An NFL player changed an author's life. He's still adjusting to overnight success. Andrew GreifSeptember 4, 2025 at 4:01 AM 0 A.J. Brown of the Philadelphia Eagles after a game against the Pittsburgh Steelers in Philadelphia on Dec. 15.
- - An NFL player changed an author's life. He's still adjusting to overnight success.
Andrew GreifSeptember 4, 2025 at 4:01 AM
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A.J. Brown of the Philadelphia Eagles after a game against the Pittsburgh Steelers in Philadelphia on Dec. 15. (Matt Slocum / AP file)
Several years ago, Jim Murphy typed out a note on his phone that he would look at and repeat every day.
I'm a New York Times best-selling author.
Since his book "Inner Excellence" was published in 2009, that affirmation had yet to come true. But if his sales were low, his confidence wasn't. The book had earned clients for his business coaching athletes, from professional golfers to Olympians, by using such affirmations of visualizing success. When Murphy got the publishing rights back to "Inner Excellence" from his original publisher in 2018, he rewrote a new edition and published it himself.
"I had an amazing life," Murphy told NBC News. "It just wasn't a super-well-known life."
All that changed in January.
During a Jan. 12 broadcast of Philadelphia's playoff win over Green Bay, a camera caught Eagles receiver A.J. Brown sitting on the sideline between possessions, reading Murphy's book. Among the more than 36 million people watching the Fox broadcast were internet sleuths who quickly deduced the book's title.
"Inner Excellence" had sold five copies one week in December and nine in another, according to Bookscan, which captures print-edition sales. In the three weeks after Brown was seen reading it, more than 200,000 copies were sold on Amazon, Murphy said. Before the shot on national television, the book reportedly ranked 523,497th on the online giant's platform; afterward, it was first.
What made the moment all the more jarring was that it came when Murphy's personal and professional lives were enduring a considerable ebb. As January began, his mother was days away from dying. Business had slowed enough that Murphy wasn't able to pay off his credit cards for the first time in years. He had long ago erased the affirmation about being a bestselling author off his phone.
Days after Murphy, 58, had unwittingly become the season's most unexpected breakout star without having played a single down or called a single play, he was in Philadelphia to attend the Eagles' next playoff game on Jan. 19 as a guest of Brown when he tried to withdraw money at an ATM. His account, he was told, had insufficient funds. The next day, his mortgage payment bounced.
His checking account may not have reflected it at that moment, but Murphy's life had been irrevocably changed. He was suddenly America's most in-demand author.
Philadelphia Eagles fans hold up a sign for wide receiver A.J. Brown and the book he was reading on the sidelines during a playoff game against the Los Angeles Rams in Philadelphia on Jan. 19. (Chris Szagola / AP file)
Eight months later, as defending Super Bowl champion Philadelphia hosts Dallas to begin a new NFL season Thursday, that overnight change has challenged Murphy to practice what he preaches. For years, he counseled athletes to perform their best under scrutiny by living what he calls a "selfless and therefore fearless life." Today, months after he signed a three-book deal and with more clients than ever before interested in his advice, Murphy is adjusting to being in the spotlight himself.
"Inner excellence is about being selfless, and I don't need the attention, or I've never wanted the attention," Murphy said this week. "I'm super grateful for what's happened and that lives have changed, and that's the amazing part. My life is very different now, for sure, but I think it was kind of an interesting thing, and I was surprised — why do they keep asking about me? ...
"Am I good at inner excellence? I wouldn't say I'm great at it. I want to be great at it. I want to be the best in the world, but who knows where I'm at right now? I try, obviously, not to compare myself to others. I want to get better every day at it. When I say 'at inner excellence,' I mean being more selfless and having more compassion, getting out of my own way, the self-referential life, self-centeredness, my biggest challenge. So it was my biggest challenge then; it's my biggest challenge now."
Murphy, the youngest of five siblings, grew up outside Seattle obsessed with becoming a famous athlete or at least working in sports. He lived a Walter Mitty existence chasing that ambition.
Drafted in the 13th round of the Major League Baseball draft by the Chicago Cubs in 1988, he bounced among minor-league clubs in New York, West Virginia, North Carolina and Illinois for three years. He went back to school at the University of British Columbia, where he played football and wrote a master's paper on baseball that later became a book based on his interviews with Sparky Anderson, Dusty Baker, Jim Leyland and other figures. Not yet ready to give up on baseball, he played two more minor-league seasons in the mid-1990s, briefly became a scout for Kansas City and served as a hitting coach for South Africa's Olympic baseball team in 2000 and briefly within the Texas Rangers' organization.
If the popularity of "Inner Excellence" was a slow burn, so was its conception. In 2003, Murphy moved to Arizona's Sonoran Desert having given away most of his possessions in an attempt to find solitude, he said. He was 36. For the next six years, he wrote a book he hoped would serve as a manual to help professional athletes perform with peace and confidence. Financing his interviews and travel put him in $90,000 of debt, Murphy has said, and left him with a "near mental breakdown," he told NPR last spring.
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Once it was published in 2009 by McGraw-Hill, the first edition of the book found an audience with professional golfers but few others. Like any successful play in football, its rise to No. 1 depended on timing. Among those who had read "Inner Excellence" early on was DJ Giaritelli, the director of the Austin, Texas-based chapter of Athletes in Action, a Christian sports ministry. Giaritelli had met Murphy at a retreat and was soon recommending the book to athletes. One of them was Moro Ojomo, a defensive lineman he knew at the University of Texas, whom the Eagles drafted in the seventh round in 2023.
Ojomo didn't read the book until months after the recommendation, Giaritelli said, but he happened to be leafing through his copy on a team flight home from a game when "A.J. asks him what he's reading," Giaritelli said.
"I read it one day and had it on my heart that A.J. would like it," Ojomo later told The Philadelphia Inquirer. "I didn't think it would result into what it has."
And it might not have resulted in much had Fox cameras not focused on Brown on the sideline mid-chapter on Jan. 12 and exposed Murphy's work to one of the largest audiences possible in American life. NFL games accounted for the 11 most-watched prime-time telecasts of 2024 and 40 of the top 100, according to Nielsen. The NFL is such a kingmaker that even a weather delay during a game last season drew more than 14 million viewers.
"The crazy thing is," Eagles coach Nick Sirianni said on local radio a few days later, "he's been reading this book on the sideline for a long time. It just so happened a camera saw it this week."
Giaritelli said he and Murphy were talking by phone on Jan. 12 as Murphy was recognizing that his life was changing.
"All of a sudden he says, 'DJ, I think a player was reading my book on the sideline,'" Giaritelli wrote in a message to NBC News.
Murphy was watching a days-old college football bowl game, and then "I see this text, several texts, saying, 'Hey, you got to turn on the wild card game.'" He initially thought the texts were from a family member informing him his mother had died.
"And I turn it on, and I see it. I was like, 'Wow, OK, this is probably going to be significant.' And then it was very, very impactful."
After the game, Brown said, reading between the Eagles' offensive possessions helped clear his mind for the next drive.
"I'm doing it every drive regardless of if I score a touchdown or drop a pass," Brown told reporters. "That's how I refocus."
After Philadelphia's Jan. 12 playoff victory, receiver A.J. Brown posted his copy of "Inner Excellence" on social media. (A.J. Brown via X)
Murphy's own focus was being tested, meanwhile, as he lived out both an author's dream and a logistical nightmare, trying to handle requests for books and media coverage. After Brown was shown on camera, an NFL studio show requested that a copy be delivered to its set that night. Three days after he'd gone viral, Murphy said, he woke at 3 a.m., still filled with adrenaline. The only assistance he could afford before was part-time help from a nephew who was still in college. Much more help was now needed. He asked the manager of Brown's foundation to temporarily manage him.
Within three weeks, on the eve of the Eagles' Super Bowl title, the team released a video filled with fans and team figures — including the team's owner — reading the book all around the city.
Pre-fame, Murphy typically spent three days with new clients, then worked with them closely but remotely generally over the course of a year. He can't commit that much time anymore, despite having more marketing, publicity and day-to-day help. Instead, he now leads three-day retreats where he can work with many clients at once, or with groups. What he wants to find out from each is the same as ever, he said.
"I would want to know, how do you want to feel in your life?" Murphy said. "And so say you said, 'I want to feel confident, calm, peaceful, joyful,' for example, then I would help you learn what adds to that, what takes away from that."
Before Brown's sighting, Murphy said, he felt content about how he had been living his own life, despite his slowing sales. The influx of attention changed his circumstances, certainly, he said, but he wants it to be a vehicle to help others. He plans to open an "Inner Excellence academy of sorts" in central Philadelphia "that trains people for job skills so they can have meaningful, fulfilling lives," he said.
Had his affirmation about being a bestselling author proved correct years earlier, he wouldn't have been prepared to handle it, he said, believing it was a lesson from God. When he saw insufficient funds at the ATM in January while he was in town at Brown's invitation to watch the Eagles' next playoff game, he took it as a reminder that "it doesn't matter if your bank account says negative like it did yesterday or if it says a lot more like it does today or way more tomorrow; none of that matters," he said. "Your purpose stays exactly the same."
Murphy was still trying to work out how he could use his new spotlight to achieve that purpose when he stepped in a Philadelphia elevator in January and heard a group of Eagles fans discussing, well, him.
"They're like, 'Oh, well, and the author, man, this guy's got to be making a lot of money,' and I was like, 'Really? Well, I hope whoever it is, I hope he does something good with it,'" Murphy said. "And then we parted ways. And that is very true.
"I hope that whether it's the money or the resources or the interviews that something very good happens. And when I say very good, I mean hopefully lives change and people have more compassion, and especially for those in need."
Source: "AOL Sports"
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