‘Born for the Storm’: How Jalen Hurts Learned to Be Unflappable

Eagles receiver A.J. Brown, perhaps Hurts’s closest friend, said his experiences at Alabama shaped him for what Brown called the “grimy business” of the N.F.L., where teams are “always trying to get somebody younger and faster.”

“He’s always fighting through adversity,” Brown said. “That’s who he is. It shows how he was raised. He’s always been calm, cool, collected.”

All athletic careers are built from numerous foundational experiences. Two influences seem particularly seminal for Hurts. At Channelview High School outside Houston, he was coached by his father, Averion Hurts Sr. Football served as day care for Jalen and his older brother, Averion Jr., who spent their summers and autumns at the school stadium and field house, first as ball boys then as quarterbacks. They learned a kind of stoicism, absorbing the admonition not to get too high or too low, to “keep the main thing the main thing.”

Also, Hurts acknowledges that the adversity he navigated at Alabama remains essential to the player he has become. He said he was “born for the storm and built to overcome anything in front of me.”

‘What do we do now?’

In the decisive game of the 2018 college football playoffs, held that January to determine the 2017 national champion, Alabama trailed Georgia, 13-0, at halftime at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. Hurts had completed 3 of 8 passes for 21 meager yards.

Averion Hurts Sr., 54, measuring the game as a father and a coach, had a hunch.

He told Averion Jr., 28, a high school coach in Houston, “They’re going to pull him. I would.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/20/sports/football/jalen-hurts-philadelphia-eagles-mvp.html