The Eagles’ Super Bowl run made Nick Foles a star. The Super Bowl parade turned Jason Kelce into one.
“It’s been pretty crazy to say the least,” Kelce said Monday, via David Murphy of phillynews.com. “I don’t think I expected that before the speech. It was just building up for a long time, and it kind of all just came out in that moment.”
Kelce showed up for the Phillies’ first full-squad workout at spring training in Clearwater, Fla., and was the center of attention. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)
He said he learned the night before the parade that he was one of the players selected to speak.
“It wasn’t all off the cuff,” Kelce said. “This is stuff that had been brewing for a long time. The night before, I couldn’t really sleep. I was kind of like up, just sitting there thinking. They had just told me I was going to talk, so I was like, ‘What could I say? What should I say?’ That’s when I really started thinking about all the different guys who had overcome things or been counted out and had rebounded well, and it was really from the top down. You saw it with everybody, and you started seeing that parallel with the city of Philadelphia and how much the city has struggled for this championship for a long time and how much they’ve been kind of down and out. It just all kind of blended together on the spot, I guess.”
Kelce said he watched his speech afterward to see the reactions from Jeffrey Lurie and Howie Roseman.