12-year-old doesn’t know it, but he’ll be at Chiefs game thanks to fan honoring his own mom

Gabriel Mata was 9 years old when the Kansas City Chiefs caught his eye.

The young boy, who has autism and ADHD, wasn’t surrounded by much red inside his mother’s Humboldt Park home in Chicago; the color is more stimulating to him than others. So when the players darted across his TV, their bright ruby jerseys drew him in.

Three years later, Gabriel owns a football, a Chiefs shirt, and even joined a local youth league as a lineman. He is as ardent a fan as any.

He gravitates toward quarterback Patrick Mahomes, whom he said looks like one of his older brothers. He wants to be fast like wide receiver Tyreek Hill.

“Mom, my Chiefs are playing,” he shouts to Feliciana Melendez, 42, most Sundays during football season.

Thanks to a kindred Chiefs fan in Wichita, the mother-son duo will soon be traveling to Kansas City to watch the players dash across the field in real life. It was a gift that grew from missed mothers and memories.

Chiefs fans in Chicago

Melendez learned about football from the oldest of her five sons. While the single mother wasn’t able to make many high school games because of her work, they’d teach her about the turns of phrase and technicalities when they got home.

These days, Gabriel parks himself in front of the TV as Melendez makes football food: homemade pizza, fried chicken, potato skins and chips.

At kickoff, he bounces around as if he ate a few handfuls of candy, she jokes. If they fall behind, he takes to pacing.

Last Sunday, when the Chiefs went head to head with the Buffalo Bills, Gabriel got plenty of steps in.

“It was intense; he was stressed,” Melendez recalled with a laugh.

Like all Chiefs fans, Gabriel rode the highs and lows of the last quarter. When the overtime touchdown brought the Chiefs a win, they popped bottles of sparkling apple cider. Gabriel spilled some on the floor, but Melendez didn’t mind.

“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 looked forward to the AFC Championship Game the following week against the Bengals that she assumed they’d be watching from Chicago, as usual.

But that changed the next day, when Melendez got a phone call.

Mothers and memories

Jason Madhu, 43, re-watched the fourth quarter of the Chiefs-Bills game from his Wichita home on Monday night. A photo of his mom, Amber Patel, sat on a nearby shelf. He looked at it often.

She had died just two weeks earlier at the age of 70, after chronic lung issues and a coronavirus diagnosis, despite being fully vaccinated.

Loved ones had gathered in the following days to remember the woman with unlimited kindness, energy and strength. In Hindu tradition, they also gave to local causes, including a foster home and the humane society in her memory, to celebrate her life.

But Madhu also wanted to show his appreciation for his mom through football, which he came to love in middle school, during the Chiefs’ Derrick Thomas days.

“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.

Madhu had an idea. What if he could gift a special moment to a woman who’s raising a son. Someone who might want to make an extra memory to hold onto.

So that night he took to Twitter, asking if any single moms wanted free tickets to the following playoff game. While his mother was never a single parent, Madhu knew single moms often have extra challenges. As he held onto memories with his own mother, he hoped he could help another family make some of their own.

He didn’t expect the tweet to take off like it did. It gathered 140 comments, several hundred retweets and 1,400 likes.

But a message from Melendez was the first to catch his eye. They chatted a bit, and he learned more about the mother of five sons who works as a patient-engagement specialist at a nonprofit medical clinic. She had also lost her mother.

Then he asked if he could give her a call. He wanted to send her to the game, with plane tickets, lodging and game tickets on him.

Melendez screamed from the other side of the phone.

An epic surprise

Melendez told The Star on Wednesday afternoon that the past 36 hours had been life-changing.

“It feels like a dream,” she said.

All Gabriel knows is that he’s getting on a plane with his mother this weekend. It’s for a mother-son trip, she told him.

Come Sunday morning, she plans to tell him that they’re headed to a restaurant for breakfast. She’ll eagerly watch his eyes wander up the walls of Arrowhead Stadium as they pull into the parking lot. Then she’ll reveal the “epic surprise.”

But the moment also means the world to Melendez, who said it was incredibly special to see someone reaching out to moms like herself.

“It feels like somebody finally said, ‘Hey, I see you as a single mom,’” she said. “You know, that’s big.”

While he won’t be at the game himself, Madhu said he assured Melendez that “KC fans are the best, and will treat you like family.”

He’ll be watching from home, thinking of his mom, and smiling.