This is the one thing that rattled the famously unflappable Patrick Mahomes.
The star Kansas City Chiefs quarterback was “visibly moved” when he saw for the first time a small toy football with the team logo that was found in the rubble of Ground Zero.
The artifact — discovered by an NYPD detective sifting through debris at the Fresh Kills landfill following the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks — has been kept in the team’s archive room for two decades.
Mahomes, along with his teammates Travis Kelce and Chris Jones and their coach Andy Reid, heard the bittersweet story behind the memento, kept in a shadow box beneath Arrowhead Stadium, when they visited the archive during the 2024 filming of the ESPN docuseries “The Kingdom,” which was released last month.
“In the the shadow box was a letter, and the letter was from a police officer. . . . He wrote that he was in charge of collecting human remains after 9/11 and on the conveyor belts with all the human remains, there was a Kansas City Chiefs football,” the documentary’s director, Kristen Lappas, told The Post.
“Patrick was visibly moved by it. He had never seen it,” she continued. “I just think it speaks to how special that organization and culture is.”
The Post tracked down the cop who found the football and gifted it to the Chiefs — retired Detective Sgt. Michael Mayer.
He was working in Brooklyn’s 79th Precinct when he was assigned with hundreds of other detectives to sift through the wreckage of the Twin Towers for human remains at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island.
“We were doing a conveyor belt situation, going through all the debris, and a small football — about three inches maybe — came past. I’m a sports guy so I stuck it in my pocket,” recalled Mayer, 64, of Wantagh, LI.
“I have a bar in my basement so I put it on my bar. That’s where it laid for nine or 10 months. Then I said . . . ‘The Chiefs would probably put it to better use than I am having it sitting on my bar.’
“I decided to send a letter to the Chiefs and tell them the history to see if they wanted it and offered to send it to them … I thought maybe they would put it somewhere. But it kind of got bigger than that because people actually interviewed me from the TV stations out there.”
Mayer eventually got a call from Dick Vermeil, the Chiefs head coach, who was touched by the gesture.
“We’re going to put it in a shadow box. It’s going to be in the locker room all year,” Vermeil assured Mayer.
Vermeil even offered Mayer and his family tickets to see the Chiefs play the Jets at the Meadowlands, a game the Chiefs won. The Chiefs finished the season 8-8.
Mayer and his three sons met the team at their hotel and then went to lunch with Vermeil and his wife.
He reflected on the reason he decided to rescue the football from the rubble.
“It meant something to somebody who died in the towers that day. So that was part of why I kept it. It meant something to somebody else so let me preserve it.”
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