How Bijan Robinson fell in love with football

LaMore Sauls didn’t know she was pregnant. Doctors thought she was having issues with her thyroid gland but, to make a long story short, it wasn’t a thyroid issue at all. She was in her third trimester no less.

That baby was to be a boy, a boy she would name Bijan.

The name Bijan in itself has its own story worthy of a small digression. LaMore and her mother, Geraldine, were working as fragrance models at a Dillard’s in the months after LaMore – now Sauls, then Robinson – found out she was pregnant.

The world around her was chaotic, as people were adjusting to the new reality of a post-9/11 world. LaMore was still young herself, adjusting not just to the chaos of the world around her but the life-changing love that grew within her. Just a college student at the time, LaMore finished that fall semester before returning to her parents’ home so they could help her raise her little boy, a boy who got his name from a perfume.

As LaMore and her own mother worked the fragrance counter, one day a Bijan cologne sample was placed before her.

“Bijan — I like that,” she thought to herself.

LaMore ruminated on the name before ultimately deciding that, yes, that would be her firstborn son’s name. Funny enough, it was actually after she decided on the name of her baby that she found out what Bijan meant. A colleague of hers was Persian and one day the colleague told her what Bijan stood for in her native language: “Hero.”

If the name didn’t fit before, LaMore said, it did now. And what’s a hero without a miraculous origin story?

A month and a half after LaMore moved back home, Bijan was ready to make his grand entrance into the world. The excitement within the Robinson family was palpable. Geraldine and Cleo were preparing the house for his arrival. LaMore’s little sister Cleyrissa, who was nine at the time, was over the moon to meet her nephew. She’d always wanted a little brother and this was the next best thing. And LaMore, though still trying to actively wrap her head around the idea of being a mother, was just so ready to meet this baby who she knew, even then, would change her life.

“Here’s going to come my first true love, something that’s going to love me unconditionally,” LaMore said. “It doesn’t matter what I do, this baby loves me, and I need to love it back.”

LaMore labored with her bundle of love for 13 hours. At the end of those 13 hours, Bijan had arrived. Doctors and nurses laid Bijan on his mother’s chest, but instead of relief quickly came…