Montour High School graduate Tom Gaskins is headed to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Well, for one night at least.
Gaskins, who played three years of varsity football for the Spartans before graduating in 1980, is one of 14 men selected for induction into the Minor League Football Hall of Fame.
The American Football Association-sponsored induction dinner will take place at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, Friday night, Oct. 24, wrapping up a two-day celebration that will include tours of the “real” Hall of Fame, entertainment and more.
Gaskins, a former offensive lineman who started playing organized football at age 9 and didn’t stop until he was 42, said he was shocked to learn he’d been chosen for induction in the Minor League hall.
“I’m just a lineman,” he said recently from his home in Alton, Ill., about 45 minutes northeast of St. Louis, where he lives with his wife, Micki, and two of her five children. “I don’t have (statistics). I can’t throw touchdowns at you. I just hit people.
“I guess I hit people pretty good when I could.”
He hit them for a long, long time. While playing for Montour, where his teams never had a winning season, he attracted interest from dozens of college football programs, several of which visited the Gaskins home in Robinson Township’s Beaver Acres neighborhood.
“But my grades were not good enough,” he said.
Gaskins enrolled at what was then California University of Pennsylvania and started at center as a freshman on the Vulcans’ junior varsity team. But college didn’t suit him, and he decided to enlist in the Air Force. There he played two years for his squadron team and two more years on an all-star base team at the now-decommissioned Chanute Air Force Base near Rantoul, Ill.
Gaskins wound up serving 10 years in the Air Force in security police – including a two-year hitch in his old hometown — before moving into IT work in the private sector after the Gulf War ended.
All the while, though, the itch to play football wouldn’t subside. Gaskins, who was 6-foot-3 and 180 pounds in high school but eventually grew to 6-4 and 240, found a home on a semipro football team that had formed in Springfield, Ill., in 1991. Thus began his lengthy minor league/semipro odyssey that included stops with the Springfield Statesmen, the Springfield Buccaneers, the Sangamo Express and the Capital City Outlaws.
He finally hung up his proverbial cleats at the age of 42, but not before earning the respect of teammates and coaches alike.
One of those coaches – Chris Lawson – nominated him for induction into the Minor League Football Hall of Fame.
Lawson coached Gaskins for seven seasons and said there was a lot to like about him.
“I appreciated his leadership and his dedication to try to be the best version of himself,” said Lawson, who grew up on Pittsburgh’s North Side before moving to the Midwest at the age of 8.
“First and foremost, in anything he does, he’s just a very determined gentleman.”
Although he was playing minor league football, Gaskins never slacked at practice or games, Lawson said. He recalled one particular episode where Gaskins drew the assignment of lining up against a former Division I nose tackle in a semipro league championship game.
Lawson said he told Gaskins before the game that he needed him to “come big.”
“He was like, ‘I don’t know.’ I said, ‘I need you to bring your A-game, buddy. I believe in you.’
“I saw him go over to the sidelines and practice his footwork so he’d be ready and capable of getting a scoop block on this guy. The rest of my guys would never do that – they wouldn’t rehearse to get it right.”
He got it right more often than not, as evidenced by his selection to the minor league hall. Gaskins said there wasn’t anything complicated about his decision to give semipro football a shot.
“It was available, and I wanted to play,” he said. “I got the opportunity.”
Gaskins said playing semipro ball brought him back to his days as a Montour Spartan – particularly when night games appeared on the schedule.
“One of the last games I played was a night game in Peoria (Ill.),” he said. “It was like you’re back in high school. There are people in the stands. You had the concessions. You had professional referees, and it’s the real thing.”
Gaskins said virtually all the guys he played with and against had the dream of one day reaching the National Football League. And he was no exception – at least at the start.
“That was the only reason we were still playing – we were hoping to get a shot,” he said. “Particularly the younger guys.
“One of the last guys I played against in Peoria – he was just out of college and trying to get on one of the (NFL) practice squads. He couldn’t believe how old I was when I took off my helmet.”
By that time, Gaskins had long ago given up on his NFL dreams. But that wasn’t the case years earlier. “When I was in the Air Force, I was still thinking I could get back into college ball and from there, you could definitely get noticed,” he said. “At that time, the University of Illinois was the closest school to Chanute (Air Force Base). But it just never happened.
“As I got older, the dream just dissipated. And then you’re just there to have fun. Fun playing football. Real football.”
Gaskins said he fell in love with the game as a youngster in Robinson Township. He recalled attending a charity basketball game at Montour in 1972 when the high school faculty played a team made up of Pittsburgh Steelers players. He managed to snag autographs from several players, including Hall of Fame linebacker Jack Ham. But a big rookie running back eluded him and other autograph seekers, just like he would dozens of would-be tacklers in the years to come.
Undeterred, Gaskins trailed the player down to the cafeteria.
“I’m 10 years old, and I’m running after him,” Gaskins said. “He went inside and someone put a giant plate of doughnuts in front of him. He was eating them in two bites. I sat in front of him and just stared. He finally said, ‘What.’ I took out my pen and he signed my paper. I flipped the page and said, ‘Can I get two?’ He signed his name again. I got up and ran out the door.
“That was Franco Harris.”
According to Lawson, the soft-spoken Gaskins never thought he was all that great as a player. “He was always his own biggest critic,” Lawson said. “But he was always better than he thought he was.”
Now that he’s days away from being a Hall of Famer, Gaskins said the selection “validates all those years of playing football.”
“People would ask, ‘Why in the world would you get yourself all beat up like that?’” Gaskins said. “Particularly when I got old. But I’d tell them they just didn’t understand.”
Gaskins said in a way, playing football was a way to hang onto his youth. “To try to be that football player you used to be,” he said.
His old coach said he’s proud that the 63-year-old Gaskins will be enshrined in the Hall later this week. “It was a privilege and an honor to have coached him – and to call him a friend,” said Lawson, who – like Gaskins – also is a retired military man.
Lawson said he considers himself a minor league football enthusiast through and through.
“There are three types of people who play minor league football,” he said. “The first is the person who didn’t finish what they thought they were going to do. Maybe they went to college for a couple years, but they didn’t finish. They have something they want to complete in their life. That’s Tom.
“Then you had athletes who just weren’t good enough to go to college. They practiced and they prepared all through high school, but they needed to pay their own tuition to go to (college). This gives them a chance to live out their high school dreams.”
And the third group?
“It’s the only way to legally hurt other people,” Lawson joked. “I’d say about 15% are in that latter category.”
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