On May 1, Gold House unveiled its annual A100 List, recognizing the 100 most impactful Asian Pacific leaders across industries. See the full list here.
After the Philadelphia Eagles beat the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl 59 in February, Eagles offensive tackle Jordan Mailata lifted the flag of his native Australia on the victory stage in New Orleans. His compatriots seemed to appreciate the gesture: when Mailata returned home in March and April to conduct football clinics in Australia and New Zealand—part of his role as the NFL’s ambassador to the region—he was recognized everywhere he went. “I was really shocked,” Mailata says. “I guess winning the Super Bowl is a great achievement in Australian history.”
Especially since the 28-year-old’s journey to the Lombardi Trophy is one of the most unlikely stories in all of global sports. Mailata, the first Australian player to ever win a Super Bowl, never played a down of high school or college football before suiting up for the Eagles starting in 2018. He was a rugby player who joined the NFL’s International Player Pathway program (IPP), an initiative to train athletes from around the world on the ways of American football and potentially provide them roster spots on teams. Mailata, an Eagles captain who was named by Pro Football Focus, a data and analytics site, as the NFL’s best offensive lineman for the 2024 season, is the crown jewel of the IPP. And as the son of Samoan immigrants who grew up in a blue-collar area outside of Sydney, he’s using his platform and popularity—Mailata has also competed on the The Masked Singer—to inspire people of Polyneisan descent to pursue their dreams. “You just need belief,” he says. “I’m proof.”
Mailata hails from Bankstown, an ethnically diverse suburb. His father was a handyman who retired when Mailata was about 8 years old, and his mother was a hotel housekeeper. Mailata started playing club rugby when he was 11, but his career hit a roadblock when he was 17: he collapsed during a practice and ultimately needed two ablations on the upper and lower chambers of his heart. He was able to return to club rugby 18 months later, but he wasn’t making much money playing the sport—he had to take odd jobs doing scaffolding, demolition, and stage building to subsidize his athletic dream.
An agent alerted him to the existence of the IPP. His only experience with American football to that point, Mailata says, was watching the Coldplay-Beyoncé-Bruno Mars halftime show at the 2016 Super Bowl, and seeing former Houston Texans superstar J.J. Watt block a field goal on TV. “I was like, ‘Who is this man? This man is a freak of nature,’” Mailata says. He felt he had nothing to lose by attending a three-month training program in Florida, but per the rules of his strict Samoan household, he had to ask his parents for permission. “At first they said no, and I had to respect that,” Mailata says. A couple weeks later, after letting his father win at ping pong—“He had a great night whipping my ass,” Mailata says—he made his case again. This time, his parents relented.
“Everyone's on board now,” Mailata says. “They're all die-hard supporters, waking up at 4 a.m. to watch the game.”
Mailata did well enough at the IPP to warrant his own Pro Day, when personnel from eight or so NFL teams traveled to Florida to scout him out ahead of the 2018 draft. Eagles offensive line coach Jeff Stoutland ran his workout. The day before, Stoutland drew a pass protection technique on a board, and told Mailata to memorize it and demonstrate it to him the next day. Mailata left the room, but before driving away, he stealthily ran back up to the classroom to take a picture of the technique on his phone. He aced his test the following day. “I conned him into thinking I had the memory of a f-cking wizard,” Mailta says. Philadelphia took him in the seventh round.
The adjustment to pro football was difficult. “There's nothing that I brought over from rugby to help me, other than my toughness,” says Mailata, who’s listed at 6’ 8” and 365 pounds. “Nothing translates over. Everything about football is just weird, uncommon, and it's really hard to learn.” The playbook intimidated him. “I was kind of like, f–k, this is bigger than the Bible,” he says. “This is like learning a new religion. What are we doing?” Rugby purists give him grief when he argues that football is a more difficult sport. “My answer is just, ‘Strap it up, put on the pads, put on the helmet, and meet me out there and I'll show you,’” he says.
Veteran Eagles offensive linemen, like now-retired players Jason Kelce and Stefen Wisniewski, helped tutor Mailata on the technicalities. He did not appear in any games his first two seasons, but he filled in for an injured starter in 2020, and won the full-time starting job under new coach Nick Sirianni for the 2021 season. Mailata signed a four-year, $64 million deal that year, and a $66 million extension in 2024. Off the field, he plans to soon launch a foundation to provide academic and career development opportunities for children of Polynesian descent, in both Australia and the United States. In Bankstown, Mailata felt Samoan kids were almost expected to work in factories or hold down other blue-collar jobs. “Why can't we be doctors?” he says. “Why can't we be lawyers? We want to create a foundation that's based on that, where we're helping Polynesian kids achieve their goals and their dreams.”
Between seasons, Mailata has been able to showcase another talent, besides pancaking his opponents: his singing voice. “I knew how to harmonize before I could pass a rugby ball,” he says. Mailata lasted three weeks on the reality TV competition show The Masked Singer in 2022, an opportunity he took at the urging of his wife, Niki Ikahihifo-Bender Mailata. “She’s an attorney, so she has a big-brain mindset of life after football, and growing my resume off the field,” he says. He bridged his love of singing with his pro career when, in 2022, 2023, and 2024, Kelce, Mailata, and fellow Eagles lineman Lane Johnson released a trio of “Philly Special” Christmas albums. They raised over $7 million for local charities.
In April, Mailata and his teammates returned to the Eagles practice complex for strength and conditioning sessions. Eagles fans need not worry about a Super Bowl hangover for Mailata. Since he didn’t grow up dreaming of holding a Lombardi Trophy, he says the enormity of the accomplishment won’t sap his motivation, as it sometimes does for American players. “On the field after we won, I was like, ‘Yeah, OK, that's cool. I'm over it,’” Mailata says. “I want the next one. The next one is more important.”