For These Stars, Mom Rules

His sports life has been documented by his mother, with photos and news clippings pasted into scrapbooks. Last week, she flipped through the pages: Springs with his first football team in Oxon Hill at about 7 years old; with the Blue Devils at Springbrook High School; at the Rose Bowl playing for Ohio State.

"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, said she signed her son up for football with modest expectations. "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 seven months earlier.

Thomas said she has tried to support her son through this 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.

These days, Thomas is at every Redskins game. "I see what the fans don't see: the pain. The physical standpoint of football." She added: "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. "To this day, I could not tell you how I got from the suite down to the field," she said.

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

A couple of years ago, one mother from each NFL team told her son's story for a recipe book called "Moms Know Best," put out by the Campbell Soup Co.

On Page 36, Teresa Thomas was the featured mother for the Redskins.