‘I feel like I can feel her out there’
Bears receiver Taylor Gabriel had to overcome his mother’s sudden death when he was a teenager — and being passed up in the NFL draft — to carve out a career in football. Now he’s hoping to become a go-to guy after his breakout game against the Buccaneers. Colleen Kane’s story,
Kimberly
As Taylor Gabriel remembered it, he begged for a job. This was more than four years ago, before Gabriel caught three passes for 76 yards in Super Bowl LI with the Falcons. Before the Bears decided his upside was worth a four-year, $26-million contract. Before he set a career high with 104 receiving yards on seven catches in his fourth game in a Bears uniform.
Gabriel was an undrafted rookie tryout hoping to stick with the 2014 Browns.
“A camp body,” he said. “Somebody there to fill up the numbers so the draft picks don’t run out and hurt themselves.”
Gabriel was the one who hurt himself, injuring his hamstring on his second day. But he wasn’t ready to give up, so he walked into Browns general manager Ray Farmer’s office and laid out a promise.
“I told him if he would give me an opportunity to come back and get healthy, it would be the best thing he has done that year,” Gabriel said.
Confidence is seemingly a prerequisite for NFL wide receivers, and the confidence Gabriel has brought to the Bears is borne from early experience.
It comes from showing throughout his life that his success can be bigger than his 5-foot-8, 165-pound frame. It comes from having a mother and father who believed in him from the time he was a 6-yearold Texas youth player running for a touchdown on his first career carry.
And it also comes from a deeper, more painful place, where he learned to channel the support of his mother after she died suddenly of a brain aneurysm when he was 15.
“That had to be one of the top worst things that could happen to a person,” Gabriel said. “So mentally overcoming that, I felt like I can overcome anything.”
An unforgettable conversation
Gabriel grew up in a footballloving family in suburban Dallas. His father, Calvin, remembered him using pennies to set up formations as a child. At the time, NFL dreams were still far off. Gabriel wanted to grow up to be a businessman and wear a suit and tie like his father, a software engineer.
But football games with his friends still went on “every day, all day.”
“Football was like eating in Texas,” Gabriel said. “Something that you had to do every day.”
Small and fast, just as he is today, he started out on defense but eventually asked to play running back. Calvin, a former defensive player, was heartbroken, until that first touchdown.
“That’s Taylor,” Calvin said. “He has that kind of aura, that kind of magic on him.”
Calvin coached Gabriel in youth football, but his mother Kimberly was the tougher of his parents. Gabriel remembered her aura as one that drew people to want to talk to her.
“An angel to anybody she came in contact with,” he said.
But she also didn’t coddle her son. After all, she had big expectations for him.
“My mom was a trash talker, so I had to make sure I backed it up,” Gabriel said.
Calvin remembers a discussion with neighbors about who had caused trouble with a garage, and Gabriel’s parents asserted they didn’t believe their son was involved. One woman said something Kimberly didn’t like.
“She turned to them and said, ‘Let me tell you something: This one right here, someday the whole world will know his name,’ ” Calvin said, letting out a long, deep laugh. “She was an outstanding woman.”
Said Gabriel: “She was just confident in me when I wasn’t confident in myself. That’s one thing I miss about her.”
One night, Kimberly had a talk with her son, perhaps a typical mother-son conversation, but one that feels uncanny now. She told Gabriel she wasn’t always going to be around to get him going in the morning and make sure he was on time.
The next morning — 12 years ago last weekend — started off as a regular one. She dropped her son off at high school, but about an hour later, Gabriel’s father came to pick him up. Out of nowhere, Kimberly had died of a brain aneurysm.
“For her to say that that night, it was kind of weird,” Gabriel said. “That morning she had given me a tad bit of a whooping to make sure I was in line. You can look back and say, not that she knew, but it was like she was prepping me for the rest of my life. I look at that as a big steppingstone. It kept me going. … I felt like I had to do more than what was expected of me, for my mom. I feel like that for sure pushed me to make it to the NFL.”
Such realizations didn’t come at first.
For several months, Gabriel withdrew. He didn’t want to go to school or play football. He didn’t see the point.
“I felt like, who am I playing football for?” Gabriel said. “My mom isn’t here to cheer me on.”
Calvin called it “devastating” for the whole family. He thought he was going to spend the rest of his life with Kimberly, but suddenly he was the sole backbone for Gabriel and his younger sister and older brother. Gabriel called him “my Superman,” a person from whom he wants a syllabus on being a parent to help himself as a new father. In a sad way, Calvin said, the trauma brought them closer together.
Eventually, Gabriel returned to football and became an All-State wide receiver at John Horn High School. He landed at then-Division II Abilene Christian because he didn’t get his qualifying test scores in time for Division I schools, he said. He became second on Abilene Christian’s all-time receiving list with 215 career catches for 3,027 yards and 27 touchdowns.
He had found his motivation to play again, and proving Kimberly right was a large part of that.
“When I play football and when I’m on the field, I feel like I can feel her out there,” Gabriel said. “I never wanted to lose that feeling again.”
‘A crazy story’
Gabriel didn’t know it, but Farmer already was going to offer him a contract to continue into the preseason with the Browns when Gabriel went into the GM’s office to plead his case.
Before the 2014 draft, Gabriel and his father talked to a few teams. They thought he might be picked in the later rounds, but his name never was called.
“I looked at him, and he looked at me, and I said, ‘We’re going to have to go the long way,’ ” Calvin said. “And he said, ‘Let’s do it.’ He went about proving himself.”
Farmer didn’t know much about Gabriel beyond his pro day numbers indicated blazing speed and that Browns scouts thought he deserved a look.
The Browns had just drafted cornerback Justin Gilbert eighth overall, and Gabriel figured if he separated himself against the first-round pick during the tryout, he could catch some eyes. Farmer said he could tell within 15 seconds how explosive Gabriel was. Though the rookie injured his hamstring, Farmer had seen enough.
Gabriel laughed when he thought now about the odds. While Farmer had seen tryout players go on to big careers before, he acknowledged it’s rare.
But a few months later, Gabriel was playing in his first NFL game against Steelers safety Troy Polamalu.
Over their two years together in Cleveland, as Gabriel totaled 64 catches for 862 yards, the effort Gabriel put in during his downtime to catch balls on the JUGS machine or study impressed Farmer. He knew of Gabriel’s backstory, but he didn’t talk to him directly about his mother.
“Everybody’s ‘why’ to me is personal,” Farmer said. “Whatever he used to motivate himself is powerful enough that to me you could see his drive in everything he did, to his ‘Tuesday work ethic,’ to how he approached practice, to how he approached studying his playbook and learning, to his willingness to come to my office as a tryout guy and say, ‘Hey, look, I know I got hurt, but if you give me a chance, I can do this.’
“It just demonstrates the belief he has in himself and promises he made to those in his life that are important.”
After Farmer was fired at the end of the 2015 season, Gabriel hit another pothole. The Browns, 3-13 the previous year, waived him before the 2016 opener.
“All the media would say you get cut from the Browns and you’re done,” Gabriel said.
But Gabriel had played his rookie season under Browns offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan, who in 2016 was the Falcons coordinator. Farmer believes Shanahan’s familiarity with Gabriel’s abilities helped pave his way to Atlanta. Five months later, after totaling 35 catches for 579 yards and six touchdowns in 13 regular-season games, Gabriel was playing in the Super Bowl.
“It’s a crazy story, man,” Gabriel said.
New connection
When Gabriel was looking for his free-agent landing spot in the offseason, he spoke with former Abilene Christian teammate Charcandrick West about playing under Bears coach Matt Nagy when West and Nagy were with the Chiefs. He liked what he heard, and so far the coach has measured up with the expectations.
“He’s like the Yoda of this offense,” Gabriel said of Nagy. “He knows everything. He knows what pieces should be where.”
For Gabriel, that has meant 22 catches for 193 yards and two touchdowns and four carries for 27 yards in four games. He thinks the next step in his development as a wide receiver is consistently making opportunities for himself, and he likes that he landed in the hands of Nagy and wide receivers coach Mike Furrey.
Furrey, an NFL receiver with three teams from 2003-09, is blunt about his expectations. He has been impressing on Gabriel what it takes to be a featured wide receiver, one who played 83 percent of the Bears’ offensive snaps this season. Furrey said learning the art of being a great wide receiver will take him further than relying on his talent alone.
“That doesn’t just happen on Sundays either,” Furrey said. “You can’t just show up. We’ve had a lot of conversations (about) during the week you have to work on these things, or you really have to self-critique yourself. You have to be hard on yourself. Even if you catch the ball, you have to be hard. Did I get out of my break right? Did I use the right footwork at the end of it? Did I separate? Could have I gotten vertical more? Did I keep running?”
Furrey saw that work show up in Gabriel’s career performance against a banged-up Bucs secondary. It was a day Gabriel thinks demonstrated the trust he is building with quarterback Mitch Trubisky.
“(People) think he’s just a speed guy, but he takes a lot of pride in his routes and that’s something I see, too,” Trubisky said. “He says, ‘Mitch, I can run any route you want me to run, just let me know. I’ll work on it and we’ll get it down. We’ll get the timing down.’ And that’s what we have done.”
Calvin was at the Bears’ 48-10 victory over the Bucs. One night this week in Texas, he was driving home when he considered what it felt like to watch that game as a father. As he pulled into his garage, he saw the trophies from Gabriel’s past.
“What he’s doing now is what we’re used to seeing him do,” Calvin said. “It’s what he does.”
Kimberly isn’t physically present to see it, but Gabriel will remember her as he tries to take the next step in his career. He plans to use the NFL’s annual “My Cause, My Cleats” campaign to support brain aneurysm awareness, and he tries to reach kids back home in Texas.
“I’m trying to share my story so they can see you can overcome those things and become greater,” Gabriel said. “It’s important to me to spread this. … There’s a reason to why we’re doing this and why we’re talking about this.”
More than two decades ago, Kimberly began instilling confidence in Gabriel. Now her son is trying to pass along the inspiration.