NFL Coach Reunited With Long-Lost Son
New York Giants coach Jim Fassel and his wife Kitty have reunited with the son they gave away for adoption 34 years ago.
The Fassels met their son, John Mathieson, on Wednesday at a hotel in Highlands Ranch, Colo. On April 5, 1969, they put up their 3-day-old boy for adoption, and kept his birth a secret to all but their immediate family.
"For John, Kitty and myself, we have lived with an unanswerable question for all these years," Fassel told The New York Times. "If someone had granted us one wish in the world, it would always have been to be together and to know things were OK. Instead you carry this question around with you and you never know how it will come out. So to have a day like today, it is a miracle."
The Fassels, who were unmarried when John was born, were able to track down Mathieson thanks to a recent change in Colorado adoption law. They first spoke with him on Mother's Day, discovering that Mathieson was married with four daughters.
The Fassels have four other grown children.
Mathieson is a general sales manager at a Colorado car dealership. His adopted father, Tom, is dead.
"I think it's a blessing that John is more or less getting something like an extended family," said his adopted mother, Dorothy Rogers.
Seven years ago, Mathieson began looking for his biological parents, "but I got nowhere," he said.
Last July, after Colorado laws were changed to allow agencies to attempt reunifications with written consent from both sides, the Fassels' search intensified.
It paid off this week.
"I just lost it and cried for two hours straight," said Mathieson, who is a Denver Broncos fan. "My greatest fear in life was that I would want to find my natural parents, but they wouldn't want me to find them. To find out they were looking for me brought out more emotion than I could ever describe."
Fassel, 53, has been the head coach of the Giants since 1997. Prior to that, the California native held jobs in the Broncos, Arizona Cardinals and Oakland Raiders organizations.