PHILADELPHIA — Malcolm Jenkins, the Philadelphia Eagles’ star safety, was dragging Monday afternoon, and for good reason.
The previous night, he helped the hometown team earn a trip to the Super Bowl with a 38-7 thumping of the Minnesota Vikings. He left the stadium at 11 p.m. After a brief appearance at a team party, he went home and played poker with some college fraternity brothers until 3 a.m. His alarm went off at 6 a.m., as it always does. He looked in on his 5-day-old baby and got ready to take his 4-year-old daughter to school. Then it was off to the Eagles’ training facility for rehab, Super Bowl planning and to discuss his other full-time job — fighting for criminal justice reform and addressing racial inequality.
“There’s a huge emphasis for me on time management,” Jenkins said with a shrug. “Sometimes it requires burning the candle on both ends.”
Jenkins, 30, has been burning that candle since the summer of 2016, when the killing of several African-Americans by the police became his call to action. Since then, he has used every waking hour he isn’t spending on football or family to work with the Players Coalition, a group of N.F.L. players seeking solutions to seemingly intractable problems facing African-Americans.
Jenkins’s raised fist became one of the enduring images of the 2017 N.F.L. season. After the league agreed to invest $89 million in social causes, he ended his protests but not his work off the field.Credit…Rich Schultz/Getty Images
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