Kelee Ringo answered a phone call from Eagles general manager Howie Roseman a few minutes into Day 3 of the draft. His belated wait to enter the NFL had ended. Sitting next to him, directly to his left with a smile stretched across her face, was his mother, Tralee Hale.
The significance of sitting next to each other shouldn’t have been lost on the mother and son during this phone call. They remember the calls three years earlier.
“There were certain situations that we didn’t know if we would overcome, and she was able to figure out a way,” Ringo said in an interview with The Athletic this week, days before Mother’s Day.
Ringo left for Georgia on June 3, 2020, and his mother wondered if the year could become any worse. This was during the throes of the coronavirus pandemic. She had been laid off from her job as her son enrolled in college across the country, leaving her as an empty nester.
She decided she would finally make herself a priority. She needed her eyes checked. A visit to the dentist awaited. Both paled compared to something else.
“I’m embarrassed and humbled to say that I actually had a palpable mass located at 10 o’clock on my left breast that I had actually been ignoring for nine months,” Hale told The Athletic. “Just being a single mother and…
