Ex-Jet Thompson practices what he preaches

MARYSVILLE, Wash. – As an athlete, Steve Thompson’s career took him to the pinnacle of professional football.

As a pastor, he sometimes ministers to people in the depths of misery.

There is a spectrum of human experience and Thompson has seen most of it, whether personally or in his pastorate. Highs and lows are a part of sports, as they are in ministry, and the one constant of his two callings seems to be the hope, the pursuit and sometimes the realization of victory.

“Football was a great experience I had,” said the 61-year-old Thompson, a Lake Stevens, Wash., native who helped the New York Jets win the 1969 Super Bowl against the Baltimore Colts. “That was an era of my life, and I loved the game and I loved the competition of it. It was an opportunity and I enjoyed it.

“Now I’m in another opportunity and here there are eternal ramifications. From the Biblical perspective, this life is short. You play out your life and then there’s another life, an eternal life. So what I’m doing (in ministry) is affecting people for eternity.”

Thompson is the head pastor at Victory Foursquare Church in Marysville, where he leads Sunday worship services, officiates at weddings and funerals, and counsels people in the midst of difficult and sometimes dire circumstances and events.

There is, Thompson believes, a parallel between what he does today and the sport he played so long ago.

“In (pro) football,” he said, “you prepare all week long, and then everything comes down to Sunday. Your mind, your emotions and your body are all focused on the game. … My Christian experience is the closest thing I’ve ever had to that. Because to me, the Christian experience is a battle between light and darkness, good and evil, between God and his kingdom and the kingdom of darkness. Everything I experienced and the joy I had in sports is just taken to another level in the ministry.”

Thompson was born in Seattle, but raised in Lake Stevens and became an outstanding athlete at Lake Stevens High School, graduating in 1963. He was recruited to play football and basketball at Washington State University, but instead opted for football at the University of Washington.

The Huskies of the mid-1960s were mostly mediocre – no bowl games, but no losing seasons. Still, they were good years for Thompson, who was twice a first-team all-conference selection as a defensive tackle and a second-round draft choice by the Jets after his senior season.

He arrived in New York in time to play in one of the most storied games in pro football history. The Jets were part of the fledgling American Football League, which two years earlier had begun sending its champion to face the winner of the venerable National Football League in a still nascent event called the Super Bowl.

The NFL was a convincing winner in the first two games, but in the 1969 game (which followed the 1968 season) the Jets and a flamboyant quarterback named Joe Namath – he brashly predicted a New York victory – upset the Baltimore Colts 16-7. It remains one of the most unlikely outcomes in Super Bowl history.

“The Super Bowl was kind of a storybook experience,” said Thompson, who played on special teams and two plays from scrimmage as a defensive end against the Colts. “It was hard to believe. I was on the sidelines, whooping it up with everybody. I just remember looking up at the clock with about four minutes to go in the game and realizing, ‘We’re winning this thing.’ It was kind of surreal, but it was a neat experience and it was a lot of fun to be a part of it.”

Thompson went on to play five more seasons in New York. He then spent one season with the Portland Storm of the World Football League and one season with the B.C. Lions of the Canadian Football League before retiring to a career in business that lasted about 10 years.

He was 39 when he was asked to join the staff at the New Life Center church in Everett. He worked there for five years as an assistant pastor before becoming the head pastor at the Victory Foursquare Church, where he has been for almost 16 years.

Along the way, Thompson and his wife, Starla – they were high school sweethearts – raised six sons and a daughter. They have 11 grandchildren with No. 12 on the way, and they live in the same Lake Stevens home where Starla was raised as a girl.

These days, Thompson enjoys football like the rest of us. He has season tickets to UW games and he follows the Seahawks on television, although he remains loyal to the Jets.

When New York faced Seattle a few years ago, Thompson preached his sermon that same morning while wearing his old Jets jersey.

“As I’ve gotten older,” he said, “I don’t particularly look like a football player anymore. I look like a big guy. But I wear a Super Bowl ring and people see that, and it’s pretty obvious that it’s a football ring. Some people aren’t interested at all, but most people have a positive response.”