The first thing you need to know about Miami Dolphins munchkin

rookie phenom Zach Thomas is that he is not dead yet.

This, however, is not due to Zach's lack of effort. At 2 1/2 he

was playing near the back tire of a pickup truck. The driver

didn't see him, backed over his head, felt the bump, panicked,

put it in drive and ran over him again, which, come to think of

it, may account for a lot of odd things about Zach.

At nine time and again he jumped as high as he could on the

family trampoline--and landed on the ground. "That was really

stupid," grumbles Zach. "No wonder my knees are so bad."

At 13 he tried to navigate a flooded river on an air mattress

and got swept away. Luckily his older brother, Bart, ran more

than two miles downstream and pulled him out.

By the time he was 16 his family's house had burned down, and

Bart had knocked him out with a right hand and hit him over the

head with the side of a tennis racket.

At 19, he was in an ugly fight in....

"Don't put the fight in there," Zach says.

No fight stuff?

"No. That isn't a good example for the kids, man."

By 20 he had been been 1) inside a friend's car that went out of

control on a dirt road and rolled five times; 2) bounced around

in his 1975 Monte Carlo while trying to back over a fire hydrant

at 30 mph to see if a busted hydrant really does shoot water

straight up; 3) rear-ended twice and sideswiped once in his 1992

Camaro; and 4) passed by his own left rear tire. When the last

happened a second time, Zach said, "Whoa, boy! I just got to get

some new lug nuts!"

And by 21 he had been in more trouble than R.J. Reynolds. In

1993 he and a few of his Texas Tech teammates shot at the ankles

of some innocent passersby with a BB gun from the balcony of his

seventh-floor dorm room. It got so bad, people would emerge from

the bars and restaurants below and run, hunched over, to their

cars. Nobody was hurt, but many were annoyed, especially the man

who climbed off a Harley-Davidson and the reporter for the

school paper.

"You're going to put the BB gun thing in there?" says Zach.

Yes.

"But they kind of covered that up. Nobody really knows it was

us. I mean, you couldn't really hurt 'em from that far away

anyhow."

I know.

"But shooting at the reporter. That was just stupid, huh?"

Not a good example for the kids.

"No, sir."

But more amazing than surviving all that is the fact that Zach

Thomas, a guy who might have trouble meeting the height

requirement to ride a roller coaster, is not only surviving as a

starter on the Dolphins but is also the hottest new linebacker

in the NFL. Thomas, the 154th player taken, is looking like the

heist of last April's draft. After nailing eight opponents in

Miami's 23-20 win over the Houston Oilers on Sunday, he leads

the Dolphins with 125 tackles, 91 of them unassisted. He also

has two sacks, two forced fumbles, two fumble recoveries and two

interceptions, the second of which he returned 26 yards for his

first NFL touchdown on Sunday, giving the Dolphins a 20-17

fourth-quarter lead. All this is a little hard to believe,

seeing as how Thomas stands 5'9" or so--"Yeah, but if I had a

neck, I'd be six-three," he says--is unable to leap small stacks

of change and is slower than the last day of school.

Take a recent night in Miami Beach. Thomas is dressed in a white

shirt and white cap as he stands outside a nightclub waiting for

the parking attendant to bring around his new Chevy Tahoe, a

purchase that still blows his mind. "I'm making $131,000, man!

That's big money for a guy like me!" (It's also the NFL rookie

minimum.) And this middle-aged woman walks up to him, and he

thinks maybe she is going to ask him for his autograph. That

somebody might want his autograph also blows Thomas's mind. But

no, she hands him a dollar and says, "It's the white Beamer."

Or take the day early in camp last summer when he was getting a

haircut at his Fort Lauderdale barber shop. His barber was

asking how practice was going when a customer broke in.

"What high school you play for?"

The barber winced. "He doesn't play high school," he said. "He

plays for Miami."

"Get out of here! You play for the 'Canes?"

Zach winced. The barber's scissor hands drooped to his side. His

face reddened.

"No," said the barber. "He plays for the Miami Dolphins."

"Ohhhhh." Then the customer gives Zach the old doubting Thomas

kind of look that he has seen his whole football-playing life,

the kind that says, "Well, I'd ask for your autograph, but I

know you're not going to be around long."

Unfortunately for 11-year veteran and Pro Bowl linebacker Jack

del Rio, whom the Dolphins cut during training camp to make room

for their surprising rookie, Thomas is still around. In fact,

draft pick 5C for Miami is showing up in film rooms all over the

league. "That guy," says Dallas Cowboys coach Barry Switzer, "is

just a rolling ball of butcher knives."

He's one of the last players out of the Dolphins' practice

facility by a good hour almost every night; he watches film

until 7:30, when most guys are gone by 5:30 or six. As a result,

in games he's usually already at the ball when the guys with the

4.5 speed are just recognizing the play. Somehow he has turned

his shortness and his slowness into his biggest assets. He flies

under the radar. "I'd rather be five-four than six-five any

day," he says. "If I'd been six-five, I wouldn't be nearly the

player I am because I wouldn't have had to try so hard. This

way, I can get under all those fat linemen."

Says Dolphins coach Jimmy Johnson, "I've never had a rookie

linebacker like this. He has the finest instincts of any middle

linebacker I've been around." And all for about $3.17 million

less per year than the guy Thomas is making Miami fans forget:

Bryan Cox, who signed a $13.2 million free-agent deal with the

Chicago Bears last February.

"You going to put anything in there about the cross?"

Of course.

"Good. Put some stuff in there about my parents and religion and

everything, and they'll just get all kinds of happy. I mean,

that'd be great."

The cross is in.

"Cool."

Brother Bart, who's 2 1/2 years older than Zach, and the cross

are two West Texas landmarks.

Bart is 6'1 1/2", handsome, swift, a great leaper, extremely

responsible and neat. In sum, he is the anti-Zach. Stand the two

side by side and pick which one is the NFL linebacker, you'd

guess Bart. He glides across a room like a jewel thief. Zach

hitches along behind him, taking two steps for every one of his

brother's. Bart hangs his T-shirts in his closet, all facing

the same way, first the short-sleeved ones, then the long

sleeves. Zach's room is so messy you could lose a small farm

animal in it. Bart made the state track meet in two events. He

played football instead of competing in track and field at Tech,

but now he's a junior high football coach who's in decathlon

training for the 2000 Olympics. "Bart is my hero," says Zach.

The cross is the 19-story-high, 2.5-million-pound, $450,000,

visible-for-20-miles white steel cross illuminated by two

1,500-watt flood lamps that his parents put up alongside I-40,

35 miles east of Amarillo, in a town called Groom. Zach's mom,

Bobby, came up with the idea for the cross. His dad, Steve,

liked it, and when Steve sets his mind on doing something, lock

it in.

Steve is as stubborn as a weed and twice as hard to get rid of.

He played one year of football at Tech before devoting all of

his attention to his engineering major, started himself in the

oil business with not much more than a phone and a pickup truck

and made himself a multimillionaire by the time he was 35, in

1985.

Steve always wanted to give something back to society, so he

erected the biggest cross he could. "We wanted to make people

think of Jesus in their travels," says Bobby, "instead of being

bombarded by all kinds of non-Christian things." She might be

referring to the giant billboard down the road a piece

advertising America's largest adult bookstore.

This is maybe how Zach came to be as compact and indestructible

as a black box. When the pickup rolled over him, "we thought he

was dead," says Steve. But all the mishap did was leave tire

prints in his scalp, break his arm and shift the geography of

his face, pulling the right eye and ear over slightly and making

his head even more Fred Flintstone square than it already was.

It also affected his hearing enough to make him a better

football player: He relies on visual cues much more than most

people, and that's why he watches so much film and can read

plays so quickly. It also made him a wonderful lip-reader. He

occasionally uses that skill to read plays being brought in from

the sidelines by opposing players.

Anyway, after using his head as a speed bump, he was fine in no

time--back running in the canyons, over rocks and cactus,

barefoot, on his parents' ranch. When Zach was in junior high,

Bart knocked him unconscious with a right hand that was supposed

to have a boxing glove tied on it, except that both brothers had

already removed their gloves. Once he fell out of the top berth

of his bunk bed without waking up.

He is a walking Buster Keaton movie. He lived to tell about the

night he walked into the hall outside his dorm room in time to

see a thin line of fire heading straight for his door, which he

slammed a sliver of a second before the door caught fire. And

how did the man who pulled the prank, Shane Dunn, a teammate of

Thomas's at Texas Tech, make such a line of fire?

"Ether," says Dunn.

Weren't you afraid of hurting Zach?

"Awww, you can't hurt ol' Zach."

"You talked to Shane?" asks Thomas.

Yes.

"Did he tell you about the face masks?"

The face masks: At Tech, Thomas played as a true freshman and

was All-America as a junior and again as a senior. Better than

that, he has the school record for breaking his own face

mask--three times--while making tackles during practice and

games. "He used to give us more headaches," says Dunn, who is a

senior on Tech's offensive line. "Plus he's got that Fred

Flintstone square head of his. That thing hurts."

NFL teams weren't impressed. That might be because of how Thomas

performed on the vertical jump at the scouting combine, which

was not very well at all. In fact, Thomas recalls jumping a

mediocre 28 1/2". You could hear the pencils scribble, scribble,

scribble the end of his career. "Hell, I tried to tell them

about the kid," says Tech coach Spike Dykes. "But if your guy

isn't six-two, they don't even want to talk about it."

The Dolphins risked a fifth-round pick. "I just hoped he'd make

it on special teams," says Johnson. But then in training camp

Thomas started making like Mike Singletary. In Miami's opener he

knocked out New England Patriots wideout Shawn Jefferson so cold

that when Jefferson came to, he mentioned his high school

coach's name. In a recent practice Thomas rocked rookie running

back Karim Abdul-Jabbar, who asked for nothing more than the

rest of the afternoon off. All of a sudden this kid who shares

an apartment with equally abridged rookie free-agent linebacker

Larry Izzo ("People think we're agents," says the 5'9" Izzo),

this no-name who keeps his ties tied because he can't make a

knot, is the hottest thing in Miami this side of stone crabs.

The other day local radio host Joe Rose invited Thomas and Izzo

to a Fort Lauderdale eatery for a free meal. They couldn't

believe their luck. But when they walked into the restaurant

that night, people were spilling out the front door. Thomas

figured the wait for a table was going to be ridiculous. Then he

realized that everyone was there for them, particularly him.

It is almost too much for him to believe. "Man, sometimes I

think about it, and I don't believe it," Thomas says. "I'm

playing against Chris Warren! Jerome Bettis! I mean, you watch

them on TV, and then you're out there in the game with them!

I've got posters of these guys on my wall!"

Looking at him, you've got to admit that the whole thing is a

little hard to swallow. In a nightclub the other night Thomas

and Izzo were talking to four head-snapping models. Hard as our

heroes tried, the models wouldn't believe they were NFL

linebackers. They guessed ankle tapers or agents. Finally Zach

took out his wallet and flashed the clincher--his Dolphins VIP

at Hooters card.

"They still didn't buy it," sighs Izzo.

Ladies, three words of advice: Watch your ankles.

COLOR PHOTO: BILL FRAKES [Zach Thomas sitting on car seat with two people dressed as crash test dummies]

COLOR PHOTO: CHRISTOBAL PEREZ/AP Thomas gave the Dolphins their first lead against the Oilers with his first NFL touchdown. [Zach Thomas in game]

COLOR PHOTO: BILL FRAKES In the pad he shares with Izzo, Thomas has all the necessities for living the life of an NFL rookie. [Zach Thomas lying on couch watching television]