For These Stars, Mom's the Word

"I'm the type, I like to reflect back on things," she said. "I like to remind Shawn, if you feel the need to complain about anything, look how far you have come. Look what you have been blessed with thus far."

Now a retired Army master sergeant, Thomas, 51, says her son's beginnings in football were not the way she imagined. "I put him in for discipline," she said, "but he ended up just loving the game."

A major influence was Springs's father, Ron Springs, who also played in the National Football League, mostly with the Dallas Cowboys. In October, the elder Springs fell into a coma amid complications from a routine surgery; he had undergone a kidney transplant months earlier.

Thomas said she has tried to support her son through this emotionally difficult time. His father remains in the hospital. "It has been sad," she said. "Last season was difficult. First his father and then [the death of Redskins safety] Sean Taylor."

As Mother's Day approached, Springs talked about Thomas, how she took him to games as a kid, how she probably did not miss even one game while he was in college.

One of Springs's most vivid memories, he said, is from an Oxon Hill game in which Thomas got so excited by his scoring that she fell off the bleachers while cheering. Her seat was not far from the ground, he noted.

These days, Thomas is at every Redskins game, cheering the team in her son's suite and watching out for him. Some days, she said, she worries quietly: "Oh no, don't let my baby get burned."

A feeling of unease sets in every year in August, with the preseason. "I see what the fans don't see -- the pain. The physical standpoint of football." She adds: "You know your child is grown, but . . . you just want to still hold them. You feel their pain."

The worst, she said, was a Philadelphia game in which Springs was knocked unconscious. "It was one of the scariest parts of my life," she said. "To this day, I could not tell you how I got from the suite down to the field."

Lately, Thomas finds solace in an NFL mothers group called the Professional Football Players Mothers' Association.

A couple of years ago, one mother from each NFL team lent her name and told her son's story for a recipe book called "Moms Know Best," put out by the Campbell Soup Co., with Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb and his mother, Wilma, on the cover.

On Page 36, near a recipe for chicken scampi, Teresa Thomas was the featured mother for the Redskins.