The N.F.L. playoff game was still going on, mind you, while the Philadelphia Eagles star receiver A.J. Brown was engaged in some behavior you seldom see on a football sideline.
He was reading. A book. An ordinary book, not a playbook.
After the game on Sunday, which the Eagles won over the Green Bay Packers, 22-10, Brown expounded on his reading matter, the self-help book “Inner Excellence,” by Jim Murphy. He summed up the book’s message as: “Have a clear mind, and remember that nothing else matters, negative or positive.”
The glimpse of a superstar athlete absorbed in reading as a game proceeded got plenty of people interested in the book and its contents, so much so that “Inner Excellence” was listed as the No. 1 best-selling book on Amazon on Monday morning, in all genres, just ahead of the dragon novel “Onyx Storm.”
Murphy, a 57-year-old from Washington State, was well aware of the sudden interest in his self-published book from 2020. “It’s such a perfect time for this to come out,” he said in an interview on Monday, “because there’s so much fear and anxiety in the world today.”
The gist of the book, he said, is that “ self-centeredness is the biggest challenge we face,” adding that it leads to fear.
Murphy, who was a college football player himself, said that traditional sports psychology could go only so far. “The heart is where your greatest fears are, and your greatest dreams as well,” he said. “So we need to get to the heart. And training your heart is the key to performance and in life.”
Brown said: “Regardless if I score a touchdown or drop a pass, if you’re humble, you can’t be embarrassed. So no matter what happens in the game, I’m just going to stay free and play free, keep going, take risks.” (This year he caught 67 passes for seven touchdowns and more than 1,000 yards.)
Murphy summed up four daily goals that are a key element of the book:
1. “Give the best of what you have that day.”
2. “Be present. Being in the place where there’s no concern for self, no concern for the outcome.”
3. “Be grateful. Look for the smallest moments, three a day, that were gifts for you. The smaller, the better.”
4. “Focus on your routines and only what you can control.”
Timely words for Brown, who had only one catch in the game, his lowest total of the season. When asked if frustration had led him to pick up the book and perhaps look for tips, he replied: “I was not frustrated, at all. I figured that’s what you all probably thought. I wasn’t frustrated.”
By way of explanation he added, “I like to read.”
Brown is not the first athlete to be seen engaged in some sideline reading. The star tennis player Jim Courier broke out the novel “Maybe the Moon” by Armistead Maupin between games of a match in 1993. “Just felt like doing it,” he said at the time. “It is an interesting book. I felt like reading.”
Last year, Robin Lopez was seen reading a book of interviews with 1940s and ’50s screenwriters, “Backstory 2” by Patrick McGilligan, while sitting courtside at an N.B.A. game. At least he wasn’t in uniform, having been traded away by the Milwaukee Bucks earlier in the day.
Now A.J. Brown joins the ranks of the publicly bibliophilic, inadvertently giving a lesser-known book a huge lift.
In case you’re wondering, Murphy, the beneficiary of the free publicity from Brown, is a football fan. “Historically I’ve been a Seahawks fan,” he said. “Now, it’s the Eagles.”
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