Football made Malcolm Mitchell a star; reading is making him a hero.
Mitchell, 31, is a former professional football player — a Super Bowl champion, in fact — but also an author and motivational speaker. He founded a youth literacy initiative, Share the Magic Foundation, and now travels the country, visiting schools and spreading the joy and emphasizing the importance of reading well. It is a message he came to through a deeply personal, utterly alarming revelation when he was a student — and football standout — at the University of Georgia: He couldn’t read very well.
Mitchell was a rookie wide receiver for the New England Patriots when he caught six passes — five in the fourth quarter — during the Patriots’ dramatic come-from-behind overtime victory over the Atlanta Falcons in Super bowl LI in 2017. He has spoken in schools around Virginia, including Brunswick County, where he has become a favorite, making annual visits, hanging out at the Taste of Brunswick Festival in October and even joining the advisory board of the James Solomon Russell-Saint Paul’s College Museum and Archives.
“He’s kind of become a part of our community,” said Bobby Conner, vice chairman of the museum. “He’s a terrific guy.
“I’ve been told many times over the years that you should never meet your heroes or celebrities because nine times out of 10 they are not the person that in your mind you think they are. Well, he is that one out of those 10. From the moment you meet him … he shakes your hand, gives you a hug, smiles. There’s no ego with him at all.”
Mitchell recently visited Richmond to meet with legislators at the Capitol so they might become acquainted with the work of his foundation, which operates programs, both in-person and virtual, in all 50 states and 17 countries.
“Just me walking in and saying, ‘Hi,’ getting them familiar with me, letting them know I exist, letting them know the programs exist,” said Mitchell, who lives in Atlanta with his family. “Everyone was very welcoming.”
Mitchell’s personal story gives even more relevance to his literacy work. He grew up in challenging circumstances, mostly in Valdosta, Georgia, where his mother had returned with her three children — Malcolm is in the middle — to live with her mother. She persevered to shepherd her family through financial struggles and, when Malcolm was 14, the family moved into a Habitat for Humanity house.
“The Habitat house meant new beginnings,” Mitchell said in a story published on Habitat.org. “It was our first mailbox, our first front door.”
Looking back, he said, he realized long ago he wasn’t much of a reader, but it wasn’t something he spent much time worrying about. It seemed to him he was surrounded by others facing similar challenges, for whom it also wasn’t an urgent concern. Besides, he was an outstanding football player at Valdosta High, a perennial powerhouse with a national reputation, and football seemed more likely to provide the opportunity for upward mobility than anything he gained in the classroom.
“I always say,” Mitchell said in a phone interview, following a day of presenting programs in Kingsland, Georgia, near the Florida line, “most kids who grow up in challenging communities want very simple things: to be in a situation to take care of [themselves] and be in a situation to help or support someone they love and care about.”
He was a high school All-American as a senior, and he signed with the University of Georgia, where he made an immediate impact, catching 38 passes, including four touchdowns. He was well on his way, riding football to the top, when it began to bother him that his reading ability wasn’t on a par with his football skills.
In a freshman English class, when it appeared the instructor was going to go around the room, asking students to read passages out loud from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the hotshot football star sat petrified.
“I was scared,” he recalled. “That moment was embarrassing, and I felt inferior because here I was, someone who everyone wanted to take a picture with or get an autograph from, and I was scared to read four sentences aloud in class.”
How did he make it through that situation?
“Well, another student volunteered to read the whole short story, so I didn’t have read at all,” Mitchell said. “I was very relieved. I probably went back to not paying attention, but that stuck with me.”
A series of events made even deeper impressions. He noticed he couldn’t keep up with captions scrolling across the television screen, and he struggled to recognize the difference, word-wise, between cans of applesauce and apple slices in the grocery store. He read an interview with Curtis Jackson (better known as the hip-hop icon 50 Cent), who spoke of how knowledge through reading empowered him to make savvy business decisions, leading to financial prosperity.
Then there was his freshman theater class at Georgia where his classmates included a former football player, who had returned to school after signing a big professional contract. Mitchell wondered, “If money represents all you need, why is he sitting in class trying to get this degree? I never talked to him about it, but I just concluded there must be something about the value of this degree that I do not understand. That all started to chisel away at the way I was thinking previously.”
Motivated, he set out to work as hard on his reading as his football. He became a voracious reader. A knee injury sidelined him during his junior season, but the time away from the field provided more time for his books. At a Barnes & Noble in Athens, he struck up a conversation with a woman who invited him to join her book club. (She had no idea he played football.) He became the youngest member of the group, by quite a few years, and the only man. It broadened his circle of friends and his reading selections, and he became the subject of a CBS News “On the Road” feature in 2014.
He not only read books, he began writing them. His first, published while he was still in college, was “The Magician’s Hat,” a children’s book about a magician whose hat contained an endless supply of magical books to help kids achieve their dreams. He launched a literacy initiative, “Read With Malcolm,” in which he read to students in local schools.
By the time he graduated from Georgia with a degree in communications and was drafted by the Patriots in 2016, he was a full-fledged literacy crusader.
Reading, Mitchell said, gives you information and perspective and “makes you better at whatever you’re trying to do.” That’s the basic message he carries with him — along with a football — when he visits schools to talk with kids and read to them and hand out books.
“I hope they understand that reading is important,” he said. “I hope they understand that reading will help them accomplish their goals, and I hope they believe that they can read, even if they struggle.”
Darlene Brown, principal at Totaro Elementary in Brunswick County, has welcomed Mitchell each of the last two years to visit with students. He was truly “captivating,” she said.
“He kept the students engaged through a mix of reading, football, and magic tricks,” she said. “Malcolm’s interactive approach inspired the kids and showcased his passion for literacy.”
Two of Totaro’s third-grade classes became state champions last year in READBowl, an annual global reading competition administered by Mitchell’s foundation that had more than 800,000 participants earlier this year.
“Malcolm remains an incredible role model and a true inspiration,” Brown said.
Injuries cut short Mitchell’s pro career — he retired after two seasons — and he misses being around the game. He still carries a football around “like a child would a stuffed animal,” he said. “It makes me comfortable in society.” But any future in the game will likely be limited to playing catch with his children or anyone else who wants to throw the ball around.
When his career abruptly ended, the life change was not insignificant, but perhaps not as rough as it is for others since he had a mission already in place, waiting for his undivided attention. He’s quite satisfied to continue writing and advocating for literacy, or, as he put it, “If I can sustain that for a lifetime, I’ll be cool with it.”