From fifth grade to the NFL, the Eagles’ Saquon Barkley has always given his Whitehall teachers gratitude

NEW ORLEANS — Saquon Barkley is one of the busiest people in New Orleans right now, but on Wednesday afternoon, with a flock of reporters trailing him down a hallway, he made time to shout-out someone special.

“Mr. Pugh,” Barkley said. “My fifth-grade teacher. He gave me the first book I really read that really resonated with me. Touching Spirit Bear.”

This was not part of Pugh’s curriculum. The novel, written by Ben Mikaelsen, was something the teacher reserved especially for his then 10-year-old student.

It was a tale of forgiveness and personal transformation, about a troubled teenager who moves to an island in Alaska. Seventeen years later, and four days before the biggest game of his life, it stuck with Barkley.

“It was the fact that someone took time out of their day to realize that maybe I wasn’t being the best student, or being the best kid I could be, and saw a lot of potential in me,” Barkley said. “It was given to me as a gift. I’ve always had a really supportive family, but that was the first time a teacher had really done something like that for me.”

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It’s not new for the Eagles running back to be using his platform to credit teachers who shaped him. In March 2018, he praised “the advocates who pushed him to improve his poor grades,” in a speech in his hometown of Whitehall, Pa.

A few months later, Barkley again credited his teachers, in an interview with NBC Sports Philadelphia at the NFL draft. When he returned to Whitehall High School last summer for a football camp, he was asked who influenced him the most.

Barkley mentioned his environmental science teacher and wide receivers coach, Justin Kondikoff, his assistant football coach George Makhoul, and his high school Spanish teacher, Michelle Le.

“It was incredible,” Le said. “I’m not nothing to him, but I’m just his former Spanish teacher. There have been so many other people who have had larger impacts on his life. It meant the world to me.”

For as talented as he was on the field, Barkley was not a natural student. He worked to improve his grades. But he never forgot the love and support he got from those who helped him, long before he was a superstar.

“I wouldn’t be where I am without them,” he said.

Barkley was especially close to Le, who went by Ms. Bear when he was in high school. She taught him his freshman, sophomore, and senior years. Spanish was not his strong suit. He didn’t have trouble with vocabulary, but struggled with verb conjugation.

So, he would ask Le for help, while doing plenty of extra credit.

“When he had a challenge, instead of getting frustrated, he faced it head-on,” Le said. “And I think that is part of the reason why he is where he is today. He wasn’t willing to just say, ‘I don’t get this.’ It was, ‘How do I get this? How can I understand this?’”

Le helped Barkley in more ways than one. In February 2015, when Le was working as a senior adviser for Barkley’s class, she noticed that he hadn’t paid his class dues, which covered cap and gown, senior breakfast, and other graduation-related costs.

The deadline was coming up. Le offered him a proposal.

“I asked if he wanted to do some sort of fundraiser to offset his dues,” Le said. “And he jumped on that opportunity. He was selling coupon books. And that kid went around the school and hustled those coupon books like no other.

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“Even when he had enough to cover his own dues, he asked me if I had more, because he knew that this was for the class as a whole. That’s not something most 18-year-old boys are doing. That’s probably the last thing they want to be bothered about. But he was all about it.”

It wasn’t just a one-sided relationship. Le said Barkley was one of the most emotionally intelligent students she has ever had. He could tell if something was wrong, and would always offer to help.

One day, he approached her after class. He’d noticed she had been crying.

“He said, ‘Ms. Bear, are you OK? You don’t look like yourself,’” Le said. “For a teenage boy to recognize something like that … I was like, ‘Oh God, I’m not doing a very good job of putting a happy face on.’

“But if he would see someone upset, even if it wasn’t his friend, he would always go and see what he could do for them.”

By all accounts, Barkley still acts the same way. Le’s colleague, Mike Yadush, taught him American history in 10th, 11th, and 12th grade. He’s had Eagles season tickets since 1989, and was watching his former student warm up before an Eagles-Giants game in December 2023.

He took a photo, but didn’t say anything. A few months later, when Barkley was at Whitehall, Yadush showed him the photo from that day.

Barkley was taken aback.

“He said, ‘Why didn’t you yell at me?’” Yadush said. “And I said, ‘I’m just not going to do that.’ People bug him too much. Let the guy focus.”

Yadush remembers Barkley as a student who asked a lot of questions. Kondikoff does, too. Both teachers coached the future running back in football and believe that his inquisitive nature contributed to his success.

Kondikoff said sometimes he’d have to cut Barkley off to make sure he could get through his lesson. But the questions were always rooted in sincerity. Barkley was just a curious kid.

“That mental aspect of football is so hard, and it’s not really talked about as much,” Kondikoff said. “Obviously he passes the eye test. He’s got the physicality, the speed, the strength — all that stuff. But that intangible stuff, where you’re mentally into the game and you can figure out what the defense is doing before they know what they’re doing — that just puts you so much further ahead. So, asking those types of questions really helps.”

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Kondikoff has taught at Whitehall High School since 2008. He has photos of Barkley by his desk. He said students will ask where Barkley once sat (front row in the middle) so they can sit in the same seat.

“You can just see their pride,” Kondikoff said. “They ask, ‘Can I move my seat to where he was?’”

Danny Moyer never taught Barkley, but he spent plenty of time with him. Barkley was friends with a few students in Moyer’s art class and would often stop by.

They were working on an installation in the western wing of the school. It was a mural full of different black-and-white portraits of Whitehall students.

Barkley participated in the project his senior year. Every day, Moyer says, he sees students kiss their hands and touch the wall. It’s obvious that they’re proud.

But there’s something else that sticks out to the art teacher.

“That photograph of him, looking just like everybody else in our school, that’s the most visual example of who he is,” Moyer said. “That’s Sa-Sa.”

A few years ago, not long after Kobe Bryant died, Amy Bonshak saw a video of Barkley on social media. The sixth-grade English teacher turned to her colleague, Mary Bellamy.

“We were like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ This is too perfect,” Bonshak said.

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It was a repurposed clip of Barkley from 2019, when he was at Penn State. He wrote an open letter to Bryant, detailing how inspired he was by his legacy.

“There’s a famous poem, called ‘Ozymandias’ [by Percy Bysshe Shelley],” Barkley said in the video. “It’s about a traveler, who comes about an ancient kingdom, covered in sand. At the end of it, all that remains is a broken statue of the king, Ozymandias, with the inscriptions.

“‘Look on my words, ye mighty, and despair!’ But there’s nothing to see, except sand. This poem makes me think about what it actually takes to leave a lasting legacy. The best legacy starts humbly, and lasts long after your reign is over. You, you have proven that.”

Bonshak and Bellamy were floored. They had been teaching the same poem (circa 1818) to their class at Whitehall-Coplay Middle School for years, but had always had trouble getting students engaged in it.

Not anymore. Once the two teachers began showing the video of Barkley, the kids’ eyes lit up.

“As soon as you talk about Saquon, they are immediately paying attention,” Bellamy said. “They value what he has to say. It’s a really hard poem, and it’s hard for kids to grasp and wrap their heads around. And the way he explains it, I think they get it.”

Bonshak and Bellamy now show the clip to their students every year. Bonshak, who taught Barkley in sixth grade English, doesn’t think she assigned him “Ozymandias” in class, but the fact that he knew the poem filled her with pride.

“It’s kind of an obscure poem,” she said. “It’s interesting that he connected to it and took what he did out of it. But then how he put himself out there, acknowledging that this poem resonated in him, I was thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, how can I not bring this up to a middle school kid, who probably hates poetry, and thinks, dear God, I want nothing to do with this.’”

Bonshak likes to joke that she is responsible for Barkley’s eloquence. She never got the sense that English was his favorite class, but like Le, she witnessed his work ethic firsthand.

Even at 11 years old, Barkley had no qualms about asking for help, or putting in extra effort.

“Some kids might just try to get by,” Bonshak said. “But that was never good enough for him. At all.”

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To see what he’s become — a professional athlete who can calmly and thoughtfully answer questions, even on the biggest stages — is the greatest gift a teacher could ask for. Sometimes, Bonshak will watch his postgame interviews, just to see how her former student will respond.

“The way he articulates his thoughts, he really makes sure he’s connecting with whoever is speaking to him,” Bonshak said. “It’s just an impressive quality to have.

“[It makes me feel] oddly special, even though I don’t believe my role was that exceptional. Yet in a small way, I think yes, it was. You know what I mean? You do feel proud about that.”

Bill Pugh was not available by phone on Wednesday afternoon, but a family member was.

“It’s incredible,” they said. “[Pugh] absolutely loved Saquon. He was always very proud of him, even before he went to Penn State, even before the Giants. He’s always loved and respected him. I’m honored that he would shout him out.”

When Barkley’s teachers hear that he is singing their praises, they are grateful but not surprised. This isn’t because they think they’ve had an outsized impact on his life.

It’s because he has always shown them gratitude, from fifth grade through the NFL.

Le gets emotional when she thinks about that camp at Whitehall High School last summer. Barkley didn’t just mention his teachers by name. He knew exactly how they’d impacted him.

He told her that she’d always had his back, and protected him, and that he appreciated it. It’s a moment she won’t forget.

“Whitehall is his home,” Le said. “And I feel like as you grow and you become this professional, famous athlete, it’s very easy to forget where you came from, because there’s so much else going on. And that just is not the case for him.”