The hardest days for Robert Mathis were the ones spent at his dying mother’s bedside, inside the home he bought her with his first NFL paycheck, just like he’d always promised. He’d sit there, clenching her limp hand, his fears pouring out while the cancer stole her away, a little more, a little more, a little more each day. Emma Mathis didn’t have the strength to speak, so her youngest son did.
She was his champion. She’d shown him work; he’d heard the stories of her picking cotton in the fields of rural Georgia when she was just four years old.