Eric Fisher is as big as a giant and looks a bit like a bouncer at a rough bar. That’s part of what the Chiefs liked about him. He plays football like an ornery cuss, with a nasty streak and the kind of factory-worker style that old-timers sometimes say doesn’t exist anymore.
The Kansas City Star reports that’s part of why the Chiefs made Fisher, a left tackle from Central Michigan and Stoney Creek High School, the No. 1 overall pick in the NFL Draft on Thursday night, and it’s part of why people sometimes get the wrong idea about him.
He’s a 6-foot-7, 305-pound sweetheart who puts pass rushers in the dirt because he wants to make his mother proud.
Heidi Langegger raised this enormous son by herself, a single mother who’s on her 33rd year working in Volkswagen’s warranty department. As her boy realized a dream on Thursday at Radio City Music Hall, mom did a little crying and a lot of reflecting. Can you believe this? Her son?
“He was my little man,” she says. “Now, he’s my big, little man.”
Langegger felt her son change a bit after the diagnosis. She fought thyroid cancer when Eric was young, and she didn’t want to scare him. But she could tell it shook his world.
She’s cancer-free now, but ever since the diagnosis, Eric became very protective. Grew up a little bit. She was the mother, the caregiver, all of those things. But he became more than a son. He returned the love. Never gave mom a problem. Even in college, he’d skip out for a weekend to come back to his country home to see mom. Sometimes they’d split logs together outside. Sometimes they’d talk. Sometimes they’d laugh.
