Eagles locker room: Jordan Mailata on his pregame routine; Thomas Booker describes his White House visit

In the lead-up to his second-career start at left tackle in 2020, Jordan Mailata called his therapist.

Mailata, 23 at the time, couldn’t shake the nerves that were building up ahead of the Eagles’ Week 5 matchup against the Pittsburgh Steelers, a team that boasted talented defensive ends T.J. Watt and Bud Dupree. He had been nervous for his first-ever start the week prior against the San Francisco 49ers, but that feeling paled in comparison.

“I just remember, ‘Well, [expletive],’” Mailata said with a laugh. “I was just like, ‘Man, I’m stressed out.’”

In an effort to ease his mind, Mailata’s therapist suggested that he try grounding, the practice of walking barefoot on the earth as a means of reducing stress. The rookie left tackle didn’t ask any questions. He shed his cleats and socks during his pregame warmup at what then was known as Heinz Field. The Eagles lost the game, but Mailata’s nerves dissipated.

“It just reminded me, like, you’re playing on this Earth; it’s going to be good,” Mailata said. “It’s going to be fine.”

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Since then, Mailata has practiced grounding during his hyper-regimented pregame routine. Nowadays, he said its incorporation in his laundry list of tasks mostly is rooted in superstition. Still, all he can focus on while performing his routine is the routine itself, keeping anxious feelings at bay.

For a road game, that routine begins the day before, when Mailata requests that he sits at the very back of the plane on the left-side window. When the team lands, he has to be on Bus 3 in the same location as his seat on the plane.

His dinner at the hotel the night before a game is always the same — bow tie pasta, a mixture of red and white sauces, shrimp, sun-dried tomatoes, spinach, a little bit of garlic, salt, pepper, and chili flakes. Sometimes he pairs it with steak and garlic bread. After meetings, he has a snack of three scoops of chocolate ice cream and crushed Oreos. If the Eagles play a 1 p.m. game the next day, he’ll get an IV the night before.

Mailata is just as particular about his breakfast as he is his dinner. He has an eight-egg omelet (four whole eggs, four egg whites) with spinach, mushrooms, and chicken sausage, with a glass of orange juice to wash it down. If the hotel has silver-dollar pancakes, he eats eight of those. If they’re larger, he eats four.

“It’s got to be eight,” Mailata said. “It’s got to be four. Just doing the size math. Boy math.”

On game day, he assumes his typical spot on Bus 3 to the stadium. As they approach the stadium, he listens to gospel music. He must be the last one off the bus. Once he’s inside the stadium, he does his grounding walk on the field first while listening to a specific pump-up song that he wouldn’t reveal.

Mailata then sees a massage therapist. He puts his uniform on in a particular order — pants on, then the right thigh pad, then the left, then his shoulder pads, and then the knee pads. He gets his thumbs taped — right one first — by Steve Feldman, the team’s coordinator of rehabilitation. He returns to the field and goes through blocking and pass-protection drills with left guard Landon Dickerson.

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After a 30-minute chill-out in the locker room, he hits the field for team warmups and immediately looks for a midair hip bump from tight end Dallas Goedert. Following team stretches and drills, it’s back to the locker room and more gospel music until kickoff.

Mailata said that his routine has gone awry in the past, and the results weren’t pretty. The night before the Eagles’ Week 2 Monday night game against the Minnesota Vikings in 2022, Mailata ordered ramen for dinner by delivery. He said he gave up at least a sack and a half.

“Never again will I ever break that routine,” Mailata declared.

In his first year on the Eagles’ 53-man roster, Thomas Booker is settling into his role on the field. This summer, he found his voice off of it.

The 6-foot-3, 301-pound defensive tackle was invited to speak at the White House on a panel about gun violence prevention in the Black community by Sydney Harvey, an adviser for public engagement within the Biden administration. Harvey initially connected with Booker through Donald Stewart, his former teammate at Stanford.

Booker, 24, said he was “shocked” when he first received the invitation, but when he noticed the “whitehouse.gov” email address, he knew it was legit. Even though Booker said that he hasn’t been personally affected by gun violence, he said that he approaches the issue from an economics perspective, which he cultivated at Stanford as a major in the subject.

“I don’t think that gun violence is a logical way to go about things, but there’s always a reason for why people do what they do,” Booker said. “That usually happens when people don’t have the economic opportunities, the jobs, the things around them educationally to be able to make choices that make more sense.

“I just kind of looked at it from that perspective in terms of trying to solve the problem at its root and not be a reactionary solution with all of the rest of the sort of stuff, like police and all the rest. If we give people opportunities, give people jobs, all the rest of it, crime usually goes down because people have more positive things to do with their time and all the rest of it vs. trying to resort to something that might not be in anyone’s best interest.”

In addition to Booker, the discussion featured a variety of voices from the music and entertainment industry, including Bun B, one half of the Southern hip-hop duo UGK, Sekyiwa Shakur, the sister of Tupac Shakur, and Shameik Moore, an actor and musician who voiced Miles Morales in the Spider-Man animated movies.

Booker said he would love to continue to stay involved in gun violence prevention activism. The experience reminded him of the importance of using his platform as a professional athlete to facilitate change and inspire others to do the same.

“Seeing people step out of their specific professional frame and do things they care about to help people, I think, lets everybody else know, ‘Why would I not stand on my principles if this person feels the same way?’” Booker said. “I do think at the end of the day, setting the example’s extremely important and extremely potent in today’s society.”