Against the odds, Broncos rookie Que Robinson determined to write own definition of fatherhood

The father left with no warning and no suspicion. No reconciliation. He left his son and granddaughter standing on the other side, a bridge between them that Quandarrius Robinson wanted to mend but never could.

And so, a week before the future Broncos draft pick’s senior year at Alabama, Tyneshia Whatley had no choice but to call her son and tell him. No matter the scar it would leave.

“Hey, are you busy?” Whatley asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Robinson replied, with Alabama about to play Western Kentucky in a few days.

“Well,” Whatley replied. “Can you come home for a minute?”

“For?”

Willie Robinson Jr. lived a complicated life, phasing in and out of contact with Whatley and Robinson. His mother and father died within three months of each other, his family shrinking, his mind sinking. He turned to drugs. Whatley tried to offer him help, but kept him at bay from Robinson. Still, Willie proudly told everyone in rehab that he had a son playing football for the Crimson Tide and a granddaughter named Riley.

Sister Ella Headen urged him to just call Robinson.

Willie couldn’t. He felt he had little to offer, as Headen recounted.

In late August, Willie went missing. A family friend going for a walk eventually found his body. He’d taken his own life.

He died believing his son resented him because of the choices he’d made, Whatley said. He was wrong.

Quandarrius “Que” Robinson lived wanting his father to meet Riley, the little girl who arrived that same summer, the little girl he wanted to create a different future for.

Que had little to say after gunning it the hour back from Tuscaloosa to Ensley, Alabama, sitting in silence with Whatley and his sisters. He had little to say at his aunt Headen’s house, standing in silence as relatives on his dad’s side he didn’t know hugged him.

Two days later, Whatley called her son again and told him the county morgue needed his signature so his father could be released for cremation.

“Mama, I can’t,” Robinson told her.

“You have to,” she replied. They went back and forth.

And then he broke down.

The hope of making it out of Ensley, a hope few realized, nearly ended right there. But that week, in a feat of mental fortitude Alabama defensive coordinator Kane Wommack still marvels at, Robinson recorded a sack in a win over WKU. He strung together a season of high-impact reps in SEC play. And in April, the Broncos selected the 6-foot-4, 243-pound Robinson in the fourth round of the NFL draft.

He began his Alabama career frustrated, a backup, nearly booted from the program after a DUI arrest his sophomore year. He ended it as one of the most beloved people in Bama’s building, as one staffer described.

In May, he stood at his locker in Denver after rookie minicamp, holder of the first college degree in his family’s history and a $5 million rookie deal. Pained, still, by a loss of a fatherhood he never really had. But intent, now, on creating his own.

“You obviously want to give the kid the best opportunity at life,” Robinson said of his daughter.

“Even though you didn’t (have it).”

•••

The screams echoed down Pineview Road that day in 2014, as Whatley’s ears perked up, recognizing her daughter’s voice.

Mama! He got a gun! He got a gun!

She threw open the door of her family’s home and saw Robinson sprinting down the street, sister on his heels, a group of boys trailing in their wake.

Wrong time. Wrong place. A young Robinson had gone for a game of pickup basketball in Birmingham’s Central Park, and smoked everyone, as Whatley tells it. Everyone, unfortunately, included a gang that called themselves the “Park Boys.” Robinson and his sisters came and holed up in the house, the Park Boys threatening to burst in.

They backed off, eventually. Others have been less lucky with gang violence in Ensley.

“I always have tried to embed in my kids, like — this ain’t the life,” Whatley said. “I taught them the struggle. And I’m glad they know what the struggle is.”

Robinson and his two sisters attended Central Park Elementary, where principal Nichole Davis-Williams sometimes had to hustle kids inside as gunfire broke out in the streets. They later went to Jackson-Olin High, where school resource officer Francesca Clark said she’s seen over 40 students die from gun violence in the area since 2015.

The school is nestled on the border between Ensley and Pratt, two neighborhoods in Birmingham connected by a couple of streets and a path that winds across a bridge over a creek. But there’s a neighborhood rivalry that’s trickled down from older generations, as Robinson’s cousin Raheem Collier said, that’s woven into bloodlines.

“It’s very common for the kids to wake up one day and their friend be there,” Clark said, “and the next day they’ve been killed.”

As a kid, the now-32-year-old Collier signed up for any sport he could in an effort to stay safe. He told his younger brother Aikeem to do the same. Aikeem told Robinson to do the same. They passed a mentality down, from generation to generation, as both Collier and Aikeem played at Jackson-Olin.

One of us gotta make it.

The problem was that few — including some in Robinson’s own family — actually thought he would. He was a sweet boy with an old soul, but also hyperactive, prompting so many calls for Whatley to pick up her son from school that she once lost her job as a nurse’s assistant.

When Robinson was 6 years old, a doctor suggested prescribing Ritalin. Whatley was raised by two parents who sold drugs and used them. When she was 11 years old, her father explained to her he was a pimp, and to never let anyone talk her into entering that world. It was fatherhood, in some form.

She told the doctor no medicine for her son.

Robinson eventually saw a school psychiatrist in the fourth grade, but Whatley had little help for a long time. Willie was in and out of contact. Family members whispered about her son. She prescribed her own remedies.

One: A family motto that still holds true to this day, except for the fact that Robinson is now 6-foot-5. Act up, you get beat up.

Two: Football, a hope that seemed far from the rotating roofs of family homes and apartments in Ensley.

“I told my kids, y’all got to keep doing the impossible,” Whatley said. “Please keep doing the impossible.”

Her son did. Robinson rounded into a skinny but powerful four-star edge rusher at Jackson-Olin, where Alabama head coach Nick Saban once took a chopper out from Tuscaloosa just to see him. And he headed up to Bama in 2020, the weight of that Village Creek bridge between Ensley and Pratt on his shoulders.

“We want him to be successful,” said Davis-Williams, Robinson’s senior-year principal at Jackson-Olin. “We need him to be successful. So that we can say to other kids in Ensley, ‘Look what Que did. Que did it, you can do it too.’”

Robinson, though, redshirted his freshman year and was wedged behind future NFL first-round picks Will Anderson Jr. and Dallas Turner at outside linebacker. He was an afterthought at a powerhouse. He needed to grow — in all ways.

On Aug. 28, 2021, at around 11:30 p.m., Whatley got a call from someone she didn’t know.

“Um, hey,” the voice came, as Whatley recounted.

“Hey,” she responded.

“Tell me,” Whatley continued, “ain’t nothing wrong with my child.”

A pause came.

•••

When news broke that Robinson was arrested for a DUI that weekend in August, the world saw another example of a prime talent who’d blown his shot. Facebook comments called for him to be booted from the program. Typical, one user wrote underneath a post from a local ABC station in Birmingham. His own hometown, in neighborhood and barbershop talk, wrote him off, as Collier recounted.

Those who knew Robinson, though, were stunned.

“Put it like this,” said Karl Scott, who coached at Alabama from 2018-2020 and recruited Robinson. “If I got that report that a Bama player had a DUI on a night — a weekend night — Que would probably be one of the last ones that I guessed.”

Alabama suspended Robinson indefinitely. When Davis-Williams heard, her reaction was simple: God dang.

He can’t let it go like this, Davis-Williams recalled thinking. This can’t be the end.

It easily could’ve been. Davis-Williams had seen young men with promise get sent back to Ensley and lose everything. Perhaps Robinson, if he were booted, would’ve latched on with another college football program. But everyone was scared of the alternative.

“If he wasn’t able to stay, I don’t know where he’d be,” Clark said. “I really don’t.”

Ashleigh Kimble, Alabama’s assistant director of recruiting operations, had slowly entered Robinson’s inner circle of trust. He came into her office “genuinely remorseful,” she said. And Saban knew enough to know that the list of options for Robinson was slim. So he met with Robinson, and told him he wouldn’t give up on him.

It turned him into a man, cousin Collier believes. Robinson told his mother he wasn’t drinking nothing else. He’d seen the cliff. He’d teetered there. And Robinson realized the opportunity in front of him to change his — and his family’s — path.

“I had another opportunity, for the most part,” Robinson said of meeting with Saban. “I appreciate him for that, love him for it. And for the most part, I didn’t squander it.

“And ever since then, I’ve just been on my high horse, man, just trying to work to get to where I’m at now.”

He turned into Alabama’s “Mr. Everything” on special teams, as current outside linebackers coach Christian Robinson (no relation) described. But Robinson entered his senior year with just 124 cumulative defensive snaps at Alabama. His daughter, Riley, came last summer, so suddenly that Whatley didn’t know there was a baby on the way until after she was born.

Robinson walked into Kimble’s office, a bastion of his time at Alabama, nervous. Really nervous.

“He’s like, ‘Okay, I really gotta step it up,'” Kimble recalled, “‘because I have someone I have to provide for now.'”

The weight of a life that’s never been easy, though, came crashing with Willie’s death. Robinson lamented to his mother that he never got a chance to tell his father he wasn’t mad at him. He lamented to Kimble that his father never got a chance to meet Riley.

Whatley eventually drove to Tuscaloosa to convince her son to put pen to paper on his father’s death certificate. It got signed. Willie was cremated.

Except Robinson couldn’t bring himself to sign it. Whatley had to forge her son’s signature.

He told his mother that he was going to stop playing football and find a job. Help stabilize the family. Whatley, the mother who always pushed her kids toward dreams she never had the chance to see, told him that wasn’t an option.

What did I always tell you? she implored. Keep doing the impossible.

Robinson stayed at Alabama through Saban’s retirement and the hire of Kalen DeBoer. He spent more time studying film. He started lighting into younger teammates who goofed off at practice, and became a “standard-bearer” in Bama’s program, as the defensive coordinator Wommack said. He assumed a starting role at outside linebacker amid injury and never let go.

He finished with four sacks in nine games. Robinson picked up Georgia’s right tackle in one game, as Christian recalled, and buried South Carolina’s tackle on a late two-point conversion try that would’ve tied an October matchup.

“He was supposed to be staying in the core of the formation, but he kinda aborts and sees what’s happening and makes the play,” Christian Robinson recalled. “I mean, that is a defining play for the rest of my room on some of the things that we’ll teach.”

The Broncos, seeing a raw prospect with instant special-teams value, called Robinson in the fourth round. Whatley asked herself if it was real. Collier still gets emotional when he thinks about the moment. Davis-Williams started jumping up and down, to no place in particular.

“I just can’t say enough about — this is the guy it should’ve happened to,” Davis-Williams said. “It really is. He deserves it. This family deserves it.

“This was their way out.”

Across his senior year at Alabama, Robinson and his position coach Christian Robinson talked at length about the concept of time. The value of it. Maximizing it. And in warmups before every game, Christian stepped aside and let the 23-year-old deliver a few words on the bigger picture to the group.

Tomorrow isn’t promised, Robinson would tell them.

“I think when he said that,” Christian Robinson said, “guys kinda knew what he was talking about.”

•••

In the years to come, whatever Robinson ends up being, Davis-Williams and Clark will be able to tell the tale of their “Great Hope” in the halls of Jackson-Olin. Of the boy who was so focused his senior year that he rebuffed Davis-Williams’ offers for $20 so he could get a haircut before prom.

Of the boy who made a way for his family when there was none, who emerged from every hole that life had dug for him.

In Denver, the Broncos have a “vision” for him, as head coach Sean Payton acknowledged last Thursday. Coaches throughout Robinson’s career have pointed to a special blend of bend and burst in his 6-foot-5 frame. He’s popped as a pass-rusher across OTAs and minicamp, and has taken a heavy dose of special-teams reps.

“He has all the traits you look for at that position,” Broncos general manager George Paton said after Robinson was drafted.

Fatherhood, Robinson reflected in May, has expanded his horizons. He’s determined, he’s told Whatley, to do something for his daughter his own father didn’t do.

Was having Riley a driving force, The Post asked Robinson at his locker in May, to get here?

“For any man,” he replied, “it should be.”

To this day, Robinson still hasn’t quite processed it all. But three days after Alabama beat Western Kentucky back in late August, he returned to Ensley for Willie’s funeral. He delivered a eulogy in front of the same faces he could barely muster words to inside Headley’s house.

He spoke of a man who hadn’t always been in his life. But a man he still loved. He wouldn’t change anything, he said then, as his aunt Headley recalled. Tears began to flow.

And now that he was a father, Robinson told the assembly, he was going to do all he could for his daughter.

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