QB Robby Ashford’s story draws inspiration from parents’ medical battles

Back in January, Robby Ashford sat at a big circular table in what was essentially media speed dating. He stays. Reporters rotate. Hopefully you’re not answering the same question 40 times.

This was back when he was just another Gamecock transfer. This was before Ashford was able to show what he could do in garnet and black, before he started for South Carolina against Akron and had the team’s best quarterbacking performance of the season, throwing for nearly 250 yards and two scores while rushing for 133 yards and another touchdown.

Of all 25 transfers South Carolina added to the roster this offseason, no one has as many footnotes as Ashford. A coveted recruit out of powerhouse Hoover (Ala.) High School, he spent his whole life around SEC football and then decided, “Is there anything a million miles from here?”

He ended up at Oregon, in part because the Ducks allowed him to play both football and baseball. At the time, though, the Ducks had an overflow of quarterbacks. Ashford wasn’t seeing the field and the room was too crowded to know if he ever would.

So he headed back home and started at quarterback during what many Auburn Tigers fans will refer to as “Bryan Harsin’s last season.” But Ashford stayed put when Hugh Freeze was hired. The problem was that Freeze had brought in his own quarterback, Payton Thorne, and Ashford played sparingly. Another transfer loomed.

Ashford still had some cachet. He’s one of the rare three-time transfers who was still getting calls from SEC teams. Perhaps people thought he’d been misused, screwed over or both. South Carolina and Shane Beamer didn’t promise him the starting job — there’s a redshirt freshman, they told him, LaNorris Sellers, who had already been on campus a year. He committed anyway.

And then he’s sitting at this round table, almost like a new character dropped into a sitcom, and is asked: “What’s your story?”

Ashford had a dozen different starting points. Why not the recruiting stories out of Hoover? Or playing two sports at Oregon? Or whatever went down at Auburn?

Over the next four minutes and 16 seconds, Ashford did not once mention Oregon or Auburn. He hardly mentioned football. He started by saying he’s from Hoover, Alabama, growing up with a sister who’s 13 years older.

Then he talked about his parents — two of the biggest reasons he became a South Carolina Gamecock.

“Both parents,” Ashford said, “sadly have been sick.”

The car crash that changed his mom’s life

Meloney Ashford heard the sirens. She was driving in the right lane of a six-lane highway at around 11 a.m. when, as other cars around her did upon hearing the ambulances, she brought her Mitsubishi Galant to a stop.

Then her life changed.

The driver of the BMW SUV behind her slammed into Meloney’s bumper at around 50 mph. The airbags exploded on impact. The force broke the car’s seats. Ashford’s car, hit with unimaginable force, shot forward 40 feet and nearly collided with the emergency vehicles passing by.

One ambulance kept driving. Another turned around for Meloney.

Over 15 years later, her aching neck and stiff back never let her forget about the crash. And, yet, the worst part didn’t come until a year later. After 12 months of pain grinding her life to a halt and keeping her stationary, doctors began finding blood clots. Yes, blood clots — plural. Two in her legs. Six in her lungs. And another already shutting down the right ventricle of her heart.

Meloney was admitted to thecritical care unit. Doctors told her ex-husband, Bob, and daughter Brandi to say their goodbyes. Meloney wasn’t going to live through the night. Inside the CCU, she said, she was the only one awake. Everyone else was in a coma.

She lay there for three days, thinking about how her mom died when she was just 11 and praying to God that her kids wouldn’t have to go on without a mother.

“I don’t really think I was fighting for myself. I was fighting for my children,” Meloney said.

Steroids and blood thinners helped dissolve the blood clots. That kept Meloney alive. It also left behind so much scar tissue in her lungs that she now breathes at just 57% of her capacity. If that’s a tad tough to grasp, consider this: If you gave Meloney a children’s balloon, she couldn’t blow it up.

“She’s a fighter. She’s a warrior,” Ashford said of his mom. “I think that’s where I get that mentality from. It came to a point during the ‘22 season (at Auburn) where I was dealing with bad shoulder injuries and I would get four shots a game to play. That goes back to her.”

She’s had 15 surgeries and at least a few more are coming. And the bad news hasn’t stopped. For the past two years, she had been feeling widespread fatigue and swelling, waking up every day in pain that wasn’t just from a car crash.

Doctors told her it was fibromyalgia. She assured them it wasn’t — and she was right. A few months ago, she was diagnosed with lupus, an autoimmune disease where your immune system attacks healthy tissue.

On Saturday morning before the USC-Akron game, hours before she was supposed to board a flight to Columbia to watch her son’s first start at South Carolina, it flared up. She couldn’t get on the airplane. From the time he was 6 years old playing baseball, she thought, Saturday was the fourth game she’d ever missed.

Instead, she watched from home and “I yelled so much that my voice was gone just as if I was there,” she said.

She texted him after the game her “mom notes” for his postgame news conference: 1. Don’t wear a hat. 2. Sit up straight. 3. Just breathe. Then, still on cloud nine, she called him and told him how proud she was.

For four hours, he subdued her pain.

“It totally changes your mood,” she said.

Cancer strikes

Bob Ashford didn’t want to tell his son he had cancer.

Robby Ashford was on his way home from his official visit to South Carolina — a weekend full of hope for a new beginning. Bob just wanted his son to stay focused, to make his decision and live his life without thinking about how it would affect his dad.

But that’s not something you hide.

So Bob told his son how he had noticed a knot just below his jawbone, how he went to the doctors and they confirmed it was throat cancer. It was cancer of the parotid gland, which meant it was very slow moving. But cancer is cancer.

“You don’t know how much time (left) you have with somebody,” Robby Ashford said in January. “They can tell you one thing and then it could be going in a second.”

Ashford weighed his transfer options soon after that. He had thought from the jump that South Carolina was one of the best schools to offer him, but Bob’s cancer diagnosis helped push him to a commitment.

“I was able to kind of stay closer to where he can hopefully be able to come out here,” Ashford said. “Hopefully get to see me play in a South Carolina jersey.”

Doctors removed the lump from Bob’s throat and performed a biopsy about three weeks after the initial diagnosis. And checkups in February, March and August all came back with the cancer-free stamp.

Right after the August visit, eight months after the removal, Bob locked in on a goal.

“As a celebration gift to myself,” he said, “I’m going to attempt to attend every game this year.”

So far, he’s four for four — including last Saturday.

What Ashford did against Akron didn’t surprise his family, but there’s a certain joy when you know what your son is capable of and what he does perfectly align.

Bob met up with Ashford late Saturday, wrapped him up and told him how much he loved him.

Ashford wore the biggest grin. He stood with his dad, twirling the game ball in the air.