Steelers’ Tuitt buys a house for his mom
Defensive end Stephon Tuitt didn’t exactly need an open week to get some rest. He has missed the past two games and four of the first eight for the Steelers because of separate injuries.
But what he got to do with a free weekend is something he had been wanting to do since he was a kid — buy a house for his mom.
So Tuitt, who signed a six-year, $61.05 million contract extension before the season, went back home to Georgia and bought a townhouse for his mother, Tamara Bartlett, in John’s Creek, an Atlanta suburb.
“I got a chance to give her the home she wanted,” said Tuitt, the fifth-highest-paid defensive end in the NFL who expects to play Sunday in Indianapolis. “That was a goal of mine since I was little kid. She worked really hard her whole entire life just to keep us in good neighborhoods and have us go to good schools, even though we couldn’t afford it.
“All that struggle she’s been through, the pain and suffering she went through, the hard work she put in, I only felt it was right to go back home and give her the house of her dreams and let her live debtfree.” When he was young, Tuitt’s mom moved her three sons from Florida to Lawrenceville, Ga. He said his mom always rented a place for them because she wanted to be in a nice neighborhood. When she couldn’t drive him to football tryouts at Monroe High School — she worked in the Gwinnett County sheriff’s department — Tuitt walked 12 miles to them.
Tuitt said his mother wanted a townhouse because she didn’t want to have to worry about doing work outside.
He closed on the three-story, 2,700-square-foot structure over the weekend and said his mother will move in this week.
“It feels tremendous as a son,” Tuitt said. “People don’t all grow up the same. I’m blessed to be able to do something I get paid a lot of money to do, but you got to be smart. I just had good people in my corner to do the right things with my money and put me in the right position to do this for my mother.”