Is an NFL player reading a book on the sidelines a win for books?

Photo from Fox’s Twitter/X account

I’m not a big football fan, but I did watch a lot of skateboarding videos as a teen so I understand the appeal of a sport that involves lots of concussions. So I nearly missed the overlap between reading and football (speaking of violent collisions) that happened this weekend when Philadelphia Eagle’s star wide receiver and three time Pro-Bowler A.J. Brown cracked open a paperback the sidelines of a playoff game:

AJ Brown is reading a book on the sideline?

FOX pic.twitter.com/jQGv8smD9N

— FOX Sports: NFL (@NFLonFOX) January 13, 2025

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The book was quickly identified as Inner Excellence by Jim Murphy by Brown on his own social media and in post-game questions:

pic.twitter.com/PB9xB6UYmn

— Jim Murphy (@innerexcellence) January 13, 2025

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He really likes the book as a source of inspiration and a good luck charm:

Man, it gives me a sense of peace. That’s a book that I bring every single game. My teammates call it ‘the recipe. It’s the first time I heard that y’all got me on camera, but it’s not the first game. It’s got a lot of points in there, it’s a lot of mental game, a lot of mental parts about it, and you know for me this game is mental.

I fiercely believe I can do anything and everything, but I’ve got to make sure my mental is good. It’s something like how I refresh every drive, regardless of if I score a touchdown or I drop a pass, I always go back to that book every drive and just refocus and nothing matters, nothing happened, just rely back in.

“Nothing matters, nothing happened”—maybe Brown should get into some existentialism next.

I hesitate to call this an out-and-out win for literature since the book seems a little thin, in the way that some self-help books tend to be. Conor Orr gave it a quick read for SI.com: the author was a minor league baseball player turned public speaker who gave “up most of his possessions and moved to Arizona to live a life of solitude and find answers to pressing questions about life, meaning and living with purpose,” an experience which he compares to “an 18th-century Japanese samurai who was driven to alcoholism when the warrior class was removed from power in the country, thus robbing the samurai of his identity.”

Overall, it seems like the book is aimed at athletes, business boys, and other hustle culture devotees: “Whether you’re an athlete or entrepreneur, single mother or father of five, you’ll find exercises, techniques and tools in this book that will improve every area of your life.”

It makes sense that Brown, who is in a job that requires tremendous presence of mind to perform under pressure, would be drawn to lines like, “We’ve all had times when everything came together in perfect harmony: sacred moments when we were totally immersed in the experience and felt fully alive,” and “In the pursuit of extraordinary performance, it’s easy to succumb to anxiety and pressure, because so much is out of your control.” But it seems a little off-the-shelf inspirational Instagram post to me.

Brown seems like an interesting character: in addition to football, he sang on a charity Chrismas album, is maybe or maybe not a flat Earther, and is some kind of cheese truther. But he’s also a reader: “Brown is a fan of non-fiction and he tries to read two books per month,” reported NBC Sports. “He aims to read one book in the first half of the month and another in the second half.” And as he said after the game, “Dang. I like to read.”

I’m a lot like an elite athlete in that one way.

Brown also seems like a genuinely thoughtful guy:

Brown has been open about his mental health journey in the past. In 2021, he shared that he’d previously dealt with suicidal ideation and that he regularly spoke with a therapist. “It’s OK to talk to someone,” he said at the time. “Seek help. You have to take care of your brain just like you take care of your body.”

So is this a win for the nerds? Have we finally begun to turn the jocks towards our shores of introspection and the written word? Do I need to start buying more snacks in anticipation of NFL players going wanting to come over and watch Twin Peaks with me and my pals?

A book and reading in public going viral is great, it’s gotta be—more books in culture, especially huge ones like the NFL feels like it has to be a win. And materially, it’s clear how much this sort of small moment can ripple out: Yahoo Sports reported that by this morning, the book “had hit No. 1 on Amazon’s Best Sellers ranking, up from No. 552,709 a day before, according to the site’s public data.”

But I think this is also an indication of how low the bar is for reading, especially men. Someone reading in a spare moment shouldn’t strike the public as this extraordinary, if you ask me. (Though, I hear you, the sidelines of an NFL playoff game is hardly the kind of liminal moment when the average person would reach for a book.)

We don’t assume that reading books is something that everyone does, in the way that we assume everyone watches movies, for example—Brown’s Twitter profile picture is Health Ledger’s Joker, something that didn’t make a splash like his book moment did.

I’m glad to see books popping up in one of the most prominent and popular areas of America life. Finding inspiration and solace in a book is deeply relatable, but I wish it were so common in our culture to be seen as ordinary.