For Gabriel Mata, the Kansas City Chiefs started as a flash of red on a screen in his mother’s Chicago home. Three years later, the 12-year-old has a football, a Chiefs shirt and a spot in a local youth league as a lineman. Now, thanks to a Wichita fan moved by his own family memories, Gabriel is headed to Kansas City with his mom for a trip neither of them saw coming.
Gabriel was 9 when the Chiefs first grabbed his attention. He has autism and ADHD, and the bright red jerseys on television stood out to him more than the colors around him in Feliciana Melendez’s Humboldt Park home. Once he locked in, he didn’t let go.
Patrick Mahomes is his guy, because, as Gabriel put it, the quarterback looks like one of his older brothers. He also wants to be fast like Tyreek Hill. And most Sundays during football season, Melendez hears the same declaration from her son: “Mom, my Chiefs are playing,” he shouts to Feliciana Melendez, 42, most Sundays during football season.
The game-day routine in Chicago has become a family ritual. Melendez learned football from her oldest son, and though work kept her from making many high school games, her boys filled her in later on the details.
Now Gabriel settles in for kickoff while she cooks up football food - homemade pizza, fried chicken, potato skins and chips. He bounces around the room, she says, like he’s had too much candy.
If the Chiefs fall behind, he starts pacing.
Last Sunday against the Buffalo Bills, he was especially restless.
“It was intense; he was stressed,” Melendez recalled with a laugh.
Then came the overtime touchdown, the win, and a celebration with sparkling apple cider. Gabriel even spilled some on the floor, but Melendez said she didn’t care.
“It was pure beauty for him,” she said. “Just to see him gravitate to something and feel like he wants to be part of it, that makes my heart happy.”
They expected to keep watching from Chicago when the AFC Championship Game against the Bengals rolled around the following week. Instead, the next day brought a phone call that changed everything.
In Wichita, Jason Madhu was rewatching the fourth quarter of the Chiefs-Bills game on Monday night with a photo of his mom, Amber Patel, sitting nearby. Patel had died two weeks earlier at 70 after chronic lung issues and a coronavirus diagnosis, despite being fully vaccinated.
Loved ones had already honored her in their own way, including donations to a foster home and the humane society in her memory. Madhu, who fell in love with football in middle school during the Chiefs’ Derrick Thomas days, wanted to do something through the sport too.
“In life, we’re like, we still got tomorrow, we got next week, we got next month, you know, and sometimes we just take things for granted,” he said.
So that night he posted on Twitter asking whether any single moms wanted free tickets to the next playoff game. He said he knew single mothers face extra challenges, and he wanted to give another family a memory to hold onto while he was holding onto his own.
The response was immediate. The tweet drew about 140 comments, more than 500 retweets and more than 1,600 likes.
One message stood out first: Melendez’s. They talked, and Madhu learned she works as a patient-engagement specialist at a nonprofit medical clinic and has also lost her mother. Then he asked to call her.
What he offered went beyond seats at the game. He said he would cover plane tickets, lodging and game tickets so she and Gabriel could make the trip.
Melendez screamed on the other end of the phone.
By Wednesday afternoon, she said the last 36 hours had already changed her life.
“It feels like a dream,” she said.
Gabriel, meanwhile, just knows he’s flying somewhere with his mom this weekend. Melendez told him it’s a mother-son trip.
On Sunday morning, she plans to tell him they’re going out for breakfast before driving up to Arrowhead Stadium, where she expects to watch his eyes climb the walls as they pull into the parking lot. That’s when she’ll spring the “epic surprise.”
For Melendez, the gesture landed just as hard.
“It feels like somebody finally said, ‘Hey, I see you as a single mom,’” she said. “You know, that’s big.”
Madhu won’t be at the game, but he told Melendez, “KC fans are the best, and will treat you like family.”
He’ll be watching from home, thinking about his mother and smiling.
Hey #ChiefsKingdom
- Jason (@jmadwho) January 25, 2022
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