On graduation day, outside the Barry Switzer Center, the air is heavy, thick, sticky, presaging the thunderstorm threatening to erupt. Traffic snakes through the streets lining the Oklahoma campus. Sweat spots polka-dot dress shirts. True love becomes sharing ever-dampening handkerchiefs with ever-more-desperate relatives.
It’s early afternoon when an NFL quarterback who’s better known for the other college he attended strolls into the training facility named after a famous Sooners coach. This is Oklahoma, so of course the athlete ceremony takes place atop an indoor turf field adjacent to the weight room. The forecast forced the university-wide graduation, the evening portion of this festive spring Friday, indoors.
Beyond the hash marks, the field is outfitted like any other graduation (balloons, white folding chairs, champagne flutes). But on this day, in this place, for this quarterback, it’s also typical but in a different way. For Jalen Hurts, this day in mid-May opens a window into his superpower: intention. While not a novel concept in sports, Hurts’s application of purpose, the thorough, deliberate, precise and varied ways he deploys intent, stretches far beyond what’s typical.
