Michael Horrocks’ plane hit the South Tower on Sept. 11. His West Chester football teammates made sure we never forgot

Tom Schafer was a hulking man when he played one preseason game with the Eagles in the summer of 1984. The undrafted free agent center stood at 6-foot-2 and 270 pounds, with a booming voice and an unabashed confidence to match.

By the fall of 2009, his broad frame had hollowed out. His voice had been reduced to a rasp. Schafer could walk, but only gingerly, and for short distances.

Yet here he was, sitting in a West Chester University parking lot, handing out fundraising pamphlets and preaching to tailgaters about his long-lost teammate.

It was not the way most people battling cancer would’ve chosen to spend their time. But Schafer was not most people.

When Schafer was told the disease he’d battled two decades prior had returned in 2008, he had already made a commitment and was determined to see it through, no matter how many rounds of treatment he’d have to endure.

“He still had that fire about the statue,” said former West Chester center Joe Walsh. “He was talking then about everything we see now.”

Walsh motioned to the northwest corner of Farrell Stadium. There, at the base of a hill, stood a bronze likeness of a quarterback, his left foot firmly planted, his right arm cocked, ready to uncork a spiral.

The man was Michael Horrocks, class of 1985. He and Schafer overlapped on the football team for two seasons, but Schafer took a liking to the sophomore’s goofy personality.

And when he found out that that same sophomore had been a co-pilot of Flight 175, the plane that hit the South Tower on Sept. 11, 2001, he was distraught.

Years passed, and Schafer began to coach high school football throughout the region. Some of his players joined West Chester’s program. None knew of Michael Horrocks. Not of his tragic place in history, or of his greatest moment on the field, when he led the Golden Rams to a 35-27 upset win over Delaware in 1983.

They didn’t know of his service in the Marines, or his devotion to his kids, and his wife, and his friends. They didn’t know his name at all. And Schafer desperately wanted them to.

So, he and his teammates came up with a plan, to ensure Horrocks’ presence would be felt for years to come. From 2008 to 2010, the West Chester alums raised $150,000 dollars for a scholarship endowment and a statue to commemorate the late quarterback.

They faced all sorts of challenges, some of them logistical. West Chester had never built a statue on campus before, and had no clear guidelines on the process to have one erected.

In an initial conference call with Horrocks’ teammates, school officials tried to persuade them to build something smaller, like a plaque or a bench. They warned the former players of the money they’d need, and the bureaucratic hurdles they’d face.

But Schafer was undeterred.

“Tom went in there and said, ‘F— you, we’re not doing a plaque. We’re doing a statue,’” said class of 1988 linebacker John Mininno. “And he was not to be denied.”

The end result was not just a statue, but a tradition. Since it was unveiled in 2010, West Chester’s players have tapped Horrocks’ left foot before every practice and game.

They’ve done this so often that you can see scuffs of gold peeking out from beneath the bronze. Horrocks is not here in the physical sense, but this version of him — fearlessly driving down the field, leading his men — is now preserved.

And his teammates intend for it to stay that way.

“We want this to be a legacy,” Mininno said. “We want this to be here for much longer than we’re going to be around.”

Horrocks was born and raised about 70 miles west of West Chester, in Hershey, Pa. He attended Hershey High School, where he played varsity football under head coach Robert “Gump” May.

May was tougher than most coaches. His team did three-a-days throughout the summer; an unusually heavy workload, which had the intended effect of whittling unreceptive players from the roster.

The coach would start camp with 75 kids. Two weeks later, he’d be left with 30.

One kid, in particular, was always in that latter group.

“Mike stayed,” May said.

Horrocks was fighting for playing time with Scott Campbell, a quarterback who would go on to have a six-year career in the NFL. Locals were skeptical that the backup would perform in the opportunities he did get, but he quickly proved them wrong.

Over his one season as a starter at Hershey, and limited appearances before that, Horrocks led his team to a litany of come-from-behind wins, including one against rival Palmyra High School, which took a 21-point lead in the first quarter.

“After Scott Campbell graduated, everybody thought, ‘Well, they lost their big gun,’” May recalled. “Well, Mike jumped in and he was just as big a gun.”

Gump reached out to a friend, Rick Daniels, a part-time assistant who later became West Chester’s head coach, and sent him some film of Horrocks. In the spring of 1981, the quarterback drove to campus for a visit.

Daniels was already impressed by what he saw on film. Horrocks didn’t just have a strong arm; he was also quick on his feet, and had an air of unflappability about him. He joined West Chester’s team that fall as a backup quarterback.

Once again, Horrocks found himself in the unenviable position of filling in for an NFL-caliber player in Ron Gaynor, who later bounced around training camps with the Seahawks, Eagles and Bills.

Nevertheless, the aspiring starter worked with the intensity of a seasoned veteran. Horrocks and tight end Al DePippo would regularly put in extra hours, throwing after practice and then heading to the weight room. If it was locked, they’d use the neck machine beneath the stands.

Horrocks coupled his drive with a light-hearted composure that allowed him to thrive in intense situations. The first time he interacted with Schafer was in 1982, when Horrocks was a sophomore.

Gaynor had gotten hurt; Horrocks was asked to fill in.

“He crouched down in the middle of the huddle, looked up at us and said, ‘Ah, the big boys,’” Schafer recalled to the Inquirer in 2010. “I said, ‘Shut up and call the play.’”

It was a precursor of huddles to come. Some players got stiff when they first entered regular season games. Horrocks was the opposite. He’d walk onto the field with a toothy grin and a laugh, confident in the hours of prep behind him.

This continued even after he was named the starting quarterback in 1983. Horrocks was known to play pranks, like tying teammates’ shoelaces together, or putting slices of cheese in a friend’s textbook.

West Chester had some of its greatest moments under Horrocks and his playful persona. In his first game as a starter, Sept. 10, 1983, the Golden Rams faced the University of Delaware on the road.

It was a harrowing matchup. West Chester played in Division II, while Delaware played at what was then known as the Division I-AA level. The Blue Hens had won their last 15 games against the Golden Rams, a streak that dated back to 1957.

But West Chester was unafraid. After a scoreless first quarter, the Golden Rams jumped to a 21-3 lead in the second. They upped it to 35-3 in the third and held on for the win.

Horrocks finished the day 10-of-18 for 129 passing yards and two touchdowns.

West Chester’s campus erupted into a giant party, as if the team had won the national championship. But the quarterback at the center of it all was already focused on his next game.

When he returned home that night, he recapped different plays and passes to his housemates on Magnolia Street.

“He would talk about even some of the plays that he missed,” said his friend, Chris Conner. “He never got too big. Even though he had just beaten Delaware, he was still the same guy.”

In 1984, West Chester hired a new head coach, Danny Hale, who brought in a new I-formation attack that incorporated elements of the West Coast offense. This system was different from what the team was accustomed to running (a split-back veer offense) and Hale, who was hired late, had limited time to teach it.

He and quarterbacks coach Bill Hart met with Horrocks every day in the football office on campus. They’d draw up plays on the chalkboard, and quiz their pupil about different coverages and fronts he’d face.

Hale’s system allowed Horrocks the ability to audible if the situation called for it, and the head coach wanted him to be well-prepared. But Hale and Hart soon learned that that wouldn’t be a concern.

The Golden Rams went 7-3 in 1984, and 5-1 in their conference, falling just shy of winning the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference’s Eastern Division title.

When DePippo looks back, he realizes that the same qualities that served Horrocks in the air were those that made him a good quarterback: a natural leader, a hard worker, a man who could balance an easygoing nature with intense focus.

“It comes back to what kind of pilot do you want?” DePippo said. “Do you want somebody that’s going to panic when the s— hits the fan, or do you want a guy that’s going to be confident?

“And Mike was that confident guy; a pilot the entire time. We just didn’t know it.”

The first time Horrocks flew a plane was in 1983. He was in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. for spring break with two friends, Mark Gosik, a former guard for West Chester, and Rob Jeffries, a tight end at Lehigh.

They were visiting a family friend of Horrocks, Bill Blauer, who worked for a commercial airline. One afternoon, Blauer invited them aboard his four-seat aircraft.

Gosik and Jeffries sat in the back, with headgear on, as Horrocks rode up front. About halfway through the two-hour ride, Blauer turned to Horrocks and told him to grab the controls.

Horrocks obliged and cruised the plane down, close enough to see the beachgoers below. As he flew over the ocean, with waves rippling beneath him, he realized he’d found his calling.

The former quarterback felt that his best route to commercial flight would be through the Marines. Horrocks knew he’d get the best training there, and liked the idea of a new challenge. So, after graduating West Chester in 1985, he enrolled in Officer Candidates School.

He got his wings at a naval air station in Corpus Christi, Texas, and was stationed at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point in North Carolina in the early 1990s, where he joined a marine aerial refueler transport squadron.

Horrocks flew KC-130 turboprop aircrafts, which were used to refuel helicopters and jets, but also to transfer cargo, passengers, ammunition; anything that needed to be moved. It was a daunting transition, one that many young pilots struggled with.

In training, they’d be flying a single-engine plane, which stretched maybe 18-20 feet long. Now, as lieutenants, they were manning a plane five times as big, with three more engines, moving whatever needed to be moved at 30,000 feet in the air.

It was anything but a routine job. Horrocks’ operations officer, retired lieutenant colonel Bill Franchi, said that when his squadron deployed to Bahrain during the Gulf War, they did so knowing that there was a good chance they’d be targeted heavily.

But Horrocks was a natural, and quickly proved he could be relied upon. He went on a number of deployments, to the Middle East throughout the Gulf War, to Europe, to Central America, and became Franchi’s “go-to guy.”

Once, during a three-week detachment to Norway, a panel in the squadron’s KC-130 caught fire. As Franchi tried to put the fire out, he asked Horrocks to redirect the plane back to the local airport.

This was not a scenario that the young pilot had practiced in a simulator. Horrocks would be landing downwind, without flaps on his wings, which helped the plane maintain lift while slowing it down.

With a full-face oxygen mask on, and vapor from a fire extinguisher filling the cockpit, Horrocks guided the aircraft onto the runway, preventing what surely would have been a disaster.

“I told him, ‘I credit you with having saved about six people,’” Franchi said. “Because I didn’t have to do a thing. He had it. And that was sort of typical of Mike. You know?”

Horrocks spent his last few years in the military instructing Marine, Navy, and Coast Guard pilots in Florida. In 1997, his active duty came to an end. He enrolled in new hire pilot training at United Airlines that summer.

By 1997, he was flying commercial airplanes full-time and living in Glen Mills with his wife, Miriam, and their two young children, Christa and Mick.

Now that Horrocks was local again, he was able to re-connect with old teammates like Bob Rafferty, a former West Chester halfback and quarterback.

They’d often see each other in Media, running errands at the Granite Run Mall. In December of 2000, while shopping for Christmas gifts, they crossed paths one last time.

Horrocks was walking out of the mall, and Rafferty was walking in. They chatted about family. Horrocks mentioned that he’d recently started working trans-Atlantic flights for United.

The two men said goodbye and went on their respective ways. Nine months later, Horrocks boarded a Boeing 767 at Logan Airport in Boston.

Rafferty watched as it hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Few, if any, of his teammates knew that Horrocks was piloting commercial aircrafts. The idea of him being on that plane didn’t even occur to them.

But Rafferty had a feeling.

“He was the first person I thought of,” he said.

Without social media, news of Horrocks’ death at age 38 spread slowly. Some West Chester football alumni found out when they saw Miriam on the front page of the Inquirer, at her husband’s funeral in Upper Providence Township.

Others heard through teammates. DePippo was working on Wall Street and lost about 40 or 50 colleagues in the attack. He couldn’t process that Horrocks was gone, too.

In late September, Gosik and two friends, Tim and Patrick Dever, took a train to New York. They spent the day at Ground Zero, walking through rubble, picking up pieces of people’s lives off the ground; photos, notebooks, newspapers.

Gosik still remembers how dust and soot filled the air. So did the sound of car alarms, blaring for their owners. A few days earlier, a neighbor had made Gosik a lapel pin to commemorate Horrocks, with his No. 14 written on a felt football.

Gosik wore it on his jacket, as he traversed the site where his teammate perished.

“We just felt like we needed to be there,” Gosik said. “We just wanted to go.”

Years went by, and the West Chester alums began to wonder why no tribute to their quarterback existed on campus. They were worried that Horrocks would be forgotten, and realized that their fears were well-founded.

“I don’t recall any of us even being aware of it beforehand,” said Tim Keyser, a wide receiver who graduated in 2013. “That wasn’t something I knew when I was a true freshman on campus or anything.”

The former players began to meet with the school about the prospect of a statue in 2008. Bill Zwaan Sr., who was head coach of the football program at the time, sat and listened as an official from the foundation tried to convey how complicated, and costly, it would be to build such a structure.

Horrocks’ teammates ended the meeting emphatically: by standing up, and reiterating, for the umpteenth time, that they were going to move forward with the statue. After they left, the foundation official turned to Zwaan.

“And he said, ‘Do you think they really understood what we were talking about?’” Zwaan recalled. “And I said, ‘They do. And they’re going to do a statue. And you guys have got to be prepared for that.’”

It was a slow, arduous process. The former players would not only have to raise $50,000 for the statue itself, but would also donate $100,000 toward a scholarship endowment, which DePippo and another teammate, Bruce Blake, started in 2004.

At this point, most of them had full-time jobs and families of their own, and carving out time wasn’t easy. But they made it happen.

DePippo oversaw the money. Mininno began a letter-writing campaign to raise funds. Walsh served as a liaison between the alumni and the current coaching staff.

Schafer worked as a partner of a local concrete cutting company. He and another West Chester alumnus, Paul Vanscovich, donated their construction crews and equipment free of charge.

Other teammates chipped in through a team banquet and a Super Bowl pool. A few local businesses, and the pilots’ union, contributed as well.

“I’d kick in $1,000, John would kick in $1,000, Jim O’Donnell would kick in $1,000,” DePippo said. “And then we would get on a text chain, and berate each other in team fashion. Like, ‘You’ve got to do this.’

“We raised money basically only through grassroots. I was specific about that. I didn’t want any corporate sponsorship. You know, ‘CBS Sports presents the Mike Horrocks statue.’ I didn’t want that.”

In the months before construction of the statue was finished, former players would visit West Chester to share stories of their late teammate with the current roster.

Walsh, DePippo, and Blake visited them the day before the dedication. Wearing purple and yellow practice jerseys, the team took a knee as Walsh began to speak.

He explained that one day, Horrocks’ teammates wouldn’t be able to share his story, and that it would be up to the next generation of players to do so.

Then he asked them to close their eyes, and think of a loved one; a sibling, a friend, a parent.

“And when you go down that hill tomorrow, and you touch [the statue of] Mike, think of Mike,” Walsh said. “Say his name. And think of someone else who is special in your life. And thank God that you have them with you today.”

The statue was unveiled at 10:30 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2010, a perfect autumn day in Chester County. The school arranged a ceremony beforehand, with bagpipes, a marching band, and a flyover.

Miriam and the Horrocks children, now teenagers, were in attendance; Christa gave a speech about her father.

Sitting next to the podium, with crutches by his side, was Schafer. He was unable to speak to a large crowd, but sat throughout the entire ceremony with a smile on his face, shaking hands with football men young and old.

He died of cancer just over a month later, at his home in Phoenixville.

Last August, during a team reunion in West Chester, a thought occurred to Walsh. He pointed to the bricks surrounding Horrocks’ memorial, which contained inscriptions honoring the late quarterback.

He suggested adding a small stone, maybe toward the back, with the number 52 on it; a nod to a teammate who put another above himself, even when his body was failing.

“Tom just believed in his heart that it needed to be a statue,” Walsh said. “And he was right. He was right.”