‘Never met a stranger’: Riding to a Miami game with Linda Fletcher
It is 9 a.m. on one other humid day in Florida, and Betty nonetheless has her sleeping masks on. She has a massive day forward, one that may maintain her awake previous 1 within the morning. Rest is essential on a journey day like at this time.
“Don’t mind her mask,” Linda Fletcher says, pointing on the lined windshield. Betty, Fletcher’s RV, has taken her throughout the nation, to the West Coast, up the East Coast, and, this weekend, will take her to South Bend, Indiana, for No. 1 Miami’s Saturday game at No. 11 Notre Dame.
Fletcher has pushed practically 60,000 miles over the previous 4 years to watch each game her son, Miami operating again Mark Fletcher Jr., has performed in school. She drew nationwide consideration final 12 months when Miami made the College Football Playoff. Sitting within the stands with her massive sun shades and even larger smile, the digital camera would minimize to her continuously as she celebrated Miami’s run to the nationwide title game. Her ground-bound journey from Florida to Texas, then Arizona and again grew to become an unavoidable piece of the postseason.
Before she had Betty, Fletcher would drive a minivan or truck, placing up with all of the difficulties that got here with driving a regular automobile for tons of of miles at a time. But simply earlier than the playoff started, she befriended Michael Irvin. Linda, with a contagious snort and penchant for giving out hugs, had already determined she wished to hire an RV to watch Mark for his senior season. Irvin wished to assist. So, he reached out to a buddy with an RV dealership in Texas and got here up with a plan. Irvin and his enterprise associate met with Linda and proposed a weekly sequence, “Fetching Fletchers,” documenting her travels throughout the season, all whereas driving a custom-made RV.
“I get to drive the RV?” Linda requested. “They said, ‘Yeah, but the cameras would be following.’ I was like, ‘How bad could it be?'”
In August, the RV was delivered to her on the Miami campus — “Fetching Fletchers” in daring orange and inexperienced letters, with house video games listed on one facet and street video games on the opposite. An airbrushed image of Linda’s late husband, Mark Sr., is on the door. It was Irvin’s thought. “To protect her on the road,” Irvin stated.
“Linda has never met a stranger,” Irvin stated. “She loves everybody — a good old-fashioned mama, like what we grew up with. She’s just a beautiful person.”
On this morning in October, Linda is getting Betty prepared for a journey to Clemson, South Carolina, with 10 passengers aboard — together with her oldest son, Keith, her daughter, J’Sha, and 3-year-old granddaughter, Bri Bri.
A social media sensation and native superstar, followers line up at house and away video games to get a hug, a picture and a “Let’s go Canes!” She at all times obliges, reveling of their pleasure and love, a mother to each the Fletchers and the Hurricanes devoted.
Linda by no means knew how badly she wanted the journey and hugs till she received quiet moments on the street, Betty buzzing alongside, every mile offering time for self-reflection and self-discovery.
“Sometimes you get in your own head,” Linda says. “I start thinking about life. I start thinking about Mark (Sr.), and I just can’t even hold back my tears.”
12:15 p.m., leaving St. Augustine, Florida
Linda started the trek to Clemson the day gone by, driving greater than 300 miles north from Coral Gables to St. Augustine, the place she and her crew did a haunted home tour and stayed in an RV park for the night time. After breakfast at a native diner, the remainder of the 430-mile journey to Clemson begins.
She turns up the music as she pulls out of the car parking zone. The theme track to “Fetching Fletchers” performs and everybody within the RV sings alongside.
Linda loves to sightsee and lists the Grand Canyon — which the household visited en route to the opener at Stanford — as her favourite cease to this point. Going to numerous zoos has change into a custom, so the deliberate first cease on this journey is on the Catty Shack Ranch Wildlife Sanctuary in Jacksonville, 52 miles away.
As she drives down A1A, downtown St. Augustine comes into view. The oldest metropolis in America, Spanish type buildings with terra-cotta roofs dot the panorama. “Isn’t this an amazing view?” she asks. “You can’t see this from an airplane!”
Linda drives previous the Castillo De San Marcos National Monument, an previous Spanish fort constructed to defend Florida and the Atlantic commerce route. Within minutes, the rain begins. Keith naps within the again, whereas J’Sha, Bri and Linda’s longtime buddy, Maria Cephus, quietly have a look at their screens.
As she drives, Linda explains that she had a panic assault on an airplane 4 years in the past and that she hasn’t flown since. She likes the sense of management she feels behind the wheel. Linda remembers the primary time she drove Betty again in August. She had been coaching to get her CDL, however she nonetheless felt nervous as she pulled away from the Miami campus. Now, she says she feels snug however she nonetheless takes specific precautions. She checks 4 or 5 occasions earlier than she alters lanes. She takes frequent stops and by no means lets the fuel tank get beneath half.
Rain is now pelting the windshield in sheets, however Linda retains Betty regular in the proper lane at this time, by no means going sooner than 40 mph. She explains why she enjoys going to the zoo — it is enjoyable for all ages, and she or he says that the animals act in another way in several states. But greater than that, she desires to give her youngsters and grandkids experiences she by no means had as a little one.
“My family didn’t expose me to swimming, to fishing, to horseback riding, and the zoo, different things like that,” Fletcher stated. “For my kids, I wanted it different.”
She goes again to her personal childhood. She says that, for causes Linda nonetheless doesn’t perceive, her organic mom deliberate to put her up for adoption after she was born. But her dad and his household received a telephone name.
“[A] neighbor called my grandma and my dad, to say, ‘You guys should get over here.’ So, they ran over to Broward General Hospital to get me,” Linda says.
Though she had household elevating her, Linda says by way of tears, “I didn’t grow up easy. Nobody was really responsible for me. I don’t know what it’s like to call somebody from home to say, ‘I left my homework.'”
She grew up calling her grandmother “Mom” till at some point she requested: “Why does Dad call you Mom, and I call you Mom?” Her grandmother sat her down and defined. From that time ahead, Linda stated she was obsessed with attempting to work out why she didn’t have a mother of her personal.
Linda lastly met her organic mom when she was 12, hoping that once they noticed one another, her mom would understand she had made a mistake and take her in with open arms. That’s not what occurred.
“I never got what I was looking for from her. I think she had made up her mind that she couldn’t be there for me emotionally, physically, mentally, no type of way. It just never turned out to be the mother-daughter thing that I was looking for. We never fixed it,” Linda says.
To at the present time, Linda doesn’t know why her mother gave her up. She says that query will hang-out her the remainder of her life. She is aware of she was the seventh little one born to her mother, and that her mother was a lot older than her dad, and thinks that maybe she was embarrassed by the circumstances of her being pregnant. Linda would have a look at footage of herself as a 4-month-old child, her chubby thighs and cute cheeks, and suppose, “How in the world did she leave me?”
“I think about her decision,” Linda says. “I don’t know how she did it. I can’t imagine what her headspace was. I just couldn’t understand her. I got to a point where it made me dislike her.”
Linda by no means received the love she wished from her dad and his household, both.
“I used to tell them they weren’t easy,” Linda says. “I wasn’t with them long when I realized that life could have been better for me without them. I was raised in a situation where everybody could tell me what to do, but nobody was really responsible for me. I was just a young girl and I’ve got to figure out this big old thing called life.”
Because she felt deserted — and lied to about her beginning story for years — she could not belief the adults round her. She felt anger and resentment, so she began writing letters — to her mom, her grandmother, her aunts — placing all her emotions down on paper. Linda by no means put them within the mail. She nonetheless retains them.
“I just had to get it out of me,” she says. “That helped.”
She additionally had to do one thing to change her circumstances. Linda says when she was 14, she begged certainly one of her academics to signal a doc that will enable her to work in an on-the-job coaching program by way of her highschool. Students had to be 15 to take part. She defined her scenario. “I’m having a hard time at home. I’m not getting the things that I need,” she stated to the trainer. “I need a job.”
He signed the paper, and she or he moved out of her house into an condominium when she was 16.
“The people that I came from, the women that I came from, they didn’t tell me, ‘Linda, you gotta go to college,'” she says. “I was compelled to do better than them because they were so mean — stiff people — people that don’t think about the generation that was coming up behind them.”
All Linda wished was to be beloved. She discovered that in “Big Mark” Fletcher, whom she had identified from church since they have been 5. In his household, she discovered security and stability. His dad was a preacher, and his mother was an English trainer. They have been sort and wished their youngsters to have higher lives than they’d.
When Linda had youngsters of her personal, she tried to be sure that they by no means had any questions on whether or not they have been beloved. First got here Keith, then J’Sha, and at last Mark Jr. Determined to give them the life she by no means had, Linda gave them each little bit of her time and power. She held them in her arms, snuggled them, allow them to sleep in her mattress, took them on holidays, made their lunches, helped them with their homework, drove them wherever they wanted to go. Her life was for them.
“Mothering is very important to me,” Linda says. “I probably did a whole bunch of other things wrong, but being a mother, I won’t let someone tell me that I’m not a good mom because I do my very best at it. You don’t hurt your kids, you don’t let anyone else hurt them, and you build them up. That’s what I’ve been doing.”
Despite the harm she felt, Linda tried to construct a relationship between her kids and her mom. But that by no means labored, both. Her mom has since died, leaving Linda to work by way of her complicated feelings alone. Though she says she had issues with her dad up to now, the 2 have maintained their relationship.
Linda by no means wished for her harm and ache to make her into a bitter individual. She selected to “be nice, and be a lover.”
Even after Big Mark died unexpectedly in his sleep in 2024, devastating your entire Fletcher household, Linda vowed they’d push on with positivity and a smile — the way in which he lived his life.
Linda typically cries, not only for herself, however for her kids. Big Mark performed an outsized position in Mark Jr.’s life — spearheading his soccer profession from the time he was a little one, attending each Miami follow and each game. His dying shook Mark Jr. so badly that he stated he wished to stop soccer. But then he requested himself, ‘What would Dad need me to do?’
“Keep going.”
That motto is beside Big Mark’s image on the door of the RV. Linda typically kisses the image and says, “Mark, can you believe this?” Driving Betty could have been wildly sudden, however so has the outpouring of affection and help she has felt from so many. They have turned all her ache into function.
“I had love bottled up,” Linda says. “That’s why when I get the opportunity to scream, holler, jump, yell, I do,” she says. “I will sleep when I’m dead, because it’s about living, it’s about loving, it’s about being happy. It’s about encouraging others.
“There’s a little Linda in there who wants that love, who wants that help, who wants the encouragement. I used to say, ‘Who cares for me? Who loves me?’ I get an awesome quantity of it now. So, I thank God for that.”
Linda wipes her tears and keeps going, up I-95, crossing into Georgia.
“We’re making it by way of. Me and previous Betty,” she says. “Betty’s doing an incredible job pushing us on by way of.”
3:12 p.m., Brunswick, Georgia
Buc-ee’s, the promised land for many weary travelers, offers gas pumps and restrooms, yes. But this is more than just a rest stop. This is a slice of Americana — from the kitschy home décor to the hundreds of Buc-ee’s branded items to the jerky wall to the fresh brisket station at the center of it all.
Linda walks in with her friend Maria and the others in her traveling party and immediately heads toward what she calls the “inspiration part” — a wall of clothes to see if there is anything she can turn into an outfit. She picks up a shirt that says “MAMA” and a pair of leopard print pants. “Isn’t that cute?” she asks. Linda puts the items down and walks toward the fresh roasted nuts. She loves snacking on cashews, so she puts some in her cart.
After nearly an hour browsing around, Linda and Maria leave with snacks — including the famous banana pudding — and Beaver nuggets, caramel flavored corn puffs.
As Linda pulls the RV out of the parking lot, she puts the “Fetching Fletchers” theme song back on.
“South Carolina, right here we come! We are 300 and one thing miles out.”
Linda has another announcement as well. Rather than drive straight to Clemson, she is now headed further north to Greenville, South Carolina, to pick Irvin up from the airport and give him a ride to his hotel.
“Isn’t that superior!” she says.
Irvin is scheduled to land around 10:45 p.m., adding several more hours to the trip. Linda smiles through it all. Is she tired? “No! I’m feeling nice!” she says. The trip to this point has been less than ideal — no stop at the zoo, driving rain that lasted for hours, monotonous interstate travel without many sights to see or any music on the radio.
But this is what Linda loves, the control behind the wheel and the feel of the road underneath her. She first learned how to drive in big empty fields outside downtown Fort Lauderdale, Florida, when she was 10, and then when she got older, drove town cars for a living. Anybody who knows Linda knows how seriously she takes her driving. Nobody else is ever allowed to drive the RV, including her son, Keith, and most of the time, nothing plays through the speakers. No radio, no music. A process that many others may consider boring is what Linda Fletcher needs. And that’s why if she needs to go hours out of the way to pick somebody up, she’ll gladly make the trip, no questions asked.
Just before the South Carolina border, Linda pulls into a gas station to refuel. A couple comes over to say hello. They happen to be Miami fans who spotted the RV and wanted to give her a hug. One of them has a giant Miami ibis tattoo on his left forearm that he proudly shows off.
When she gets back in the RV, Linda says visits like that happen often.
“At first, I discovered that to be so bizarre, like, actually? and so they go, ‘Yeah, actually!'” she says. “So I finished doing that. I obtain them a lot in another way now. We’re simply spreading love each methods, and I’m having fun with it.”
6:30 p.m., crossing into South Carolina, 244 miles to go
Linda is the only person insured to drive Betty, but that is the way she prefers it, no matter the inconvenience. Linda took her time to get out to California for the season opener at Stanford, but then, Miami had a midweek home game against Florida A&M in Week 2.
With five days to get back to her home in Fort Lauderdale and 3,000 miles to cover, the RV dealership offered to send her a driver to help.
Linda said no. She drove 10 hours a day to make it back in time.
“That would really feel like defeat to me,” she says of letting somebody else help drive. “I drove us out and I used to be bringing us again in. It was onerous, however that is what makes it so candy. The onerous stuff I’m doing out right here on the street is nothing in contrast to how onerous my son works on that subject. I’m going to match his power and maintain going.”
“This isn’t a hardship for me as a result of I get pleasure from it. At first, individuals have been giving me such warmth on-line about driving. You learn the feedback, ‘Oh, she wants to develop up.’ ‘Oh, she wants to fly.'”
Linda says she had mental health professionals reach out to say they could “remedy” her anxiety around flying. One even mentioned he worked with DJ Khaled.
“I’m like, uh-uh, you’ll be able to maintain it transferring,” she says.
An hour out from the airport, an SUV passing on the left honks at Linda and flashes the Miami “U.” It is now dark on the road, but Linda says she is not tired. She is excited to see Irvin. She recalls how they first met. Last season, she had a front-row seat for Miami’s game at Pittsburgh and flagged him down. Now she is driving an RV he arranged for and helped design, stars in a show produced by his company, and is minutes from picking him up at the airport.
“I by no means knew by simply waving down Michael Irvin that this is able to come,” she says. “You by no means know the place life goes to take you.”
11:03 p.m., Greenville-Spartanburg South Carolina airport
Linda waits in the RV until she catches a glimpse of Irvin.
“Oh, my goodness! We received the Playmaker, the Dream Maker! Welcome, welcome, it is so good to see you!” she says.
“You are wonderful,” Irvin says.
Irvin walks onto the RV and finds Bri. He picks her up and says, “Here’s my star proper right here, bona fide famous person.”
Linda asks Irvin what he thinks about the game the following day against Clemson.
“It’s going to be a nice game. It’s going to be a powerful game,” he says.
“We received Mark Fletcher again on the sphere. Before we left, Darian Mensah got here out and stated a little goodbye to us,” she says. “It was good to see all people. They’ve been working very, very onerous.”
Irvin sits with Bri on the couch, and she giggles while eating a packet of fruit snacks.
“There’s nothing extra lovely than listening to youngsters snort,” he says.
Bri proceeds to tell Irvin all about the two days in the RV with her grandma driving, punctuating each sentence with a clap or a shoulder shrug. She heads off to sleep a few minutes later, and eventually Linda drops Irvin off at his hotel.
It’s another 50 minutes to the RV lot at Clemson. Linda keeps going. After nearly 11 hours of driving, and 787 miles covered over two days, Linda drives Betty onto the Clemson campus. They pass the football stadium on the way to the lot. “Look at that! This is unimaginable!”
She turns left toward the baseball stadium and into the grass field where she parks Betty for the night.
“I did it!” she says. “That was an incredible journey! I felt actually good.”
It’s 1:10 a.m. The game is about to kick off 18 hours later. Linda turns Betty off. The sleeping masks goes again on. Linda winds down for a bit earlier than heading off to the queen-sized mattress at the back of the RV for much-needed relaxation.
In the morning, she is going to stroll barefoot within the grass to floor herself, sit within the solar and smile. These are the higher days she prayed for.