Raheem Mostert’s improbable run: From traumatic childhood and six NFL cuts to Super Bowl

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SANTA CLARA — He calls her Mama Chop.

When 49ers running back Raheem Mostert was a boy, the wife of his youth football coach was like a mother to him, often driving him home from the practice field to the projects in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. She always was wary about dropping him off in a neighborhood rife with gangs, drugs and shootings.

“Mama Chop, I’ll be OK,” DeAnne Stokes remembers the young Raheem reassuring her. “I pull my sheets across the windows and don’t pay attention to what’s going on out there.”

On Sunday, the break-out player who was largely unknown until his record-setting performance to help the 49ers clinch the NFC Championship will be putting the heartbreaks of his youth aside. No. 31 will take the field in Super Bowl LIV against Kansas City at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, a three-and-a-half hour drive south from the Pop Warner fields where he spent his nights and weekends as a boy.

Mostert left his home state a decade ago, determined to put his tortured family life behind him. He never knew his father, he doesn’t speak to his mother, and his stepfather is in prison for attempted murder after shooting his younger half brother four times on Father’s Day 2014. When Mostert was no more than 4, he picked up a loaded gun left in the house and shot himself in the big toe.

And all that happened before the Purdue University star was cut by six teams over the past five years — the Eagles, Dolphins, Ravens, Browns, Jets and Bears.

“The journey has been crazy. Not everybody can deal with that type of stress and pain and agony I went through,” he told reporters after running for four touchdowns and 220 yards in the 49ers’ NFC title game win over the Green Bay Packers. “But I kept the faith in not only myself but with whoever gave me the opportunity.”

His odyssey has been a professional triumph and a personal testament to his determination to building the life he never knew as a child. Mostert’s closest supporters will be in the stands on Sunday: his wife, Devon, and their 7-month-old son, Gunnar; her parents, Kevin and Michelle Beckwith; and Stokes, the widow of his Pop Warner coach Michael “Chop” Stokes, who died in June of complications with cancer.

At every home game this season, Mostert wore a red jersey under his pads with the coach’s nickname, “Chop,” hand written in a Sharpie under the 49ers logo. Stokes earned the moniker as a child running late to football practice gnawing on a pork chop.

The morning after Mostert’s life-changing NFC Championship game — fielding scores of media interview requests — he texted Mama Chop, promising to send her and her son, Trevor, tickets to the Super Bowl.

“You guys are always there for me and always believed in me,” Mostert wrote. “And for that I will always be thankful for you guys!”

From the start, the Stokes were taken in by the humble child with the huge smile.

“What I admire most about him is his heart. He just had the drive to make something of himself and get out of the situation he was in,” DeAnne Stokes said in a phone interview from Florida. “My husband used to say you could look in his eyes and you could see he wanted to learn, he was eager, just soaking up everything.”

Mostert sought refuge at the sports complex, a field built over an old landfill, where he helped pick up trash to earn free hamburgers from the concession stand.

He also headed for the ocean. He loved to surf. One day, when he was 14, his wife said, a Billabong — the surfing clothing company — agent approached him on the beach offering a sponsorship. The teenager turned him down.

“He knew he wanted to be the first in his family to graduate,” Devon said. “It blows my mind at such a young age he was able to make the decisions he did to get out.”

His coach encouraged him to study, a clear path to carve his own future. As part of its mission, the Pop Warner league sent tutors to the field. When the young athlete chose Purdue University in Indiana, Devon Mostert said, “it was as far away from Florida as he could get.”

In college, Raheem Mostert played football, ran track and met his wife, who played on the soccer team.

They were “best friends first,” she said, and would take long walks around campus. “He would bring me pizza at 2 in the morning when I was studying.”

She was the first to hear about the Father’s Day shooting in 2014, while Mostert was flying back to Purdue from a track meet.

“The only thing he said is, ‘Is my brother breathing?’ ” Devon said. “I didn’t know the answer at the time.”

Local news reports back then said that his half brother, then 18, had broken up a fight between his parents. Mostert’s stepfather had his hands on his mother’s throat, police reports said, and when his mother fled, his father shot his son four times with a .22 caliber handgun in his abdomen, hip and elbow. As the teen ran out of the house, the father shot one more time and missed. After surgery, the brother recovered.

Devon’s parents, the Beckwiths from the Cleveland area, welcomed Mostert into the family and became his surrogate parents.

“With Raheem, I felt like instantly I wanted to put my arms around him and hug him,” Michelle Beckwith said in a phone interview from Miami awaiting the Super Bowl. “I felt like he was the missing piece of our family.”

When he explained his rough upbringing, “it made me admire his strength and what he wanted in life. It’s never easy to break a cycle or change things.”

Out of Purdue in 2015, the speedy 5-foot-10 Mostert wasn’t drafted but instead signed as a free agent with the Philadelphia Eagles. Despite an impressive preseason, he was cut from the team. His NFL journey was one disappointment after another, with the toughest blow coming in late 2016. He was released from the Cleveland Browns the same day his future wife was having her bridal shower — in her hometown that she had hoped would be their home, too.

“I’d say we probably moved 20 times since graduating from college, making a place a home and having that ripped from you and having to start all over,” Devon Mostert said. “We never felt at ease. We never felt comfortable.”

That night, the couple discussed their future. “Should I continue with football?” he asked. “My career isn’t going the way I planned.”

If he wanted to stick with it, she told him, she would, too.

“She basically says, ‘Hey look, if you love the sport like you say you do, you’ll keep fighting,’ ” Mostert said in an interview last week at Levi Stadium before flying to Miami. “It was a wrap from there.”

He made two brief stops, with the New York Jets and Chicago Bears, before signing after Thanksgiving in 2016 onto the 49ers practice squad, then joining the active roster in December. He scored his first NFL touchdown in the 2018 season, a 52-yard run against the Oakland Raiders, but broke his forearm in the same game.

The 49ers signed him to a three-year extension last March, and he played mostly special teams, where his teammates say he had a “Pro Bowl-type year.” He earned a shot at running back, and by the end of the 2019 regular season he finished with eight rushing touchdowns. And when starting running back Tevin Coleman left the championship game with a shoulder injury, Mostert — and his career — took off. Until that night, no one had run for four touchdowns and more than 200 yards in an NFL playoff game.

With her parents at her side and her baby on her lap, Devon Mostert could barely keep up with her husband’s performance.

“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t cry 10 times that night,” she said. “People were like, ‘Get your phone out, there’s another record he’s breaking up on the Jumbotron.’ It’s hard to keep it together. It’s been a lot. Every chapter that is closed, or every bad event that happened in his life, he keeps going. Thankfully, we are where we are today.”

Ben Garland, the 49ers center whose locker is next to Mostert’s, said there’s no question what makes Mostert stand out.

“That grit, that persistence, that’s a real thing that a lot more of us could use,” Garland said. “It’s tough in the face of failure where you think you screwed up to continue to go, continue to grind, continue to chase your dreams. But those who do sometimes end up on top, and it’s that real perseverance that makes you the man you are today.”

And Mostert pays it forward. He kept a box of all his seldom-worn cleats from all his NFL teams, DeAnne Stokes said, and “was going to ship them to the high school because he knew how hard it was for him not to be able to pay for his own.”

In San Jose, where the Mosterts live, he has volunteered every year with Fresh Lifelines for Youth, a nonprofit program at Santa Clara County Juvenile Hall that encourages troubled youth to move past their mistakes. Sean Rooney, the probation division manager, said Mostert never shows up with the swagger of a big star.

Instead, he said, “it’s ‘I’m a person who struggles and works hard every day.’ Whether it’s a little or a lot, he always seems to be moving forward.”

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49ers voice complaints about turf at MetLife Stadium, play there again next Sunday On Sunday, Mostert will be going through the same pregame ritual: First, he’ll call up on his phone the list of cut dates from the six NFL teams. Then, to appreciate how far he’s come, he’ll linger over a series of photos: Devon and Gunnar; his in-laws, Michelle and Kevin; a picture from his wedding day of him, beaming between Chop and Mama Chop.

With his past behind him, he’ll be looking forward — this time for a chance to help the 49ers win their sixth Super Bowl and thank his teammates and family for believing in him.

“He’s a light and the world needs a light,” Mama Chop said. “We saw that in that 7-year-old boy, and I’m just glad the world now is getting a glimpse of who he is.”

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