Tom Fox
Episode 158
7 FEB 2022
He will be inducted this year into the St. Ignatius Athletics Hall of Fame. For 20 years he has run a basketball camp in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and has coached both basketball and track at two different high schools, plus he also coached AAU basketball. As a student-athlete he had played basketball on a full athletic scholarship at St. Francis College of Pennsylvania, which followed a high school career during which he was a four-year letterman in track and three-year letterman in basketball. Prior to his senior season of basketball, he was selected as one of the top players in Ohio by USA Today. Last year he published a book called, “A Penny’s Thoughts: Sometimes All You Need is a Change of Perspective.”
Notable guest quotes:
“I grew up in a large Irish Catholic family… we lived actually right up the street from St. Luke’s grade school… Big part of the parish. Parish life was everything to our family.”
“(I attended) St. Luke grade school in Lakewood, Ohio, St. Ignatius High School in Cleveland, and St. Francis College… in Loretto, Pennsylvania.”
“My dad started an initiative called Varsity Coats for Needy Folks… he noticed our three varsity coats — my younger brother, mine, and my older brother, for Ignatius — were just hanging in the closet and he thought, there’s a lot of homeless individuals, folks that can’t afford coats, and why not refurbish these coats and get them out to the poor.”
“He’s just a very holy man and a great basketball coach at the same time. So, I’m very blessed to have played for someone like him.”
“In my college career I actually tore my ACL… Basketball was everything (to me), but had my folks not really instilled a deep faith, I don’t know if I would’ve gotten through that very tough time in my life.”
“Faith has been my constant and without my parents establishing that early on and having great godparents… I don’t think I could’ve weathered those storms.”
“The Holy Spirit, really, I was very blessed to come up with the concept and the words really came (for the book).”
“Every morning I get up, the first thing I say when I put my feet on the ground is ‘Thank you, Lord, for another day.’ I know that every day is a gift.”
“The prayer that I wanted to tell you about, the prayer of abandonment, is a prayer by Charles de Foucauld, is his name. I’m pretty sure he’s just become a saint.”
“The rosary I say every morning… I have a rosary in my pocket and I will say a decade for something different every day.”
Related links:
Tom’s blog “The Empathetic Fox”
