Eagles Brandon Graham Admits Dealing With Bust Label Was Difficult

PHILADELPHIA – Is there anybody out there who doesn’t love Brandon Graham now?

OK, maybe there are some pockets of fans in other NFL cities, especially Dallas, a city that is home to the Cowboys, who Graham said was his favorite team to trash talk when they played. He said he would do it with Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott and Prescott was cool with it.

Then there was his kindergarten teacher, a woman who long ago told Graham’s mom, Tasha, that her son was going to be big trouble as he got older.

“I told her, ‘I don’t think you know who his mom is,’” she said after watching her son from the front row of the Novacare Complex’s auditorium as he retired after 15 years in the NFL, all with the Eagles. “I always taught him to be nice and always be respectful.”

Perhaps it’s those lessons learned at home as to why Graham has forgiven Eagles fans and some media for the label they pinned on early in his career - bust.

All he heard was how the Eagles should have taken the player that was picked right after him, safety Earl Thomas, who played his final NFL game six years ago. Jason Pierre-Paul was also a name he heard a lot after Pierre-Paul was taken two picks after Graham went.

Graham turned that bust label into a beloved figure. He said it wasn’t easy, though.

“When they put that bust label on me, that was tough because I didn’t want to go outside, I didn’t want to do nothing,” he said.

Brandon Graham at his retirement press conference with the two Lombardi Trophies he helped deliver to the Eagles, his wife, Carlyne, and kids Bryson (left) and Emerson. | Ed Kracz/Eagles on SI

His wife, Carolyne, who was also at the press conference with her and Brandon’s two children, Emerson and Bryson, got him to come around. She got him back outside, got him involved in community work in the Philly area.

“She’s like, ‘Do something…you can’t just be sitting in the house,’” he said.

That was the easy part. The true forgiving came when Graham was able to move past the fans’ negative talk.

Fans’ vitriol and the sometimes-harsh media criticism have soured many athletes on the city, has even driven them out of town. They are the ones who never got it, never understood what the fans expected. Those players leave bitter or scarred from their experience in the City of Brotherly Love.

Graham never let that happen. Again, it was not easy.

“I had to work on that for real,” he said. “I’m still working on it. A lot of people don’t know me. A lot of people just watch the football player that I am, on what I did. They don’t know me. I can’t be mad at them for making their own assumptions of whatever it is.

“You know what assumptions do. That’s why I don’t assume because if I want to know something, I’m going to go talk to them. In this case, in football, (fans) don’t really get to talk to lot of us, so you’re going to talk about it. So, you can’t really take offense to it.”

One only had to look around at the gathering of coaches and teammates at his retirement press conference to know how much he meant to the organization. Graham will go down as a legend on the field, but how he turned a negative into a positive to become one of the most beloved figures in franchise history, that can’t be forgotten, either.

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