Editor's Note: This feature was our cover story of our Sept/Oct 2002 issue. We hope you enjoy looking back at this excellent piece by Norma Lugar!
Sept/Oct 2002
At 27, she was a divorced single mom with four-year-old twin boys to raise. Alone. Pinching pennies. Working multiple jobs. A tough life? Not if you ask Geraldine Barber, a former Army brat who learned early how strong women cope with tragedy. Today, with hard times behind her, she's got plenty to celebrate: two NFL superstar sons, beautiful new grandbabies, an impressive job, and a three-word success formula that worked like magic.
If you didn’t know any better, it would be easy to dismiss Geraldine Barber as simply the mother behind two amazing athletes.
After all, how many women have sons like Tiki and Ronde Barber, the 27-year-old twins who star for the New York Giants and Tampa Bay Buccaneers? Bright, attractive men who have done such spectacular things as break Frank Gifford’s single-season total yardage record from 1956 (Tiki), earn a spot in the Pro Bowl (Ronde) and, as the icing on the cake, get chosen by People magazine as the sexiest male athletes in all of sports.
Granted, Barber is the driving force who stoked the fires of her sons’ potential. But she is much more. A survivor. An achiever. A parent extraordinaire who could teach plenty of traditional families how to stop standing helpful while their kids run wild and throw away their talents and future.
The Dark Days
She is the daughter of a career Army major who was shot down in Vietnam and found dead on her 15th birthday. The oldest of four daughters, she adopted her father’s standards and her mother’s courage as the models for her adult life, examples that have served her well through personal challenges.
“I was always a daddy’s girl,” she says, recalling an incident when the family was living in third-floor military housing in Germany. “One of my father’s house rules was that we had to keep up our grades. I told him I was going to get all A’s, but when I got my report card, I had a B in geometry. I can remember standing outside our door, being afraid to go in and tell my father. It was pressure I’d put on myself, probably because I was the oldest.
“I believe in the circle of life. My mother was a young widow in her 30s when my father died in Vietnam. I was 15; the youngest child was two. I found out after his death how strong my mother was. When I divorced, I used the strengths I learned from my mother. Now I see some of the same traits in my guys. They make the same decisions through the same thought processes and that has to have come through me.”
As an undergraduate at Virginia Tech, she met and married football star J.B. Barber. Promising her mother she would finish college, she was 22 in April 1974 when she gave birth a month prematurely to Ronde and Tiki, who weighed in at four and a half and five and a half pounds, respectively. That December, she graduated, finishing her bachelor’s degree in just three years.
Soon, the family moved to Roanoke.
But when the twins were four, the Barbers divorced.
On Her Own
A diminutive 5'1" and now just 49, Barber never doubted her path, noting “You play the hand that’s dealt you.” That same year, 1978, she went to work as director of finance and business services for the Girl Scout Council, a job she held for nearly 20 years. To make ends meet, she took on other jobs... nights transcribing at Executive Suites in Tanglewood West while a friend stayed with the boys and, for a while, Saturdays at Gill Memorial Hospital where she answered the phone.
“My life was my kids,” she says."When you do what needs to be done, then everything else falls into place." But it wasn't easy. After work, she'd go home and do household chores like cleaning, stirring up big pots of chili or spaghetti and making easy things like baloney or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
"You just do it," she says of her life then.
In those days, Barber dated casually, including one man who was in her life about a year and a half.
"He got close to the kids, then he was transferred," she recalls. "That hurt my guys. My sole objective was to give them a good foundation. I thought, 'These are my kids.' I wanted to get married again but other things were more important, like being able to look at myself in the mirror. Now, I see my sons' marriages and I'm jealous. They have the kind of marriages I would have liked to have."
Though money was tight, Barber still made sure her sons had special treats. “After church on Sundays, we’d go to the Ground Round. At the time, they charged a penny a pound for youngsters 12 and under,” she recalls. “I’d pay six dollars for my dinner and a dollar apiece for theirs. They thought we were rich.”
Training the Troops
Barber is quick to verbalize the three-word success formula she believes spells the difference between children who fail and children who make successful lives.
"Hold them accountable. I started when my guys were young," she says. "I told them they were to get up and make their beds. They also had to put their dirty clothes in the hamper. I told them, 'I'll wash your clothes, but I won't go in and get them. You can choose whether you want to wear dirty clothes or not, whether you leave your favorite shirt on the back of a chair of not.'" Household chores, however, were not the main priority.
"We had house rules," Barber says. "I let them know which ones were negotiable and which ones weren't. Respect, honest and grades weren't negotiable. I didn't budge on the value of respect for themselves, their peers, their elders or life in general. But the house rules were negotiable. The boys had to be home by a certain time and I was a stickler about homework, but on the other hand, sometimes curfews were negotiable, and I wasn't strict about bedtimes."
Taking the Hard Lines
Admittedly tough on her sons, Barber demanded good behavior and good character. She also believed in the power of punishment.
“We got spankings until the belt broke when we were about 12,” Ronde notes.
Barber also learned early that athletics were a big incentive for her sons.
“When they were six-year-olds, the twins wanted to play T-ball with their friend Arthur,” she says. “Then, academics and homework became house rules, with athletics as the carrot. They only had to be late for practice once for them to understand I meant it when I said schoolwork came first.”
She also refused to back off from the touchiest subjects, like sex and money.
“Tiki and Ronde had allowances, and they had to learn to budget. They couldn’t come back and ask for more. There wasn’t any,” she says flatly.
“Once, I decided it was time to talk about sex. I told them that, and Ronde said, ‘Why, Mom? Do you need some advice?’ We had that kind of openness. We weren’t prudes, but we had a very defined line. Modesty was something my father had always stressed. He said, ‘My daughters will be young ladies.’”
Sometimes, Barber found, words weren’t even necessary.
“There was a billboard on Memorial Avenue that we passed every Sunday on the way to church,” she says. “It was a picture of a beautifully built Black man holding an adorable baby. The message read: ‘An extra eight pounds kept me off the football team.’ When you see things like that, you don’t have to say anything.”
Reaping the Rewards
It didn’t take long for Barber to recognize the talent that would propel her sons into the athletic world’s professional ranks.
“When they were at Hidden Valley [Junior High], they were both the fastest and the smallest on the teams. I tried to temper that [achievement] by telling them it might not always be that easy,” she recalls. “But I had gotten them a subscription to Sports Illustrated and not long after that, I came home one day and the boys were waving an issue that featured a story on the little guys in the NFL. They told me all about Emmitt Smith and said that if he could do it, they could too.
“Actually, the first time I realized the twins were exceptional was when they survived being born prematurely. They fought so hard to live. Not long ago, I was in the Relay for Life at Victory Stadium [Barber is a breast cancer survivor], and I met the nurse who was on duty at Montgomery Regional Hospital the night the twins were born. She told me how she had come in at midnight for her shift and spent that night holding my babies.”
The twins also proved themselves after having serious injuries their senior year.
“Everyone [the colleges] was recruiting them, and after that, I saw everything they’d worked for wavering. But they fought back. Tiki was out one game; Ronde was out five or six weeks.”
The Sunshine Times
Today, with the early traumas behind her, Barber’s life is sweet.
After years living in an apartment near the Meadow, she has her own house in The Gardens, a gift from her devoted sons. Since December 1999, she has been budget administrator for Roanoke County, and even more rewarding, she’s a new grandmother. Ronde’s daughter, Yammile Rose, was born May 10, while Tiki’s son, Atiim Kiambu Jr., arrived in July.
Close with Ronde’s wife, Claudia, and Tiki’s wife, Ginny, Barber and her guys are seldom far from each other. They all talk routinely by phone, and before her nephew came to live with her, she visited each family often, as well as joining them for trips like the trek to Hawaii for the last Pro Bowl.
More than anything, she has the knowledge that she is loved and protected by her exceptional sons. In fact, she has to think before naming the sweetest thing her boys have ever said or done for her.
“I have about a 10-foot-long list,” she says, “but there’s one thing I’ll never forget. I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1996, two weeks before the first game of Ronde and Tiki’s senior year at UVA. By Draft Day in April, I’d finished my chemo. That day, I cleaned my apartment and headed for Charlottesville. When I walked into their apartment, Tiki, who was on the golf course, was calling me on his cell phone to turn on the TV because it was to be announced that he was the sixth choice of the second round. I saw that and it was a thrill.
“That night about 14 of us went to dinner. The guys had their cell phones on and Ronde’s beeped. He picked it up and then we saw on TV that Tampa Bay had chosen him. Later, when I came back from the restroom, Tiki leaned over and told me, ‘Ronde and I talked. We want you to quit your job tomorrow.’ To the day I die, I will never hear more touching words.
“They’ve let me know I never have to want for anything. When I’m 99 and they’re 77, they will still be my babies, and their wives are confident enough that they will still allow Tiki and Ronde to be my babies. It doesn’t threaten them. They are the wives, but I know I have a very important place.”
Characteristically, Barber turned down her sons’ offer to quit her job, acknowledging that in her value system, one takes care of oneself if and for as long as it’s possible. All in all, if anything’s missing in her life, Barber doesn’t seem to notice.
“Now that the boys are grown and gone, would I remarry? If it were the right opportunity, the right person...” she ponders, then beams her dazzling smile. “That would be a dream.”
Tiki, Ronde and Mom: On Life, Lessons and Each Other
During a photo shoot and interview at The Roanoker, when the Barber family fitted us into a hurried schedule that began that morning with football camp and ended with a courtesy appearance at drug court, the most notable thing about this threesome is the easy humor among mother and sons. There are little inside jokes about their efforts to get Barber to get drinking coffee. Little pushes. Little shoves of affection. And while both young men are gracious, serious and focused, Mom beams at "her guys." But then she seems to beam at life overall.
Here's a roundup of what they say about everything from "dumb jocks" to visiting their own hometown:
Geraldine on the most important thing she tried to teach the twins: "There were three things: That every single thing you do will affect somebody you don't expect it to or don't think it will. That every single thing you do will come back to you one day. And, that if you work hard, you will be rewarded."
Tiki: "The most important thing I learned from my mother is that there is no such thing as limits. Set your own limits, not what people say you can do."
Geraldine on her life goals for her sons: "I wanted them to always be proud of themselves and to each be a good person. If you're a good person, you'll naturally be a good husband, a good father, a good player, a good coach. Also, you've got to be fair to yourself or you can't be fair to anyone else. And don't take shortcuts. You have a responsibility to yourself. If you can look in the mirror, everything else will be okay."
Tiki: "The road to success would be more crowded if so many people didn't get off at the first roadblock looking for short cuts." (Ronde jibes his brother and calls him "King of the Cliches.")
Ronde on values Barber ingrained in him: "The most important thing is a strong family. That's where everything starts. It's the beginning and the end. Without them, you're not who you are. That's something we think about now that we're starting our own families."
Geraldine on the irony of life: "I made a big mistake when Tiki and Ronde were little. I told them that when they made more money than I did, they could tell me what to do. They remind me of that about once a week."
Tiki, one of Cave Spring High School's valedictorians who graduated with a 4.0, on the remark that spurred him to academic excellence: "One day at practice I heard someone call athletes 'dumb jocks.' I went home and told my mother, 'We're not dumb jocks.'" Both he and Ronde remember when, with their huge time commitment to athletics, they sometimes did homework sitting under the bleachers at track meets.
Ronde: (Echoing a quote from Mom): "If you want something done, ask a busy person."
Geraldine: "The hardest thing I had to teach my children is that life is not fair, but that you can't let that stop you from doing what's right."
Ronde on learning discipline: "We were always self-motivated. Mom worked so much, we were on our own a lot and we learned to set our own rules, to be self0disciplined. That's helped us later in life."
Tiki points out one example: "We had to finish our homework before she came home."
Geraldine on her sons' bond: "Emotionally and mentally, they are inseparable. Before they leave the locker room after a game, they're on their cell phones with each other, going over what happened. While they were growing up, there was a lot of competition between them but not jealousy. WHen they were wrestling in different weight classes and even when they were playing college ball, they would say things to each other like, 'You made me feel good today.' Or 'You represented well, bro.'"
Tiki on the thing about his mom he'd most like to emulate: "Being smart. She would call me when I was in college and she was getting her master's [in business administration from Averett in 1996] and she'd say 'I'm making straight A's. What are you doing?'"
Twins on their favorite thing about coming home to Roanoke: "Seeing family, Mom, people we only see once a year."
On coming back to Roanoke after the NFL...
Tiki: "I think I'll stay in New York. The big city's gotten in my blood."
Ronde: "In Florida, there's gold 365 days a year. It's hot in the summers but that doesn't bother me. I've gotten attached."
Geraldine on religion as the source of her strength: "I have a very strong faith. I believe in God and that He has an order. Whether I go along or resist, His will will be done in the end. I credit my parents for my faith. My father made sure we had a base and that wherever we went, he and my mother took us to churches. They got my involved in other churches so that I'd know different religions when it came time to choose. I made that decision and I felt good about it. I still feel good about it."