The star of the Philadelphia Eagles AJ Brown understands the importance of knocking out a few pages of the book whenever you can — even on the sidelines of an NFL playoff game.
Brown, 27, was filmed by Fox cameras reading while sitting on the bench in the Eagles’ Wild Card playoff game against the Green Bay Packers on Sunday, Jan. 12, which raised the eyebrows of football fans watching at home.
“Reading a book instead of screaming at your quarterback for missing you on a long touchdown,” one viewer wrote via X. “AJ Brown is an A+ teammate and scholar.”
Another joked, “Packers are real asses, AJ Brown started reading a book in the middle of the game 😂.”
UPDATE: 12/20/24, 2:21 PM ET — Jordan Brand has announced it will pay Hurts’ fine. “We pay the fine. You can’t ban size,” the company said in a statement to Us Weekly. The representative of Jordan Brand added that he is doing for Hurts what Nike did for Michael Jordan 40 years ago when (…)
It turns out that Brown’s reading material came with a purpose. The wide receiver was reading from the so-called self-help book Internal excellencewhich he said he takes with him to every match for “peace”.
“That’s when I first heard you put me on camera,” Brown he told reporters after the game. “There’s a lot of points there … there’s a lot of mental parts to it. For me, the game is mental. I believe I can do anything and everything.”
Brown explained that the book helps him “refresh every drive, whether I score a touchdown or drop a pass, I always go back to that book every drive and refocus.”
After the game, Brown the journalist pointed James Palmer a few passages from the book that he highlighted.
One of them read: “We’ve all had moments when everything came together in perfect harmony: sacred moments, when we were completely immersed in the experience and felt fully alive. When those moments happen, we wish, even for a split second, that we had the courage to wholeheartedly take this risky path.”
After Brown’s viral moment, Internal excellence — written by a professional baseball player Jim Murphy and published in 2020 — was #1 on the Amazon bestseller list.
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Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts asked about Brown’s reading habits during his postgame press conference on Sunday, saying “I’ve never seen him read.”
“I saw him with a book in his hands,” continued Hurts, 26. “Everybody has different things, they find their flow in different ways. So he decides to do it.”
Hurts and Brown combined for just one completed pass during Sunday’s game, but the Eagles were able to defeat the Packers 22-10.
On Sunday, January 19, they advanced to the NFL divisional round against the winner of the game on Monday, January 13 between the Los Angeles Rams and the Minnesota Vikings.