By Nick Pipitone
Tom McHugh is an imposing six-foot-three, 280-pounds with a mane of long, blond hair that stops just above his shoulders. He has a tattoo of two skulls on his thick left shoulder amidst the black ink of billowing flames.
On the football field, he is just as intimidating. As the Pride’s starting left guard the past two seasons, McHugh played with a reckless abandonment that his teammates learned to love.
But he is really as violent as his image makes him seem?
While teammates and friends may tell you otherwise, a police report from 2003 gives you an entirely different perspective, one that eventually stole McHugh’s football dream from his bear-like paws.
Coming out of Monsignor Bonner, a Catholic high school outside of Philadelphia, he was a talented offensive lineman looking to move up to the college ranks. From the get-go, he wanted to go to Penn State, where his uncle, Ed Monaghan, played OG from 1985-89, including the ’86 national championship team.
After a late entry into recruiting, McHugh received interest from a few schools, including Syracuse. That is when he got the call from PSU.
“I dreamed of going to PSU because of my uncle,” he said. “Who doesn’t want to go there? They have all that nostalgia and pride and you get engulfed in it.”
He happily signed with the Nittany Lions and red-shirted his freshman year. The next two seasons, McHugh worked his way up to No. 2 on the depth chart at OG.
He played a total of 40 snaps in his three years, waiting for an opportunity to build his legacy within the PSU fraternity and follow in the footsteps of his beloved uncle.
Unfortunately for McHugh, those 40 snaps would be the only action he would see in Happy Valley. In October of his junior year, with four games remaining, he was involved in an incident that would deliver a crushing blow to his PSU aspirations.
“I was drinking, I was hanging out and I was underage,” he says with lingering lament. “I got into an argument with three guys. One of the guys’ girlfriends overreacted and attacked me. My friend split us up, we left and then she screamed at me that I slapped her.”
According to McHugh, the woman followed him for the next 10 minutes or so and flagged down campus police.
Penn State police supervisor Bill Moerschbacher told the Delaware County Times, a Philadelphia suburban newspaper, “Our officers responded to a disagreement. There was a dispute between him and the female. Our officers found [McHugh] at the scene, interviewed him and issued the citations and he was allowed to leave.”
The citation for striking the woman was thrown out in court and the two citations for public drunkenness and underage drinking were dismissed after he attended alcohol counseling. McHugh pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and received a $247 fine and 50 hours of community service.
The real damage from the incident, however, came from the media backlash that followed.
“[The media] acted like I was a murderer when nothing even happened,” McHugh said. “Nobody wanted to hear my side of the story.”
Shortly after the incident, Paterno removed him from the team. McHugh thought that after the legal implications were over, he would get a chance to return. That chance never came.
So McHugh was given an ultimatum: either finish his degree at PSU and not play football or transfer to a non-Division I program and continue playing.
He received interest from I-AA programs Delaware and Villanova, who were excited about his talent, but also concerned about the negative impact his newly ascribed stigma would present.
Rejected by the two schools, McHugh returned to his studies and pursued his degree. Then he got a call from the Pride.
“I never knew about Hofstra, I never even heard of it,” he said. “They called me out of the blue. I told them if they’d offer me I’d come. Never saw the school, never heard of it. I just showed up with bags.”
He transferred the spring of his junior year. Adjusting to the school was difficult for him on a personal and athletic level. The area was new to him and the team had a very different approach than PSU.
Fellow teammates on the Pride, seeing that he was having problems with both the change and a possible hangover from the PSU incident, welcomed him onto the team and did their best to accommodate their new teammate.
“There was baggage, obviously, being kicked off a big time legendary school,” teammate Willie Colon said. “He had a lot on his shoulders coming out here, but he dealt with it. He just kept fighting.”
McHugh was able to secure a starting job he would never relinquish, starting in all 22 games and becoming an integral part of a Pride team that rebounded from a 2-10 finish in 2003 to 5-6 his junior year and 7-4 this past season.
In his two seasons with the Pride, McHugh left a lasting impression on teammates, who were initially shocked to hear about the allegations he faced at PSU. While Colon and LB Gian Villante admitted that he is a “passionate guy,” they said he also had self-control.
Now, a full two years after the incident that blindsided him and took away his most cherished opportunity, McHugh is set to graduate this winter, having finished his final year of athletic eligibility.
He will graduate with a degree in sociology, but is unsure of what he wants to do. First and foremost, he wants to attempt to land a job in the NFL, something that he and his teammates think is distinctly possible.
For now, though, he is happy with strides he has made, from media outcast to successful college athlete.
“I was big time upset [about the PSU incident],” he said. “But you can sit there and cry and be a baby about it. You face reality and say, ‘This isn’t going to change. Pick yourself up and make something happen.
“I picked myself up. Do I think the punishment fit the crime? No. Did the media blow it out of proportion? Yes. But the only people I care about are the people that love me, everyone else I can care less.”
The offensive-line is bolstered by Tom McHugh (left guard). He has been a dominant force for the Pride. (Staff Photo)
