Daily News | Inside Jalen Hurts’ Houston legend: Family, football, food, and fantastic finishes
As he stands under the lights of a rain-soaked high school football field on Tuesday, a train whizzing by disrupts him as he recounts the eight-year-old story of his kid brother Jalen doing something that seemed impossible.
When he and Averion Jr. visited the stadium formerly known as Reliant as kids, it was hard to imagine Hurts would one day return as a starting quarterback in the NFL and an MVP candidate. But then again, there was a time when Hurts’ last-second touchdown pass against the North Shore Mustangs seemed inconceivable as well.Every once in a while, Jalen Hurts will get a shipment of live crawfish to the Philadelphia area.
Jalen’s culinary time offers a glimpse of his lighter side. Even those closest to him describe him as “stoic” most often, but cookouts are when he can flash some personality. “It’s in us. That’s a Hurts thing, I feel like: Eating crawfish and hanging out. You ask anybody on the east side of Houston, they know that’s what we do.”Jalen Hurts takes pride in carrying the torch as the next in the Philadelphia Eagles’ legacy of Black quarterbacks.There’s a silver Ford pickup truck parked right outside the doors of Channelview’s field house with a noticeably specific arrangement of logos on the back window.
“There’s the head man,” said DJ McNorton, a former Channelview standout and current assistant coach as he walks by Averion Sr.’s office. “I wouldn’t be where I am without those guys,” Jalen said over the summer. “Those are my No. 1 supporters back home because those are the guys that I looked up to. I’ve said it before, I used to spat my ankles because I saw those guys spatting their ankles.”
“That’s his spitting image,” Averion Jr. said, unknowingly echoing his younger brother. “It’s kind of annoying sometimes. He’ll try to be my dad sometimes. I’ll be like, ‘Hold on Jalen, I’m big bro, now. I’m big bro.’ That’s the reason he’s in the position that he’s in. I don’t fault him or hold it against him when he does stuff like that. It’s just him.”
“Everybody knew who North Shore was and everybody knew who Jalen Hurts was at that time,” McNorton said. “It was an east-side type of showdown so everybody wanted to be there.” Down six late in the fourth quarter, Jalen got the Falcons about 40 yards from the goal line with the chance to take one shot at the end zone. On the game’s penultimate play, Jalen rolled to his right to evade pressure and threw a prayer to wide receiver E.T. Giles. The pass bounced off Giles’ hands, past two North Shore defenders, and into the grips of Channelview receiver Bryant Valentine in the back of the end zone. The touchdown tied things at 48.
Bigger than Alabama’s 2018 SEC championship or the Red River rivalry the following season at Oklahoma. Bigger than the Big 12 title and bigger than any of his 16 wins over three years with the Eagles. “I’ll tell him to this day. That’s probably the most impressive win that he’s had as a football player,” Johnson said. “If you’ve ever been to North Shore High School and seen the type of talent and the type of program that they have, they don’t lose very often.”
“Jalen would always play by himself,” Averion Jr. said. “I’d be outside playing basketball and he’d have a football in his hand, trying to juke a tree. Like, ‘What are you doing, dude?’ It makes sense, you don’t question it now. ... I vividly remember him doing that. Running through people’s yards, juking trees, spin-moving, dead-legging. Yeah, that’s Jalen through and through.”
Jalen had the size and athleticism to pique interest as a middle schooler, but still hadn’t elicited dreams of an NFL future at the position quite yet. “I told him, ‘I can take you home,’” Henderson said. “Nope. He wanted to be here. This is where he lived. This was his sanctuary. If he was a basketball player, they’d call him a gym rat. I say he’s a field house rat.”
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