Robert Mathis doesn't want your damn pity

The hardest days for Robert Mathis were the ones spent at his dying mother’s bedside, inside the home he bought for 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. She’d shown him strength; he remembers her waking up each morning at 4 a.m. to hustle off to her shift scrubbing floors inside the homes of Atlanta’s affluent. She’d shown him pride, raising six kids on her own, qualifying for welfare but never accepting it.

To find the roots of this man’s ambition, it starts with her. It starts with the morning Mathis woke up to a U.S. Marshall pounding on the front door, demanding they pack their things and get out. They’d been evicted. His mother’s landlord hadn’t paid the mortgage. Hours later he saw her return from work, helpless, tears flowing down her face. That day he made a decision.

That’s the day the fire was lit.

It’s why, when his guidance counselor at McNair High School asked for a career goal, Mathis responded, “I’m going to play in the NFL.” OK then, the guidance counselor said, mindful that less than one percent of high school football players make the pros. What’s your Plan B?

“Play in the NFL,” Mathis said.

It’s why, as the too-small defensive end and offensive guard no college football team wanted, he cobbled together a scratchy VHS tape of his best plays – “a bootleg job,” he calls it now – and sent it out. It was his only shot. One school called back, tiny Alabama A&M, and offered him a scholarship as an offensive player.

It’s why, four years later, when reporters asked the Indianapolis Colts’ fifth-round pick what his goals were for his rookie season, the kid no one had ever heard of said he wanted to lead the league in sacks.

It’s why he’s still here, 13 seasons later, still chasing quarterbacks after what he calls “the most trying 18 months of my life.” First his mother – his champion – was taken from him. Then football. He was suspended. Injured. Doubted. Questioned. Criticized. Written off. Forgotten.

What no one saw was the fear, creeping in as the months passed and the anxiety grew and one surgery after another failed to finish the job. “Will he ever play again?” his wife, Brandi, begged the doctors. “Is this the last one? How many more will he need?” No one had the answers.

Mathis pressed on. Three surgeries became four. Five became six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Ten surgeries in 11 months. Three major reconstructive operations on the ruptured Achilles tendon that cost him the 2014 season; seven additional ones to wash out the infection that wouldn’t die. By the eighth time he went under the knife, Mathis had begun to question himself in a way he never had before. He wasn’t sure he’d ever play football again.

“A lot of days, I was just depressed,” the Colts' all-time sack king says, peeling back the curtain in a way he rarely does. “Would I ever be the player I once was? Every single day … every single day was a question mark. Can I? Will I? Will I want to?”

They were questions he’d never asked himself before. Never had to. Robert Mathis built his career fearing no man, no opponent, no obstacle. Now he was 34 years old and coming off 10 surgeries. Now he feared his own football mortality.

So on the hardest days, while he clenched his dying mother’s hand in the house he bought her with his first NFL paycheck, he’d think of his champion. Of her struggle. Of the one-story home on the southeast side of Atlanta she’d raised him in, a home that sits minutes from where the Colts will face the Falcons on Sunday. In those moments, he’d remember why the fire was first lit. He’d stop feeling sorry for himself.

“I don’t want your pity,” he says. “I don’t want your damn pity.”

* * *

He’d played football long enough to know right away. It was late last summer. Mathis was slogging away in football purgatory, suspended for the first four games of the season after testing positive for Clomid, a drug he says he took after he and his wife experienced fertility challenges.

He was back home in Atlanta, on an indoor field at a high school, sweating through bag drills, salivating for his eventual return. He put a move on one, zipped past – “something I’ve done a million times,” he says – and heard a loud thump. He thought he’d kicked something. Or stepped on something. So he looked around. Nothing. His mind raced.

He took a step. He wobbled. He knew.

“Oh my God,” he remembers thinking. “No. No. No. First the suspension … now this?"

He’d shredded his left Achilles tendon. His season was lost in an instant, gone before it ever began.

It was a new reality for Mathis: a life that wouldn’t include football. A year after moving to rush linebacker, leading the league in sacks with 19½, and finishing runner-up in Defensive Player of the Year voting, he would sit. He would watch. He would wait.

They are things Robert Mathis has never done well. Sit. Watch. Wait. Even as a child, Mathis was as rambunctious as they come, climbing trees, leaping off couches, jamming his neck on mattresses after backflips crashed too soon. “Don’t dare me to do something, because I would do it,” he says now, looking back. Trips to the emergency room were a monthly ritual.

At first he had no outlet – football was too expensive. The local league cost more than $100 and Emma Mathis couldn’t afford it. She had bills to pay, six hungry mouths to feed. Her husband, Robert’s father, left the family when Robert was five. So Emma raised her children on the meager salary she earned cleaning houses. On Sundays she’d drag her youngest to Holy Baptist Church. There, Robert sang in the choir.

Finally, in 10th grade, he went out for football. In the sport he found his passion. He grew to relish its ferocity, the combat of the trenches, the defensive end’s relentless pursuit of the quarterback. The game became his refuge and his obsession. It would be his ticket out, his mother’s passport to a better life.

“From then on, I was hell-bent on making the NFL,” Mathis says. “I basically brainwashed myself into thinking it would happen. Every single day I told myself, ‘Get to the NFL, get my momma a house. Get to the NFL, get my momma a house.’ ”

So when the high school guidance counselor pressed him for a Plan B, Mathis wouldn’t budge. No schools were calling, so he scraped together that scratchy VHS tape and sent it out. He arrived at Alabama A&M as the too-small defensive end – a label he’d squash both in college and the pros – and made his coach, Ron Cooper, a believer after a single workout.

Cooper lined up Mathis, just months removed from his high school graduation, one-on-one in a drill against the team’s top offensive lineman, a 6-6 senior and future NFLer named Kendrick Rodgers. Mathis roasted him. Cooper figured it was a fluke, so he lined up Mathis against the other linemen, all upperclassmen. Roasted them, too.

Mathis played with a rage Cooper had never seen before, and hasn’t seen since.

Get to the NFL, get my momma a house. Get to the NFL, get my momma a house.

Cooper has spent 31 years in college football, his stops including Notre Dame, Mississippi State, South Carolina and LSU. He has coached thousands of players and hundreds of future pros. He’s never coached another player like Robert Mathis.

“He played with an energy I don’t know if I’ve ever seen matched on a college field,” Cooper says.

* * *

Mathis set a Division I-AA record with 20 sacks as a senior but couldn’t sniff an invite to the NFL Scouting Combine. His agent had to beg scouts to attend his pro day. One team after another, 31 in all, told the 6-2, 235-pound Mathis he was too small to play defensive end. One gave him a shot. It was in the fifth round of the 2003 draft when Colts President Bill Polian told his coach, Tony Dungy, he was trading a future pick to move up and take Mathis. Dungy hesitated.

“I liked Robert, but Bill loved Robert,” Dungy remembers. “I didn’t want to trade the pick. I just wasn’t sure. I told him, ‘Let’s just wait.’ Bill said, ‘No, we’re drafting this kid. We have to have him.’ He was right.”

The Colts threw Mathis in mostly on special teams his first few seasons; in no time he was the unit’s best player. He chased quarterbacks when the Colts let him, corralling 10½ sacks his second year and 11½ his third. By then it was clear: This kid was too good for special teams. So Dungy lined Mathis up on one side of the defensive line, and Dwight Freeney on the other, and watched the two race each other to the quarterback for a decade.

They combined for 186 sacks and 73 forced fumbles over 10 seasons. They wrecked offensive lines and buried quarterbacks and made 13 Pro Bowls. They won a Super Bowl.

“Robert has that dog in him,” Freeney says now. “When we entered this league, they said you had to be 6-5, 280 pounds to play our position. If you were smaller, you were some type of hybrid linebacker. Him and I used that as fuel every time we stepped on the field.”

Now Freeney is gone. Peyton Manning is gone. Marvin Harrison. Reggie Wayne. Dallas Clark. Antoine Bethea.

Mathis is still here.

He’s now the longest-tenured Colt, thirteen seasons into an NFL career that was never supposed to happen. He has the most sacks in club history (115) and the most strip-sacks (42) in league history. That Plan B the high school guidance counselor asked for? Robert Mathis never needed one. Emma’s boy became a six-time Pro Bowler, the defensive pillar of a franchise, a potential Hall of Famer.

Get to the NFL, get my momma a house. Get to the NFL, get my momma a house.

Cooper knows why he made it and why he’s lasted. It all goes back to that scratchy VHS tape.

“I still use that tape,” Cooper says. “We have a bad game, the guys come in and think they played hard. I’ll pop in that tape of Robert Mathis and I’ll tell them, ‘You want to see effort? This is effort.' ”

* * *

The last 18 months have been the hardest. The esophageal cancer Emma Mathis beat off the first time came back. Robert buried his mother with a cast on his leg and his leg on a scooter. He went under the knife ten times. He watched the Colts come one game shy of the Super Bowl. He heard the critics, the ones calling him a cheater, calling him old, calling his career finished. He worked. He waited. He seethed.

He left missives on his cell phone. “Note2self: keep fighting.”

He posted photos of his Super Bowl ring. “When it becomes more than about the money…”

He left a reminder for his teammates, on the eve of his suspension, in the form of a framed photo in his locker: “Athletes, don’t take the sport you play for granted,” it began.

He watched from the sidelines for 12 months, his left leg in a boot, helpless. At times, doubt dominated his mind.

“Can I be the player I want to be? I honestly didn’t know,” he says now. “I used speed. Speed is who I am. If I don’t have that … if you can’t get to the quarterback, you have no job.”





Nine weeks into the season he finds himself in a familiar spot – leading the Colts in sacks, with four. But Mathis hasn’t played like the Mathis of old. Not yet. His team, 4-5 entering Sunday’s game in Atlanta, is desperate for a pass-rushing spark. Their star quarterback is sidelined. The Colts are counting on No. 98. The pitch count he played under the first half of the season is now history. The chains are off. It’s time to go to work.

This weekend he’ll return to the city where his improbable road began, the road that took him from rambunctious child to dismissed recruit to ambitious rookie to longest-tenured Colt. He plays now, in the twilight of his gilded career, with a new goal. He got to the NFL. He got his momma a house. What now? He looked at his twin boys, three-year-olds named Mason and Jason, and made himself a new promise. He wants to play long enough for them to remember.

“I’ve been doing research on this, and the age you start remembering things is about 4½ or five,” he says. “I just want them to remember their dad playing.”

He wants them to remember because he remembers. His mother rising each morning at 4 a.m. to clean houses. The day they were evicted. The promises he made – and kept. The hardest days, when he sat clenching her limp hand, a son’s fears pouring out while his mother slipped away, a little more, a little more, a little more each day.

Where he is today, and where he was all those years ago, a boy who brainwashed himself into thinking all this would happen.

“From where I am, stuff like this, the NFL? That’s TV,” Mathis says, shaking his head. “That’s a pipe dream. That’s not reality.”

He’s never forgotten. Inside the locker he’s had for 13 seasons at the Colts’ West 56th Street practice facility, he keeps a framed copy of a poem by Edgar Albert Guest. He looks at it every day. “Somebody said it couldn’t be done,” it begins.

Robert Mathis says it can.

Call Star reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134. Follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.

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