Editor’s Note: LeRoy Butler is No. 5 on the Times-Union’s Top 100 list of athletes from the Jacksonville area.
When LeRoy Butler was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2022, the only void from that day of celebration in Canton, Ohio was that his mother couldn’t be there.
Eunice Butler, who passed away six years earlier, served as the anchor of a family support system that lifted the second-youngest of her five children to heights nobody would have imagined when LeRoy was a child.
Beyond the limitations of growing up impoverished in the Blodgett Homes project of Jacksonville to a single mother, Butler was also forced to wear leg braces for six years until age 8 after having corrective surgery to keep his club feet from growing in.