Big Red
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- Mar 16, 2019
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Sally Kingsbury was diagnosed in 2003, Kliff’s rookie year playing in the NFL. She battled the disease through three rounds of chemotherapy and multiple operations.
She passed away in December of 2005, not long after Kliff was able to fly home from New York while playing for the Jets to say a final goodbye.
“Still the hardest thing I’ve ever been through,” Kliff told the Los Angeles Times in December, “and nothing will ever touch that.”
Tim Kingsbury, a Vietnam vet who had received the Purple Heart after a bullet shattered his jaw, could be hard on his kids as he tried to toughen them up both for football and life. Sally’s positivity balanced that out, and she became the perfect sounding board.
“She was kind of the person I went to for advice on anything and was the one person I really opened up to,” Kliff said. “It’s something you can’t ever replace, but our entire family always looks at it that we were very lucky to have her for the time we did.”
When Tim Kingsbury came out to see his son’s introductory press conference, he recounted the texting he had done back and forth with Kliff during the hiring process. Tim said his son had actually been the calming influence on Tim as they waited to see what would happen with the Cardinals.
The former prep coach was thrilled when his son told him he had gotten the job. But it was an emotional time too, knowing how Sally too would have felt.
“These boys,” Tim Kingsbury said, “everything they got good was from her.”
Kliff has always been ultra-competitive, to the point that Tim said he and Sally worried about how focused Kliff could get as a kid. But Kliff said that was tempered when his mom died. He made sure to appreciate every day. That’s how Sally approached life.
“To have such an incredible woman, person, be our mom, she helped us live our lives in the exact way we wanted to,” Kliff said. “She was always very supportive of us chasing our dreams.”
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