https://theathletic.com/698742/2018/...is-city-needs/
Nate Taylor
Originally Posted by :
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Adrion Roberson calmly watched 15 unassuming youth football players chat with one another, but he was giddy inside because of the surprise that was about to be sprung on them. Three weeks prior, Chiefs officials told Roberson, the founder of KC United, a youth sports and education initiative, to invite the league’s players who most excelled in academics and athletics to a special event.
Roberson, the players and their parents arrived at the Dick’s Sporting Goods in Leawood, Kan., on a Tuesday night in late November. Awaiting the players were snacks and free Wilson youth footballs. As Roberson discussed the upcoming event with employees from the store — in an unsuccessful attempt to learn more details of what was about to take place — the players, ages 8-13, took the footballs out of the boxes. Some players, which were members of different teams in the league, placed their new ball in their right hand. They practiced their throwing motion, with most of the players mentioning the professional player who has been at the center of almost every football conversation in Kansas City this season: quarterback Patrick Mahomes.
When the event began, Roberson watched the expressions of the players light up when a store employee told them they were each receiving a $125 gift card to purchase anything they desired. The employee also gave the players a distinctive prop: wigs featuring curly hair attached to a black headband, Mahomes’ signature when he is not wearing his helmet during games. With Roberson alongside the players for photos, Mahomes snuck in behind them.
“All right, let’s say Chiefs on three!” Mahomes shouted.
Roberson turned to his right, saw Mahomes a foot from him, and his mouth went agape.
“One, two, three!” Mahomes shouted.
“Chiefs!” the players yelled in excitement.
It was sneaky, indeed, but Mahomes has been doing this all season, making unexpected appearances at events in Kansas City that left people amazed. The players at Dick’s Sporting Goods smiled when they saw Mahomes, and their parents took out their smartphones to capture the moment. Mahomes, though, wasn’t done surprising the group. He grabbed a large display check and asked: “Where’s the coach at?”
As Roberson shook Mahomes’ hand, he was presented with a $5,000 donation from the Sports Matter program, a Dick’s Sporting Goods initiative that assists and raises awareness for the many underfunded youth leagues in America. Mahomes told Roberson that the donation was to help KC United next season. As the group took more photos with the check, Roberson couldn’t hide his overwhelming emotion. He bowed his head, placed his right hand over his face and cried.
“I thought it was about the kids, but we didn’t know it was going to be all this,” Roberson said. “The kids get to see that somebody cares about them. Most of the time, where we’re from, kids don’t get this.”
Throughout this season, Mahomes, a first-year starter, has thanked his fans and supported people in Kansas City in ways few Chiefs quarterbacks have ever done. Each week, Mahomes has made an effort to attend a community event, whether through the team or on his own. In the calendar year, Mahomes has toured most of the city, energizing and charming fans young and old and, in the process, persuaded even casual football fans to watch and cheer for the Chiefs.
With 43 touchdown passes in just 13 games, Mahomes is the leading candidates to win the NFL’s MVP award. But Mahomes has inspired and galvanized the people of Kansas City not just with his play, but also his several acts of community service. And for this, he has been named The Athletic Kansas City’s 2018 Person of the Year.
“All the games are unbelievably exciting,” Chiefs owner Clark Hunt said of Mahomes’ performances this season. “But beyond that, he’s emerged as one of the key leaders of the team, which is very hard for a 23-year-0ld player in his first year as a starter. It says a lot about his character, and he’s done a great job representing the team in the community. I don’t run into anybody, either here in Kansas City or somewhere else, who doesn’t say, ‘Wow, that young man seems like he’s really special.’”
Inside Dick’s Sporting Goods, Mahomes showed the youth players that he was more than just the quarterback of one of the NFL’s best teams.
“I was that little kid,” Mahomes said. “I was the one looking up to athletes. I remember those experiences, so I know how much it means for every single kid. Just to be around them, and for them to see that I’m just a normal dude, too, I’m someone they can just be themselves (with), and hopefully they can get to where they want to be.”
Roberson started KC United with his wife, Vicki, 10 years ago. The couple wanted to provide a league for children from Wyandotte County since most parents couldn’t afford for them to join a high-level recreational or traveling AAU team. Over the years, Roberson has added cheerleading teams and a weekly program for parents. Games are held at Bishop Ward High School in Kansas City, Kan. Roberson also wants to develop an after-school program.
The Chiefs partnered with KC United after the league joined Heads Up Football, the developmental program funded in part by the NFL. Roberson said the $5,000 donation will help the organization get more up-to-date equipment and help it recondition older equipment. Insurance costs likely won’t have to come from the parents or Roberson next season.
More than anything, Roberson was thrilled the players were able to meet Mahomes.
“For him to come out and touch the kids, they can go home and go, ‘Man, I was with Patrick Mahomes,’” Roberson said. “Their parents were out here, and they’re on Facebook Live. So this is something I hope they’ll never forget.”
Roberson, a pastor at Berean Fellowship Church, felt blessed to have his own moment with Mahomes. But he found greater happiness in knowing plenty of people in the city have their own stories and memories of Mahomes to tell.
“To me,” he said of Mahomes, “that’s the sincerity of it.”
Mahomes’ arrival in Kansas City last year — the Chiefs traded two draft picks to select him with the 10th pick in the 2017 draft — signaled the beginning of a new era. For more than three decades, the franchise had not selected a quarterback in the first round of the NFL draft. Instead, the team either traded for a veteran starter or signed another team’s backup who possessed starter potential. None of those quarterbacks carried the Chiefs to the Super Bowl. Mahomes represented change, and the Chiefs were finally going to let a young quarterback, one with unique skills, lead them.
Mahomes, however, played a secondary role his rookie season and kept fairly quiet in the process. As he learned from longtime starter Alex Smith, he refused endorsement deals and tried his best to become familiar with his new surroundings. Before even starting an NFL game, Mahomes watched how fans inside Arrowhead Stadium rooted for the Chiefs, and after interacting with people, he learned that many of them had the same personality traits — easygoing, heartfelt and content more than envious — that he did.
“I’ve been to a lot of cities with my dad playing baseball,” said Mahomes, whose father, Pat, was a pitcher in the Major Leagues for 11 years. “You realize that when you get to a city like Kansas City, it feels like home because the people are actually passionate, not only about football but about you and how you are in the community and how you are as a person. I think that was the biggest thing. That was the moment I knew this was like home.”
Mahomes grew up in Tyler, Texas, a town 98 miles southeast of Dallas. He felt most comfortable with people watching him when he performed, whether it was football, baseball or basketball in high school. Had a team in a bigger market selected Mahomes in the draft, perhaps he would’ve had to show his personality sooner during his rookie season.
Kevin Kietzman, the popular host of “Between the Lines,” the Kansas City afternoon sports radio show on 810 WHB, has a theory about when the budding relationship between Mahomes and the city truly began. Mahomes arrived at Kansas Speedway for the KC Masterpiece 400 on May 12 with a down-to-earth outfit: jorts and a cutoff jersey of the Kansas City T-Bones, the city’s independent minor-league baseball team.
“I think the second everybody saw that, they saw a little bit of themselves in him and thought, ‘OK, this guy doesn’t take himself too seriously,’” Kietzman said. “People saw that, and they kept seeing it. What they saw in Alex Smith was somebody else’s quarterback, a guy who had $100 million in his pocket the day he arrived and older and was more traditional in the way he conducted business. What fans saw in Mahomes, I really think he crossed a bridge with the fans before he ever played a game this season that Smith never did.”
From there, the more Kansas Citians that Mahomes met, the more he enjoyed spending time with them. He attended Royals games, cheered for the Sporting Kansas City MLS team with his teammates and spent time reading books to children at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum.
“No one really told me much about Kansas City, so everything I experienced was new to me,” Mahomes said. “When you see the smiles on faces and you see the excitement and just the passion they have, you always want to make sure you’re around that and that you can keep doing that for people, especially around this community. When you get the time, you want to make sure you can make an impact.”
His first significant community event came in May when he visited and thanked soldiers in Fort Leavenworth, Kan. As a player who studies film of his opponents, Mahomes appreciated watching a simulation of what soldiers can encounter during a battle.
This season, Kietzman has conducted one-on-one interviews with Mahomes each week for his show. Beyond the outcome of each game and Mahomes’ remarkable statistics, Kietzman has done his best to ask Mahomes questions that reveal his character and personality. Kietzman didn’t anticipate that he would discuss a community event with Mahomes almost every week. Or how a 6-year-old from Liberty, Mo., dressed and looked almost identical to Mahomes for his Halloween costume.
One community event Kietzman enjoyed discussing came in October when Mahomes volunteered with Veterans Community Project to finish painting small houses that were built for veterans returning from service.
“There’s an innocence here to Patrick,” Kietzman said. “It’s not that he can’t believe people ask him to do these things. He’s genuinely flattered and honored. He wants to do it. He wants to give back and do something. When he goes out and does these events, he’s so happy to be there and he’s smiling.”
Four days after Thanksgiving, Mahomes held a meet-and-greet event at a Verizon store in Liberty, Mo., after the region sustained a blizzard the day before. Kietzman watched hundreds of people wait outside to meet Mahomes, who responded by shaking fans’ hands and giving high-fives; he took photos with mothers and their babies, signed his name on jerseys, spent extra time with three military servicemen and accepted every hug.
One woman from the event, Kietzman said, stood outside for two hours. The woman had baked a large, round chocolate-chip cookie cake as a gift. The design of the cake, made from frosting, was of a ketchup bottle with Mahomes on the label and a T-bone steak, which referenced Mahomes’ love of ketchup (which the world learned thanks to an ESPN The Magazine article). The woman wrote, “Breakfast of champions” on the cake. Mahomes smiled when he saw the woman’s offering.
Kietzman had never seen such a scene in his 33 years covering the team as a radio host and former TV sports reporter and anchor.
“It’s unbelievable how much they love this guy,” Kietzman said of Mahomes. “He’s absolutely the hope of this city. Fans are absolutely convinced he’s taking them to a Super Bowl. The whole city recognizes this guy is going to be here a long, long time, and there’s a real possibility he could be the biggest sports star in the history of Kansas City.”
Earlier this season, after one of their first interviews, Mahomes called Kietzman “Sir.” Kietzman assured Mahomes he didn’t need to do that. Kietzman instructed Mahomes to call him by his first name. Mahomes politely declined.
“I just don’t know another way,” he said.
Long before her son became an NFL star, Randi Mahomes instilled the importance of treating others with respect, even though she knew her son, at an early age, was talented enough to receive preferential treatment as an athlete. Randi made sure Mahomes spoke well and made eye contact with people. While most expected Mahomes to follow his dad and become a Major-League pitcher, Randi pushed her son to search for his own path, even though football was a more dangerous endeavor.
Randi never went to college. But she wanted Mahomes to have the opportunity to learn in an environment that showed him just how instrumental a community can be to his long-term success. As an event coordinator, Randi, a single mother after she and ex-husband, Pat, divorced when her son was 6, showed young Mahomes how to treat people through listening, compliments and a desire to help through a strong work ethic.
“She enjoys just me being a part of a community more than anything I do on the football field,” Mahomes said. “When I went through the draft process, she wanted me to go somewhere where I felt like I was at home and she didn’t have to worry about me every single day. She loves me being a part of this Kansas City community and them welcoming her and the rest of my family every time she’s here.”
Mahomes, who played in college at Texas Tech, connected his fans from Lubbock and Kansas City last week through his participation in the NFL’s annual “My Cause, My Cleats” initiative. His red, white and green custom cleats against the Ravens honored former Texas Tech tennis coach Tim Siegel and his son, Luke. Siegel started his family’s foundation, Team Luke, after his son sustained a head injury through a golf-cart accident in 2015 that required three brain surgeries. Since then, Mahomes has encouraged Luke throughout his recovery, which has required physical, occupational and speech therapy.
The proceeds from the auction of Mahomes’ cleats benefit Team Luke and Hope For Minds, a nonprofit organization that supports Texas families with children who suffer from brain injuries.
“I’ve known Luke since he was a little kid, and I was there when he had his accident,” Mahomes said. “He’s rehabbing and trying to get back to where he was at. It’s a special place in my heart, just being able to be around him, and I saw the love that he had and still has for football. I’ve always helped him in any way possible, as well as helped any other kid who has had any significant brain injury.”
Last month, Mahomes and tight end Travis Kelce surprised Maria Valdez Ayala, a single mother with four children, at the Guadalupe Center, which helps Latino communities with education, health and social services for families. In partnering with Kansas City Southern, a transportation company, the Chiefs, through Mahomes and Kelce, promised to pay a year’s worth of utilities for Ayala, who has a chronic condition.
Mahomes and Kelce spent time playing with Ayala’s children. Mahomes gave each child a toy out of a large basket. He showed Eulises, a 12-year-old, how to grip a football, and he received a kiss from Sofia, a 3-year-old, after he gave her a new toy doll. When he learned of Ayala’s story and her sacrifices for her family, Mahomes was reminded of his own mother.
“I feel the excitement and I feel the love that they have, not only for me but for the Kansas City Chiefs,” Mahomes said. “It’s special. This is a special place. There’s great people here, and that’s one of the reasons — probably the main reason — I love being here and love getting to play for this team.”
One of the first people to see Mahomes and the impact he has made in the community was Londa Larkin. In September, as the Chiefs surprised fans with a 3-0 start, Larkin was one of the cancer patients from the University of Kansas Medical Center to meet Mahomes during his visit on a Tuesday afternoon.
Mahomes learned that Larkin was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia on Aug. 25, as she and her husband, Loren, were relocating their family from Dallas to Cosby, Mo., a small community within St. Joseph, Mo. Just days before meeting Mahomes, Larkin was in the hospital’s intensive care unit and needed a ventilator and a feeding tube to help her regain strength.
“I was very, very sick,” Larkin said, “but it was really awesome to see him.”
A casual football fan for most of her life, Larkin told Mahomes she enjoyed his unique playing style when she watched the Chiefs with her family. Mahomes told Larkin that she would be in his thoughts this season. He ended his visit by autographing a red Chiefs kingdom flag for Larkin.
“I just want them to know that I respect and understand, maybe not physically, but that I know what they’ve been through, and I want them to know I’m not on this high pedestal,” Mahomes said. “I care about them just as much as they care about the Chiefs.”
Since her moment with Mahomes, Larkin has watched most games while holding her flag. She has persevered through multiple rounds of chemotherapy and endured three bone marrow transfusions. In November, she received uplifting news: Her cancer was in remission, and she was set to receive a critical bone marrow transplant from a donor from Canada. Doctors are optimistic she could be cured in the next few months.
Watching Mahomes has given Larkin the ability to forget, for a few hours each week, how she can’t do the normal activities that once gave her such pride and fulfillment as a mother — such as caring for her five children, growing her garden and cooking for her family.
“He gives me inspiration,” Larkin said. “There’s a personal connection, and it’s encouraging. It’s fun to look forward to as I’m going through my journey.”
Less than an hour after leaving Larkin in the hospital’s oncology unit, Mahomes and the Chiefs backup quarterbacks took several selfies with more than 30 nurses. When Mahomes and his teammates went down an escalator to reach the lobby, they received a roaring ovation.
“Coming down that escalator, there had to have been at least, like, 5,000 people,” said backup quarterback Chad Henne, a 10-year veteran. “Patrick’s very humble, and he’s the same person. That’s what makes him great. Tuesday morning we’re in (the practice facility) watching film. As soon as we’re done, he’s got something to do in the city. He’s just that type of person.”
At Dick’s Sporting Goods in late November, Mahomes led the 15 youth football players through each section of the store. Many of the players, with Mahomes’ advice, wanted to buy new sneakers. Others wanted a red Adidas hoodie since Mahomes was wearing one. The players celebrated when Mahomes led them into the section with Chiefs apparel.
Norman Bolton Jr., a 9-year-old from Shawnee, Kan., was excited to show his mother, Precious Swygert, what he would use his $125 gift card on: a No. 15 Mahomes jersey and a red Adidas hoodie.
Earlier this season, Norman, the quarterback for the Hornets in the KC United league, played a short game in front of fans at Arrowhead Stadium during halftime of the Chiefs’ victory over the Broncos. Norman said the experience of playing on an NFL field was fun, but that meeting Mahomes in person was amazing. Swygert smiled as she used her smartphone to capture her son’s interactions with Mahomes.
“He’s always been a Chiefs fan, so he really loves Patrick,” Swygert said of Norman. “His birthday is Dec. 15, so I think it’s great for him to meet Patrick around his birthday. I’m going to treasure it because he’s happy, and I think he’ll look at him and respect him even more as a quarterback who gives back.”
Mahomes, through short messages, explained to the players how he became successful by trusting his teammates, coaches and his parents. He told the group that meeting them was one of the many reasons he enjoys his job, and he left the store giving each player a high-five.
“For me to be able to help out in any way possible, to get them the things that they need in order to go out there and have fun with their friends, is definitely a special experience,” Mahomes said. “It was awesome for them to enjoy a night out and have fun.”
Later, as he reflected on an unforgettable evening, Adrion Roberson thought of the message he always shares with players and their parents. He wants KC United to be a league known for developing players into quality men through education and coaching. Roberson often tells parents their child could be a “game-changer,” someone who strengthens a city one soul, one life and one family at a time.
Someone like Patrick Mahomes.
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