EUGENE — De’Anthony Thomas tenses up when asked about the end of his NFL career. The former running back/wide receiver for the Oregon Ducks looks briefly off to the side, his bright smile beginning to fade as his eyes narrow behind black-rimmed glasses.
“I feel like my career never came to an end,” the 33-year-old says. “I never retired, you know? I can still go back today. I just feel like a lot of things wasn’t in my favor. I just want to be more in control in my life. And that’s what I’m doing now. Just being in more control and being able to create my own momentum.”
Thomas is one of the Ducks’ all-time great playmakers, once viewed as the fastest player in college football. As a child, he earned the nickname “Black Mamba” from Snoop Dogg, playing for the rapper’s youth football team in Southern California.
Steeped in expectations as a five-star recruit and the No. 1 athlete in the country, he flipped to Oregon from hometown USC. And the Oregon teams he dazzled for under coach Chip Kelly, led by Marcus Mariota, helped place the Ducks firmly among the top programs in the country.
After things didn’t work out like he imagined they would in the NFL, Thomas now admits: “I deal with a lot of trauma.”
Thomas says he started playing disc golf about a year ago and has seen notable improvement since picking up the game. Sean Meagher/The Oregonian
Turn around, and he’s gone. Fast as ever.
On the disc golf course at Eugene’s Alton Baker Park, with Autzen Stadium peeking through the trees, Thomas runs up to his new friend, commercial pilot Ken Helms. He asks Helms, 51, if they can play a round together, discs spilling out the back of his specialized backpack.
Helms agrees, and the pair get in some practice throws off the first tee. This is Thomas’s new passion: playing disc golf at courses all over Oregon, participating in tournaments and honing his skills. He is obsessed with the technicality, the various discs, and the ways he can improve.
This relatively obscure sport, played regularly by an estimated 4 million people around the world with 250,000+ registered players in the United States and more than 200 courses in Oregon, is now Thomas’s primary competitive arena.
Navigating complicated feelings about football after seven seasons in the NFL with Kansas City and Baltimore, Thomas has found a new sanctuary now that he’s back living in Eugene.
“What I love about this is, can’t nobody hold me back but myself,” said Thomas, shaking a disc.
Early in Thomas and Helms’ warmup session, the sound of chains clanging echoes off the trees.
“Let’s go!” Thomas yells, hyping up Helms. “Did you see that?”
Helms accidentally made a hole-in-one, admittedly not in the basket he was aiming for. Still, Thomas radiates positive energy as he steps up to the tee, seemingly amazed at his friend’s skill.
With three quick steps, a twist of his body, and a sharp flick of the wrist, Thomas throws the disc a considerable distance. Farther than the kickoff he ran back for a touchdown in the Fiesta Bowl against Kansas State more than a decade ago. And much farther than Helms, who’s been playing disc golf for 30 years.
“He has a ton of power,” Helms says of Thomas. “He just needs to harness it.”
Thomas and Helms have played more than a few rounds of disc golf together. Sean Meagher/The Oregonian
Out on the course, Thomas’s shoulders drop. His smile is infectious. He says he discovered disc golf last year after moving back to Eugene from Baltimore, where his professional football career hit a stopping point after he opted out of the COVID season in 2020.
Thomas now works for David Allen Capital brokering small business loans, a job which he relentlessly promotes on a highly active Instagram account.
His phone tucked in his pocket, Thomas makes daring throws between trees, around bushes and beyond fallen logs. He leans forward on one leg for “putts” — the short throws into the basket from just a few feet away. On his drives, he bites down on his lower lip, focused with intensity as the disc zips out of his hand on a bee line.
One of several favorites in his bag is a bright, orange disc with a black Oregon Duck logo on the front. Scrawled on the back in sharpie is his name and phone number, in case he loses it. His disc marker is yellow with “DAT” written on it.
“It’s been an incredible experience because I get to compete in a different way,” Thomas says. “People like to battle against me. Brings out that competitive spirit. What I love is people know me for running, but with this it’s like, I can’t use my legs. I gotta use my mind.”
Being out in nature relaxes Thomas, he says. He can slow down and breathe. But he still moves with pace, seeking some extra cardio after an early-morning workout which featured intense resistance training.
Questions about why he moved back to Eugene, whether he has played disc golf with former Oregon teammates, and how he feels about the modern college football landscape all cause Thomas to bristle. He is hardly interested. They drag him out of the delirium of the disc. He’d much rather focus on getting around the hazelnut plant blocking his path to the basket.
“I need to get NIL from disc golf,” he jokes. “I didn’t even have a car when I was at Oregon.”
The plan for Thomas in his newfound passion is simple:
“I’mma be on the pro tour.”
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Disc golf with De’Anthony Thomas
Helms isn’t a football guy. He only learned the man he calls “D” was once a college football superstar from a video Thomas posted to Facebook of one of his Oregon highlights.
The Eugene resident had no idea Thomas’s nickname was bestowed by Snoop Dogg. Or, initially, that he played football at all. Perhaps that is why Thomas enjoys his company so much.
Both men are originally from Southern California, albeit different neighborhoods nearly two decades apart in age. While Helms notes the first-ever disc golf course was installed in the 1970s in the manicured hills of Pasadena, Thomas grew up in a single-parent household with four brothers in underserved Crenshaw. For a time, he lived with his grandpa.
Thomas daps up and says goodbye to Helms. He then settles himself next to a bike rack at the edge of Alton Baker, a new group of disc golfers approaching the first tee and periodically glancing over at him.
He says Ducks coach Dan Lanning once walked by and asked what he was up to out here, with Thomas offering up a sample throw displaying his power. Ever the showman.
“One thing about me, I feel like I’ve always been bigger than football,” he says. “Me having the name Black Mamba, and Snoop being able to just put me on a bigger stage than a lot of football players, I feel like it separated me from just a typical football player. That’s why I’m so grateful now in my life, because I have so many opportunities where I could pretty much just live off my first and last name.”
But there seems to have been something aching in Thomas all day. A feeling of being in two places in his life at once. People who knew his name, and knew it for something other than disc golf, were following him around asking about subjects which placed him right back in the fishbowl he just got out of.
Yet there is an apparent dichotomy of wanting to revel in that fame — utilizing it to promote his business funding work, and to build out a disc golf brand — while also seeking to shed it and become the anonymous everyman. A desire to move on yet not be forgotten.
“I definitely feel like I need more credit,” he says of his impact on Oregon football, frustration in his voice.
He later adds: “Why am I not playing (in the NFL)? It’s not because I don’t want to play. It’s because they don’t want me to play.”
In one breath, Thomas speaks about the need for continual growth and self-care. He looks inward and seems to acknowledge the emotional pain football has caused him.
In the next, he jumps right back into the subject at hand and declares, “Tiger Woods did something big in the sport of golf, but I think I’m gonna do something bigger (in disc golf).”
And so, the speedster searches once again for the rush of being the man in the arena. And, simultaneously, for a quiet place in the woods to heal. Thomas tucks his discs back in their bag, tossing it in the back of his Range Rover.
“I’ve got a lot of trauma that I deal with, and sometimes this helps me balance it out,” Thomas says, gesturing out to the course. “You kind of take it out on the disc, you know? You can take all your frustrations out on the disc.”