“It’s like Christmas when you’re provided [with] a good player that doesn’t have any bad habits.”
Philadelphia offensive line coach Jeff Soutland, who on Monday helped deliver the Eagles to Super Bowl LVII, is reflecting on his first encounter with $64 million offensive tackle Jordan Mailata.
Former Bankstown Bulls coach Richard Kairouz can only laugh and agree. Nothing’s changed in 12 years.
“Jordan would’ve been 14 years old and the same height – 200 centimetres or whatever he is now,” Kairouz tells the Herald after Philadelphia’s 31-7 trouncing of San Francisco secured the Eagles’ Super Bowl passage.
Jordan Mailata alongside teammate Jon Bernard Kairouz in under 15s.
The best part of six-foot-seven on the old scale and a walking birth certificate enquiry every Saturday morning for nervous opposition parents, Mailata towered over the teammates and friends he’s maintained to this day, like Kairouz’s son Jon Bernard – best known as the TikTok guy who predicted NSW’s daily COVID-19 totals.
“But he was an absolute gentleman on and off the field,” Kairouz senior says.
“A real gentle giant and actually quite cumbersome and clumsy back then, he didn’t dominate like you think he would at that size.
“He wouldn’t start a fight by any means, but he protected his teammates. He would always look after them, so he’s perfect for the role he has now in the NFL.”
Mailata’s day job is lining up at left tackle for Philadelphia and protecting the blindside of star quarterback Jalen Hurts.
It’s one of the most important positions on the field, often the second-highest-paid on a roster, because the role requires serious faith and skill to safeguard your best playmaking asset.
Come February 12 when 73,000 fans cram into the State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, Mailata will rank alongside halftime entertainer Rihanna as one of the day’s most influential figures.
If Philadelphia account for Kansas City, he will join Jesse Williams as Australia’s only Super Bowl winners, though Williams did not see any game time when Seattle thumped Denver in 2014.
Mailata’s six-year journey from NRL offcut to America’s greatest sporting event is simply stunning.
Not because his Eagles deal carries twice as many zeros as the $5000 reserve grade deal the Rabbitohs offered him in 2017.
Or because when he first arrived in the US chasing an NFL start, scouts and coaches told him to add another 20 kilos to his 143-kilo frame.
Mailata’s story is so special because he’s still the same Condell Park choirboy, even if his latest musical stage was The Masked Singer, with half-a-billion fans worldwide treated to his rendition of Ed Sheeran’s Perfect.
“Heavenly voice,” Lawrence Karam, another Bankstown coach and family friend of the Mailatas, says.
“He was in the school choir with this beautiful, heavenly voice. And I actually think it helped him with his confidence and brought that side of things out of him, being able to perform and put himself on show like that.
“Just a lovely kid from a lovely family and now we could have a kid from Bankstown wearing one of those nice sexy Super Bowl rings, that’s fantastic.”
Will Bryce and Aden Durde were the first to put Mailata through his NFL paces in late-2016 as part of the game’s international pathways program.
The speed, size and agility set tongues wagging in NFL circles almost immediately, Bryce recalls.
“But that’s only half the package,” Bryce says.
“As much as the physical side was clearly there, it was ‘can we teach this guy football? How does he process information? What’s important to him?’
Jordan Mailata with defenders in pursuit while playing under 17s for Bankstown Bulls.Credit:Rodney Messner
“That was just as valuable. Anyone who spends one minute with Jordan realises he’s even more exceptional as a person than he is as an athlete.
“There’s so much pride in his family and his background. There’s natural protective instincts, you see it, and it’s vital playing his position at left tackle.
“From our perspective, investing time and energy into Jordan was easy. Not because he’s such a big human, but because he’s such a good human.”
As Soutland told an NFL Films production of Mailata’s journey from Bankstown to the big time last year, the 25-year-old’s on-field gifts are matched off it. Not least because those size 18 feet are kept firmly on the ground by those closest to him.
“I was pissed,” his sister Sese said in the same documentary. “He was 20! We don’t have family where he was going, he’d never held an American football.”
Older brother Daniel sent him to the US with the simplest of instructions.
“You can’t fail, you’re going. Go make it.”
Mailata has. Eels recruitment manager Ben Rogers held a similar role at Redfern when Mailata was weighing up the South Sydney offer he had tabled and the NFL pathways option.
Jordan Mailata during his South Sydney days.Credit:South Sydney Rabbitohs
“Ideally, we won’t see you again, because that is the opportunity of a lifetime,” Rogers recalls telling him.
The Rabbitohs have though, with Mailata always grateful for the start he was given by the club.
He’s swung through their headquarters since making it large, just as he spent his first Philadelphia off-season training at Kairouz’s local Summer Hill Gym.
It’s a long, long way from Super Bowl LVII. But then the Bankstown choirboy has come a long, long way as well.
“We give them an opportunity,” Bryce says, “but then it’s on the player. “When you’re starting out like Jordan was, you’re playing catch-up and making up [for] what you don’t know in the evening, in the early morning, before, after practice.
“You’re trying to close that gap and have the coaches believe in you and want to give you their time. Jordan’s gained that trust and faith and the trust of his teammates too.”
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