Thomas Booker: Like Father, Like Son

They go by slightly different first names, but Tom Booker and his son, Thomas Booker, actually do share a name.

“He’s Thomas Booker IV, I am the III,” the elder Booker explains.

In reality, they share much more than a name.

40 years after his father went through a recruiting process that saw him land at Wisconsin, Thomas Booker is going through his own process that is sure to end with him at a top football power as well. Hard work and dedication put the Bookers in positions to stand out on the field, but football doesn’t define either. And both can point to the same prestigious all-boys school as having a huge influence on their lives.

When Tom Booker was being recruited as a linebacker and defensive end out of Maryland back in 1979, the process was very different.

“Back in the day, most of what got you seen by schools was coaches,” Mr. Booker says. “Coaches saw a lot of players play and coaches saw a lot of players actually play football or other sports.”

There weren’t as many camps and combines though.

Mr. Booker also points to the increased importance on academics these days.

“The only person who was really focused on academics had to be the player,” he says of his time.

He also sensed a greater urgency for players to be ready to play right away even if it was more difficult to actually do so.

“I started as a freshman the third game of the season and started the rest of the season for Wisconsin,” he says. “That’s what they wanted to see out of guys.

“It was a really important thing to be ready to play. All of the preparation that goes on now, getting guys in in June, back in the day, it was all voluntary. And I did it. There was no summer school, no nothing. I left high school 10 days after I graduated and went to work at Wisconsin for the season. It’s very different. The recruiting is different, the scholarship is different. It’s very different, but it’s much better.”

Irish Sports Daily Booker has followed his father's footsteps as a standout at Gilman.

Before Tom Booker could get to Madison, he was at The Gilman School in Baltimore, the same nationally-known private school where his son is currently standing out on and the field and in the classroom.

“A big part of what Gilman is all about is not only academic excellence, but honor,” Tom Booker explains. “Honor in this context means everything from being a great citizen to a great friend to a great member of the community as well. It teaches you honor, it teaches you character. That’s what the school is all about.”

Booker is best friends with former Gilman head coach Biff Poggi and played on the same Gilman squad as current head coach Timothy Holley.

“You see a lot of Gilman graduates teaching at Gilman,” says Booker. “Coach Holley is not an unusual guy. There are a number of my classmates who have come back to teach. It’s a community that is very tight-knit.

“Kind of like Notre Dame. You hear a lot of the same stuff.”

Before Thomas Booker became a star football player at Gilman, he was a standout basketball player on the youth level. In fact, his parents didn’t even let him play football until he was 13 years old.

“He was the biggest guy on the team and I noticed the coach used him to guard whoever the fastest, most herky-jerky, slippery guard was,” his father says. “He would be the big center, taller than all of the other kids and would be the guy they’d put on the fastest guard. When I saw that and I saw his willingness to win and the fact he would work very, very hard, his work ethic really showed me what he could do when he wanted to do something.”

Booker’s father didn’t start as a football player either.

“Believe it or not, I was a tennis player,” he laughs before adding that in the ninth grade, his own father told him there weren’t many 6-foot-3, 210-pound tennis players.

Even bigger than his father at that age, size actually prevented Thomas from playing football as a youngster until he found a league with no weight limit.

“He was 6-1, 235 pounds in eighth grade,” his father says.

He wasn’t on a great team that year, but stood out as a tight end and defensive end and was selected as part of a Maryland all-star team that made it to the semifinals in a national tournament in Austin, Texas.

“After he did that, I said, ‘Thomas, do you really like this?’” Mr. Booker recalls. “He said, ‘Dad, I want it.’

“That’s when we started preparing.”

It was definitely more preparation than playing right away as he entered Gilman at a time when Poggi had led the team to perennial national power status. Booker didn’t see the field much on game days his freshman year, but his father heard all about the impact he was making on the practice field from his coaches.

“They told me what kind of player he was in practice,” Mr. Booker says. “I saw the work he put in in practice and the work he put in in the eighth grade getting prepared for the ninth grade, how hard he worked off the field and how hard he worked in practice when he was not seeing one down.”

The NFL was never the ultimate goal for the Bookers.

“The reason you play football isn’t to go pro,” Tom Booker says. “The reason you play football is to learn lessons in life. That’s why you play sports. Football is a great vehicle for learning how to deal with very tough things and adverse situations and you have to learn how to come together.

“All of that adversity teaches you how to read a man’s character, how to read your own character. In football, you learn a lot about what’s going to happen when somebody is beating you. You’ve got to find a way. How do you take coaching? How do you get inside yourself to figure out how to do your best? This is a game where you line up and the next play is on film and everybody sees it. It’s a really tough prism to operate in. Football was always that kind of thing.”

Mr. Booker never had to question his son’s talent or physical potential.

“It was about, ‘Does he have the mindset? Does he have the work ethic?’” he says. “I was seeing that.”

But given the home he was raised in, that shouldn’t have been a surprise.

“At home, it’s really all about what kind of person you want to be,” Mr. Booker says. “We have a saying in our house that ‘Champions do willingly and with excellence what others would never do at all.’

“That’s the way we think about it. We use terms like, ‘What kind of person are you when nobody’s looking and only you know?’ We think self-control is important, all of those values. I think every parent has gone down this path. It’s not like we took him to some class or something. We really just tried to focus on the basics and invest in our kids.”

Thomas’ older sister, Sydney, graduated from Princeton and is in her third year of law school at Duke University. His mother is a partner and the head of diversity at the prestigious law firm McGuireWoods. His father has also enjoyed a successful career in business.

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“That’s what our family does, we’re grinders,” Mr. Booker says. “24 by 7 household, man, we roll.”

Thomas proved his grind the summer before his junior year as he pursued and was accepted into Stanford’s High School Summer College, a program that essentially made him a college student in Palo Alto for nine weeks. It was another parallel he had with his father’s upbringing.

“When I was a kid, my parents made sure every summer that I would never go three months without having some sort of academic engagement,” Mr. Booker says. “I think the summer is a time when you stretch your body and should stretch your mind.

“We always looked for something to allow him to stretch his mind. By the time he was a junior, he was such a good student that we thought maybe it was time.”

His roommate for the summer was a chemistry student who was taking a 15-credit course.

“These were all kids going after it,” his father says. “That’s what he did for nine weeks and he loved it. He worked out while he was there, so I was glad to see he maintained his discipline.

“I was so proud of him as a dad, but that’s what drove him. He wanted the opportunity. He basically had to write a college essay. He had to write five essays. It was like applying to college.”

And now Thomas is looking to pick a college for good. Stanford is one of the top options with the Cardinals having offered a couple months ago. Notre Dame has been one of his top schools for months. After a visit to Notre Dame back in the spring, he’s already locked in an official visit to South Bend for opening weekend.

The Bookers understand it’s the job of each school to convince them their school, program and coaching staff is best for Thomas.

“I think what he has done is he’s remained very realistic and understands there are a lot of talented young men out there,” Mr. Booker says. “He’s willing to work hard. I think he knows what he wants to do. He’s really gotten to a point where he’s focused on the school, the program and what’s going on at his position to really figure out if they’re a good fit for him and if he’s a good fit for them. I don’t think young men always look at it through all of those dimensions to figure out where the fit is and I give him a lot of credit. That’s how he thinks about it.

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“He doesn’t get too much emotional to the high side or too emotional to the low side. He doesn’t focus too much on school or too much on football. He’s very balanced with, ‘Is this the right place for me?’ He’s done a good job of understanding what the school and the programs offer. Most of all, what he’s trying to do is get to know the team, the guys. When we came out to Notre Dame, we got up and went to all of the 5:30 and 6 a.m. meetings. We went to practice, no sleeping in. He really wants to know who those guys are.”

Mr. Booker is proud of his son, not because of the football player he’s becoming, but because of the person he’s becoming.

“As a dad, the one thing you want is to have your kids do the best for themselves,” he says. “I never thought about him being a Division-I football player. I just wanted him to be the best kid he could be and be somebody you’d be proud of.

“I couldn’t be happier to be thought of as his father and I hope he’s happy to be thought of as my son. That says it all.”