Now that he’s seven years into what’s shaping up to be a Hall of Fame career, it’s wild to think that back in 2018, NFL teams and analysts genuinely believed Lamar Jackson should play wide receiver in the pros. Two MVPs later (and he probably deserved a third), he’s more than silenced those doubters and then some.
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But that’s nothing new to Lamar Jackson. He’s been overcoming obstacles throughout his entire life, both on and off the field. When he was coming out of high school, no one could agree on how many stars he deserved. And the main reason he ended up at Louisville was because head coach Bobby Petrino assured Jackson and his mother, Felicia Jones, that he’d be locked in at quarterback.
Jackson was able to navigate those challenges on the football field with relative ease because he had already endured real tragedy off it. In 2005, when he was just eight years old, he lost his father to a heart attack on the same day his grandmother passed away. Jackson has said that traumatic experience helped build his mental toughness.
“Same day, 2005… Nah, I didn’t cry, I just didn’t cry. [Mom] told us not [to]. She was like, ‘Don’t cry,'” recalled Jackson in an interview.
“I found out my father passed first. Because I was at the house, actually, I fell asleep, and then I woke up, and my cousins were crying. I hear it, I’m like, ‘What ya’ll crying for?’ ‘Oh, you know, your uncle Lamar and my father. I’m like ‘What?’ At first, I start crying and then I just stop, and then everybody comes to the house,” Jackson added.
Jackson went on to describe that when the family came together after the news of his father’s passing, his mom received another call later that same day about his grandmother’s death. His mother, surprisingly, told him not to cry despite the tragedy.
While it’s not exactly healthy to ask kids to suppress their emotions during traumatic situations, Jackson believes his mother’s attitude helped him become mentally strong.
“All my family members and my mom tell me like she got a phone call, my grandma was probably in Daytona or something like that. And she was like, ‘Your grandmother just passed.’ And I stay with my grandmother too, like all of us stay in the same house. And she’s like, ‘Don’t cry.’ I’m like, you just told me don’t cry when my grandmother just died? Like, that was crazy. So you had to be mentally tough, at a young age.”
After that transformative day, Jackson’s mother was forced to raise Lamar, his younger brother, and his two younger sisters on her own in the rough-and-tumble neighborhood of Pompano Beach, Florida.
Jackson also talked about how, a little later in life, poor grades led to his suspension from the football team during 10th grade. He said that experience, with one whole year away from the gridiron, also helped to give him the necessary mental strength to give all of himself to football when he returned to the game.
“Some people hate it because they can’t understand how someone can push through and succeed. They don’t see the grind. I didn’t play in 10th grade because I was just being a kid. But that year taught me what hard work really means.”
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Lamar Jackson has been through more tragedy and heartbreak than anyone deserves. But those experiences have combined to create the man he is today.
And that mental rigor has helped him keep his eye on the prize despite constant doubt from top-level football people about his ability to play QB. He proved it in college with that Heisman Trophy, and he proved it in the NFL with those two MVPs. Now he just needs a Super Bowl to silence the doubters forevermore.
