"He played in more than 10,000 straight snaps. Joe Thomas!" Tim Brown says.
And with that, Joe Thomas became a Pro Football Hall of Famer.
TMJ4's Lance Allan asks, "What is it like to have that HOF behind Joe Thomas?"
"It's a little weird, to be honest," Thomas says. "When I hear people say that, it's still hard to think of myself when I close my eyes as a Hall of Famer. Meeting LeRoy Butler at the Merlin Olsen luncheon, at the Super Bowl, one of the guys that I grew up watching and idolized. I had a poster of him on my wall as a kid. And then all of a sudden now, he's coming to me and saying hey Joe! Congratulations! It's just one of those things where it's just, over and over and over again, I want to pinch myself."
Lance Allan asks, "Walter Jones comes to the door. Your daughter says 'I love that you love my dad.' That's just, you can't make stuff like that up?"
"And that was the thing," Thomas says. "It was my kids that ran to the door, thinking that their friends were at the door when Walter knocked. And then they were the ones that were able to tell me and say, 'daddy we made it.' That was a script that I couldn't have written if you let me sit down and try to do it."
Considered one of the greatest left tackles ever, Thomas has a clear choice of how he wants to be remembered.
"I think it's that snaps streaks," Thomas says. "You know, my parents Eric and Sally from Brookfield, they always instilled into me I think good values that helped me in my athletic career. And that snaps streak to me when I see it up in the stadium in Cleveland. To me, that was my loyalty to my team, to my city, but also my teammates. That was the count on me mentality that Barry Alvarez taught us when I was at Wisconsin."
But Thomas, a Brookfield Central guy through and through, still remembers when Tosa East fans held up Patrick Swayze posters to heckle him.
Lance Allan asks, "You ever run into those Tosa East people that had those Patrick Swayze big heads and posters and remind them of who you are now?"
"Yeah, they're probably like he doesn't look like Patrick Swayze much anymore now that he's really bald and a little bit skinny!" Thomas says.
Thomas says his wife Annie and his four kids will be his presenters in Canton during his Pro Football Hall of Fame enshrinement. Fitting because Annie says she held her breath for all 10,363 of the snaps her husband played.
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