Linda Fletcher Embarks on Cross-Country Journey to Support Miami Running Back During College Football Season
Andrea Adelson
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- ACC reporter.
- Joined ESPN.com in 2010.
- Graduate of the University of Florida.
Multiple Authors
It is 9 a.m. on another humid day in Florida, and Betty still has her sleeping mask on. She has a big day ahead, one that will keep her awake past 1 in the morning. Rest is key on a travel day like today.
“Don’t mind her mask,” Linda Fletcher says, pointing at the covered windshield. Betty, Fletcher’s RV, has taken her across the country, 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 driven nearly 60,000 miles over the past four years to watch each and every game her son, Miami running back Mark Fletcher Jr., has played in college. She drew national attention last year when Miami made the College Football Playoff. Sitting in the stands with her big sunglasses and even bigger smile, the camera would cut to her frequently as she celebrated Miami’s run to the national title game. Her ground-bound trip from Florida to Texas, then Arizona and back became an unavoidable piece of the postseason.
Before she had Betty, Fletcher would drive a minivan or truck, putting up with all the difficulties that came with driving a normal car for hundreds of miles at a time. But just before the playoff began, she befriended Michael Irvin. Linda, with a contagious laugh and penchant for giving out hugs, had already decided she wanted to rent an RV to watch Mark for his senior season. Irvin wanted to help. So, he reached out to a friend with an RV dealership in Texas and came up with a plan. Irvin and his business partner met with Linda and proposed a weekly series, “Fetching Fletchers,” documenting her travels during the season, all while driving a customized RV.
“I get to drive the RV?” Linda asked. “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 at the Miami campus — “Fetching Fletchers” in bold orange and green letters, with home games listed on one side and road games on the other. An airbrushed picture of Linda’s late husband, Mark Sr., is on the door. It was Irvin’s idea. “To protect her on the road,” Irvin said.
“Linda has never met a stranger,” Irvin said. “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 ready for a trip to Clemson, South Carolina, with 10 passengers aboard — including her oldest son, Keith, her daughter, J’Sha, and 3-year-old granddaughter, Bri Bri.
A social media sensation and local celebrity, fans line up at home and away games to get a hug, a photo and a “Let’s go Canes!” She always obliges, reveling in their joy and love, a mom to both the Fletchers and the Hurricanes faithful.
Linda never knew how badly she needed the travel and hugs until she got quiet moments on the road, Betty humming along, each mile providing 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 began the trek to Clemson the previous day, driving more than 300 miles north from Coral Gables to St. Augustine, where she and her crew did a haunted house tour and stayed in an RV park for the night. After breakfast at a local diner, the rest of the 430-mile journey to Clemson begins.
She turns up the music as she pulls out of the parking lot. The theme song to “Fetching Fletchers” plays and everyone in the RV sings along.
Linda loves to sightsee and lists the Grand Canyon — which the family visited en route to the opener at Stanford — as her favorite stop so far. Going to various zoos has become a tradition, so the planned first stop on this journey is at the Catty Shack Ranch Wildlife Sanctuary in Jacksonville, 52 miles away.
As she drives down A1A, downtown St. Augustine comes into view. The oldest city in America, Spanish style buildings with terra-cotta roofs dot the landscape. “Isn’t this an amazing view?” she asks. “You can’t see this from an airplane!”
Linda drives past the Castillo De San Marcos National Monument, an old Spanish fort built to defend Florida and the Atlantic trade route. Within minutes, the rain starts. Keith naps in the back, while J’Sha, Bri and Linda’s longtime friend, Maria Cephus, quietly look at their screens.
As she drives, Linda explains that she had a panic attack on an airplane four years ago and that she hasn’t flown since. She likes the sense of control she feels behind the wheel. Linda remembers the first time she drove Betty back in August. She had been training to get her CDL, but she still felt nervous as she pulled away from the Miami campus. Now, she says she feels comfortable but she still takes particular precautions. She checks four or five times before she changes lanes. She takes frequent stops and never lets the gas tank get below half.
Rain is now pelting the windshield in sheets, but Linda keeps Betty steady in the right lane today, never going faster than 40 mph. She explains why she enjoys going to the zoo — it’s fun for all ages, and she says that the animals act differently in different states. But more than that, she wants to give her kids and grandkids experiences she never had as a child.
“My family didn’t expose me to swimming, to fishing, to horseback riding, and the zoo, different things like that,” Fletcher said. “For my kids, I wanted it different.”
She goes back to her own childhood. She says that, for reasons Linda still does not understand, her biological mother planned to put her up for adoption after she was born. But her dad and his family got a phone call.
“[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 family raising her, Linda says through 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” until one day she asked: “Why does Dad call you Mom, and I call you Mom?” Her grandmother sat her down and explained. From that point forward, Linda said she was obsessed with trying to figure out why she did not have a mom of her own.
Linda finally met her biological mother when she was 12, hoping that when they saw each other, her mother would realize she had made a mistake and take her in with open arms. That’s not what happened.
“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.
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