From Gridiron to Grammar
Former NFL star Malcolm Mitchell discusses his remarkable journey to becoming an author and the importance of childhood literacy
Malcolm Mitchell climbed the mountaintop on February 5, 2017, when he won a Super Bowl ring as a wide receiver for the New England Patriots. Despite all of his success on the football field, he says that he would have been unfulfilled without empowering himself through literacy.
After a career-ending knee injury, Mitchell shifted to writing, and working with his nonprofit Share the Magic to promote and foster childhood literacy.
He recently joined Zibby Owens on her podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books to discuss his new children’s book, My Very Favorite Book in the Whole Wide World, as well as how he applied athletic fundamentals to teach himself to read.
Read an excerpt below and follow the link to listen to the entire interview.
ZO: Congratulations on your fantastic book. For listeners who aren’t familiar with it yet, can you just tell them the basic story of it? Then what inspired you to write this particular book?
MM: My Very Favorite Book in the Whole Wide World was inspired by my personal experience. I grew up a struggling reader. I believed some words were too big, some books too thick, some sentences too long and complicated. I was afraid of reading. My hands would get sweaty. My behavior really suffered from that in classrooms. Through my journey into literacy and finding a love for books, I realized how magical they are, how powerful they can be, and how much of an impact they can have on one’s life. I committed myself to making sure kids understood the importance of reading. My Very Favorite Book in the Whole Wide World documents a kid going on this search for a book that inspires him. Through his journey, he realizes that sometimes the best stories can be found inside of ourselves.
ZO: I read that you were reading at a middle-school level when you got to college. What happened then? Also, were you ever diagnosed with any sort of learning disability, or was it just a lack of education in the reading arena that caused that?
MM: Let me start by saying I was not diagnosed with any learning disabilities. I think my community promoted sports and entertainment over education. I was just like every other child. It was no one’s fault. It’s just the way the community was structured. I had this intense draw to sport and football, which worked out. I was able to go to the NFL and played in a Super Bowl. I had that otherworldly experience, but it was really restricting. Only relying on that natural skill set placed me in a box. Once I got to the University of Georgia, I realized how limited my thinking was. My exposure was not broad, and I wanted to change that. I wanted to feel empowered not just physically, but mentally.
Through a series of fortunate events, I discovered that if I wanted to be more emotionally intelligent, more cognitive, a better decision maker, I needed to be literate. I had a revelation that I needed to read. I started reading picture books and took my athletic approach of starting with fundamentals, and then building on that. You become your own version of the athlete you want to be. I thought to myself, maybe if I do this same thing with reading, it’ll work out. I started with the fundamentals. I went back and started reading picture books.
ZO: You taught yourself?
MM: I’m in my dorm room reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar, writing down notes about sentence structure. I did that with books like The Giving Tree, Exclamation Mark, Cat in the Hat, Oh, The Places You’ll Go. Eventually, my theory played out like I thought it would. I gradually got better and better and better. I think I moved on to self-help because they’re easy to read. Then I moved to graphic novels because they had simple sentence structure. Then I moved into YA novels like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. Eventually, I was writing down vocabulary words and next thing I knew, I was reading The 48 Laws of Power.
ZO: That’s really impressive. In the middle of college, you’re playing football and you’re soon to be drafted to the Patriots. You could’ve been doing anything. You could’ve just been partying every night. You could’ve been relaxing, anything. Instead, you’ve chosen to completely improve yourself in every way by teaching yourself and pushing yourself through all these stages. What was the huge inspiration?
MM: If I go back to the root, it would probably be my mother. I grew up in a single-parent household in a small town. My mother has this infectious way of encouraging and uplifting and empowering. She was limited due to her own personal challenges. She really instilled this unwavering faith and almost blissfully ignorant belief that you could do anything you set your mind to. I adopted that. That’s what helped me be a professional athlete. That also helped me to always strive to be a better version of myself, even today. I always want to search for more, not monetarily or materialistic, but just trying to reach my full potential. I’m not sure that’s even possible, but my mom made me think that it is. I still believe that. I realized that I would be limited if I wasn’t literate, and I needed to be literate to stay on track with evolving into a better version of myself.
ZO: Have you told her that?
MM: In so many words. In my first picture book, The Magician’s Hat, the forward is, “To my mother for always allowing me to believe dreams can become reality.” Then, in my second book, My Very Favorite Book in the Whole Wide World, I wrote, “To my mom, my very favorite person in the whole wide world.”
ZO: Tell me about Read with Malcom and your foundation and how you’re helping children read.
MM: I started Share the Magic Foundation in 2016 as soon as I graduated from the University of Georgia. I wanted to start the foundation because, like many kids in my community, millions of kids around the world don’t understand the importance of literacy. I don’t think I was an anomaly by any means. I couldn’t have been because there are hundreds of kids that I grew up with that thought the same as I did.
I underwent a transformation through literacy. I had become empowered. I wanted to give that gift to other people. I did not want them to feel they only had these two options, being an athlete or an entertainer, to live a sustainable lifestyle. In some communities, that’s just what you believe. I’m a picture-book author. That’s a strange vocation in my community. That’s not even talked about. I started the foundation because I wanted to spread this magic that I had discovered with other kids around the world hoping that I could unlock their potential just as reading had unlocked mine. That’s the simplest answer.
