This Hunter S. Thompson a prep football maverick

Hunter S. Thompson is alive and well in Cobb County and playing football for one of the top teams in the state.

The 17-year-old feels little connection to the  renegade writer who penned, “I wouldn't advocate sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me.” The namesake has, however, followed his own unorthodox path.

With no previous football experience, this Hunter S. Thompson has come from the edge of nowhere to start at offensive guard at McEachern High School.

With its college-like campus and 2,199 students, McEachern is a storied program that athletes prepare for years to join. The Indians are ranked No. 4 in AAAAA, the state’s most competitive football division.

How does a kid, scant months from joining the team, earn all-conference and the Cobb Touchdown Club’s player of the week?

“On the offensive line, it’s all about heart. You’ve got to have a big heart, and he does,” said Geoff Pastrick, his position coach.

Pastrick first spotted Thompson at a spring McEachern baseball game. The 6-foot-3, 240-pound Thompson had the size for football. Pastrick assumed he was about to graduate and did not approach him.

Thompson showed up at spring football practice, raw but promising. Pastrick wanted to make sure: “Are your mom and dad supportive of you playing?”

“My mom passed away when I was small,” Thompson said. “It’s just my dad and my brothers, and we’re doing the best we can.”

His mom, Pamela Leigh Thompson, had been breastfeeding him when she discovered what she thought was a blocked milk duct. Instead, doctors diagnosed a very aggressive form of breast cancer, which led to a double mastectomy.

In 1995, against her oncologist’s advice, she and Hunter’s father Charlie had son Charles.

In 1997, late in her pregnancy with youngest son Jake, the cancer returned, this time in her liver.

“She went straight from labor and delivery at Northside [Hospital] to chemo,” Charlie Thompson said.

“I don’t remember her ever slowing down,” Hunter said.

In early February 1998, when his baby brother was 3 months old, Hunter was playing a board game with his mom. “She started to act funny,” he said. “Our neighbor came over, and I thought, ‘This is strange,' ... because my dad was taking my mom to the doctor. The whole next day, she was still at the doctor’s.

"Then it was late and dark, and he [Charlie] came home and took me to the back bedroom and told me that mom had passed away. I didn’t believe it. I said, ‘Stop lying.’"

The family got some help from in-laws. At 5, Hunter was the only son who remembered her.

“My biggest fear was that I didn’t want him to bear the burden and grow up too fast,” Charlie Thompson said. “But it probably had to happen.”

Hunter's dad worked long hours in the landscaping business. “I tried to make the decisions my mom would make,” Hunter said. “She gave me level-headedness and the example to think about everything before I act. I helped my brothers get up and get the day going. I learned to cook and I enjoy it.

"I did the dishes without being asked, just to have them done, because when the place is dirty everyone’s in a bad mood. ... I’m always someone who picks things up easily if I am taught the right way.”

Traits earned from his mom’s absence -- self-starting, studying the details, willing to serve -- turned him into an able defender in soccer, his dad’s sport in high school and college.

The other football drew some fear and loathing.

“I definitely got that vibe to not play football,” Thompson said. “My dad did feel more protective of me. But this is something I wanted.”

Letting go was not so easy for the man who slipped the “S” into his firstborn’s name. He never wanted his son to follow any pack.

Charlie Thompson, 45, had grown up in an ultra-liberal household, his mom an art teacher and his dad an Emory philosophy professor with seven academic degrees.  Family friends included James Dickey, the author of “Deliverance.”

Charlie Thompson was a high school student at the private Paideia School when he picked up “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

That book helped position Hunter Stockton Thompson as a pioneer of gonzo journalism, where the author inserts himself as a manic, cynical figure.

“The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong but to those who see it coming and jump aside,” he wrote.

His recurrent theme was the death of the American dream.

Hunter Smith Thompson knew how hard it would be to realize his dream of making McEachern’s roster, even before his dad issued a gonzo challenge.

“If you’re not going to start, it’s not worth it,” Charlie Thompson said.

So Thompson showed up for spring football, his soccer cleats laced tight.