American Refocus: A.J. Brown and the MLK Jr Holiday

It was the night before the ’25 spring semester, and down on the sidelines of a Wild Card game for the National Football League, Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver A. J. Brown sat on a bench and opened a book. The action was announced by sportscasters, replayed and made viral, boosting that book on the Amazon charts, with a bullet, as the saying goes.

“That’s a book that I bring every single game,” said Brown, smiling on camera in the locker room, cheeks smeared with eye -black crosses, ears pierced with tight gold huggie hoops, his medium length box braids accented by a few white cowrie shells. “My teammates call it The Recipe, you know. That’s the first time I heard that y’all got me on camera.”

“But it’s not the first game,” explained the 27-year-old athletic phenomenon from Starkville, Mississippi, who was recruited out of high school into three years of concurrent commitments to the Ole Miss college football team, where he holds the school record for total yards receiving, and the San Diego Padres pro baseball franchise, who paid him to show up for two days of batting practice each summer. In his six years of professional football, after a second-round draft, Brown has so far averaged 9 touchdowns, 84 receptions, and 1,327 yards per season.

“Because for me, this game is mental,” says Brown. “I physically believe that I can do anything and everything, but I gotta make sure that I’m mentally good to go; something like how I refresh every drive, regardless of the fact if I score a touchdown or I drop a pass, I always go back to that book every drive and just refocus.”

“Yes. I always revert back to the beginning of the book,” answered Brown, when asked if there was a certain passage that he read from. “It states if you can just have a clear mind and a clear consciousness, and nothing matters negative or positive, you’re willing to take risks. It also says if you’re humble you can’t be embarrassed. So, no matter what happens in the game, I am going to just stay free. Play free. Keep going. Take risks.”

“I like to read,” said the former student from the University of Mississippi, who took his General Studies classes in the town where William Faulkner liked to write at Rowan Oak, off the elbow of Old Taylor Rd., south of the Oxford square and the Baptist Student Union, nor was Faulkner writing too far either from today’s Ole Miss football stadium or baseball field.

As Faulkner works his sentences, does he ponder the way that Rowan Oak sounds like Roanoke, the name of the outer bank island named for the Powhatan word Rawrenock, a term that the indigenous peoples used to identify “things rubbed smooth by hand,” in particular, their “white beads made from shells” that they used for money and ornament, reminding us today of those cowrie shells adorning the box braids of an acclaimed American reader who would set school records at the stadium nearby?

Anyhoo, the writer that Brown likes to read on the football sidelines is a performance coach and former professional athlete. As author Jim Murphy explains in the revised edition of Inner Excellence: Train Your Mind for Extraordinary Performance and the Best Possible Life, once upon a time, a sentence made its way to his laptop’s screensaver: “Those destined for greatness must first walk alone in the desert.” And so, Murphy, the former Chicago Cubs outfielder, took the advice literally, got rid of his television, and moved to the Sonoran Desert of Arizona.

In the desert, Murphy felt the inspiration of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, to “front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when it came time to die, discover that I had not truly lived.” Murphy found himself focusing on one great mystery: “How can an Olympic athlete train for four years, for an event that may last less than a minute, and have peace and confidence under that kind of pressure?”

Although it’s not quite the same question as “how can a wide receiver set aside every thought or care except what needs to be accomplished in catching that ball?” the beauty of the underlying mystery is what lifts us from our seats on any given Sunday or brings us to the verge of tears just before the gold medal gets draped across the breast.

Murphy’s new law, raised up from the Arizona desert, and half a decade in the making, is the law of the free heart: “every human heart has the potential for deep contentment, joy and confidence, and training it is the most important thing you’ll ever do.”

Recipe in hand, America’s spring semester kicks off with a syllabus dedicated to the heart of champions. Careful students should not neglect coach Murphy’s glossary entry on the dangers of indifference. No matter which team wins on Sunday, together on Monday we memorialize the man that Mahalia Jackson eulogized as the King of Love: that Georgia preacher who was called to evangelize America’s strength to love. Monday is Refocus Day in America. Come Tuesday morning, we gotta make sure that we’re mentally good to go.

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