As Editorial Director of BookTrib, if I was caught watching a football game during work hours, there’d be hell to pay. So why is a football player caught on the sidelines in the middle of his workday on a nationally televised post-season playoff game being hailed as a hero for reading a book?
I watch a lot of football. And I read a lot of books. As I casually watched the Philadelphia Eagles play the Green Bay Packers last Sunday, with trusty book in hand in case of a blowout, I watched on screen as one of the players, Eagles star wide receiver AJ Brown, thumbed through a book on the bench.
At first, I didn’t think much of it. It’s commonplace for players to go through playbooks and other analytics between drives to review some detail that might have gone wrong on the field. This book, however, seemed thicker than a playbook. And Brown was going through it with the same motions with which I might turn the pages of a thriller while grazing on a beach.
As it turns out, he was reading Inner Excellence, a self-help book by a self-published author, Jim Murphy.
The book’s subtitle is “Train Your Mind for Extraordinary Performance and the Best Possible Life.” Could Brown convince his coaches that reading this book would help him and help the team?
Brown chuckled about it after the game, relishing in the attention it brought – even though he is a high-profile member of the Eagles and gets plenty of media attention.
He said he brings the book to every game to help him refocus and maintain mental sharpness between drives, regardless of his on-field performance. “It doesn’t matter whether I score a touchdown or drop a pass,” he said, adding that the book helps him be in the right mental place and keep a clear conscience.
In a sport in which teams and players will do anything and everything to gain an advantage, how nice that one reflective athlete, playing a violent sport and a position in which he typically gets mangled by physically ripped defenders, has chosen to find comfort and meaning in the written word.
Brown is not the first athlete to be seen with a book near the field of play, and likely he won’t be the last. And who says self-published books are at a sales disadvantage? With a little bump from the National Football League and Fox on Sunday, Inner Excellence vaulted to the #1 bestseller on Amazon on Monday.
This post was originally published on here
