory of the night and no memory of his mom before it.
“We didn’t know the extent of it at that point, and then the next day, we found out that our mom was paralyzed, wasn’t gonna be able to do very much for herself,” Stacy said. “Telling kids that, so that almost makes like your heart drop at that moment. We didn’t know what to expect. We didn’t know what to think.”
Turned out that Veterine, despite family living nearby, despite five children, despite the economic reality of being unable to work and despite being the only adult in the house, wanted to live on her own. The oldest kids — Stacy, 10 at the time, and Tabitha, 8 — could learn to cook and help out around the home. That was enough.
From her bed, Veterine made sure the kids did their homework and got up for school, teaching them to run the house. In Louisville — a small town whose population Marcus estimates to be around 7,800 at the time — people knew the family’s situation and helped when they could, even if it was just pointing Marcus to the right aisle in the grocery store. But the reality of their lives was project housing and living tight within their means.
When the kids needed to cook, they brought the ingredients into Veterine’s bedroom and she talked them through how to cut it up and what to do with it. When they had to buy food, a young Marcus went to the grocery store himself. When they needed extra money, one of the kids would go off and find an odd job.
The Thames family survived on disability, food stamps and the force of Veterine’s will.
“She did a lot from that bed,” Marcus said. “A lot more than some people that walk around every day do.”
As soon as he was old enough, Marcus wanted to help in a more substantive way. He joined the National Guard after his junior year of high school, earning a paycheck, he estimates, of $900 a month. He and 59 other soldiers went from Mississippi to Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., for basic training. If that sounds daunting, that’s because it is. With his first phone call, Thames rang home. Veterine got on the line.
“I was like, ‘What in the world am I doing? Why did I do this?’ ” he said.
“You made that decision,” he recalled his mom saying. “Deal with it.”
He stayed in the Guard for four years, from 1994-98. Every bit of that paycheck went home. Today, he calls it, “probably one of the best things that I’ve ever done.”
“It was good for me,” Thames said. “I use a lot of the things that I learned in the Guard in everyday life today.”
Thames was platoon leader in basic training and returned to his high school football team as a better captain. He takes that presence into coaching now.
Before he had signed on, though, there was a caveat. Thames had an inkling he would have a chance to play either professional football or baseball, and asked — if that opportunity arose — whether he would be able to stay with a team during the season and go back to make up Guard drills afterward.
Thames had started for only one year of high school baseball though, and attended East Central Community College in Decatur, Miss., on a football scholarship. He walked onto the baseball team there in the spring of 1996. He got drafted by the Yankees in June. Then decided to play another year in junior college.
Put yourself there for a second. You’re coming from poverty, you walk onto the baseball team despite a football scholarship, you play well enough to get drafted, and then you decide not to sign.
“It was [a hard decision],” Thames said, “but then I said, ‘Eh, go get better.’ Cause I wanted to make sure I was ready to go once I left.”
He went back and played another season, quitting the football team to focus on baseball, and finally signed with the Yankees before the next draft, when their rights to him would have expired. The National Guard granted his request to play professionally and make up his Guard time in the offseason. The first check from the Yankees, $35,000 by Thames’ estimate, got sent straight home, and as it got bigger, so did his contributions.
Eventually, by the time he was playing for the Tigers in 2004, Thames could buy his mom a house. He found a place in Louisville, a four-bedroom brick home in a more upscale neighborhood and equipped it with all the medical equipment Veterine needed. When the day came, Thames told her she was going to a doctor’s appointment and had an ambulance pick her up. It drove to the new place instead. The door swung open and tears hit the ground.
“She just started crying,” Thames said, leaning all the way forward now. “So did I, but it was just one of those moments that I always looked forward to doing for her. … She was just happy. She was happy and she said, ‘I love you, thank you.’ And it’s one of those things that I’ll never forget.”
Thames now has a home in Tampa and a place he rents in Westchester during the season. He has five kids of his own. Four of them knew Veterine — Marcus would put them in her arms and she’d smile wide. They were with Marcus when she died.
She passed on Sept. 23, 2012, of natural causes and with little immediate warning. Marcus was tailgating at a Mississippi State football game the day before, and everything was fine. The next morning, an aunt called him, saying to rush to the hospital.
“I didn’t make it there in time but … ,” he started, then paused, scratching his head. “But I know that she knew that I was on my way.”
That was Marcus’ first year of retirement, the first time he was able to spend Mother’s Day with her in years. They bought a cake, had the whole family over for a big dinner. He got to spend Father’s Day — another holiday on which he always called his mom — with her, too.
Marcus still spends time in Louisville. He makes sure to take his kids by the old house. He wants them to understand where he came from, what it means to be where he is now and why he got out.
“I tell them, the life that they lead is not how their dad lived,” Thames said. “So don’t take it for granted. Always work hard for what you want and what you need.”
That’s what Thames lives his life by, and that’s what got him where he is. What drove him is as simple as it is powerful.
“All Veterine.”