Engram’s stages of maturation off field & on led him to Big Blue
Evan Engram’s life took a turn toward the NFL in, of all places, a Walmart parking lot. The future Giants tight end, then a junior at Hillgrove High School in Georgia, had strayed a little from the path that would lead him to becoming a firstround pick years later. He had fallen in with the wrong crowd, was partying and lying to his parents. Nothing crazy, Engram said, but it was detrimental to him reaching his goals. And so after church one day Engram and his mother, Michelle Zelina, went to run errands and she decided to have a heart-to-heart with her son. It turned out to be pivotal.
“I told him, ‘Dude, you can do this.’ You have that dream. But you’re going in the wrong direction,” Zelina said she told him.
There had been plenty of talk and arguments before, but this time, her advice resonated.
“That conversation with my mom in that parking lot is something I’ll never forget and really a turning point for everything,” Engram told the Daily News in a phone interview.
Engram’s sister, Mackenzie, was in a similar boat and she said the discipline levied by both of their parents — threatening to hold them both out of athletic practices and games — also each made them realize how much they both had to lose.
Engram said that talk with his mother outside of Walmart helped set his priorities straight and reinvigorated his faith, too. It ended up being one of a series of events that aided the tight end in his maturation as he worked toward his dream to play pro football. At the time, though, Engram wasn’t exactly seen as a budding superstar.
Though he’d always been a natural athlete — he even proclaimed in his swimming days that he would be the next Michael Phelps — it was actually Mackenzie who received the most attention in the family for her athletic prowess. So talented at basketball was Engram’s sister, in fact, that she received an offer from Ohio State when she was in just eighth grade.
“He’s always been like in her shadow,” Zelina said. “I don’t know if he was just kind of jealous — it’s that sibling rivalry thing — and then it started to turn.” Mackenzie added she knew it was “hard” on her brother when she was the first one to be recruited — especially by the Buckeyes, who the family rooted for.
For most of high school, Engram wasn’t even the focal point of his own football team’s offense. That honor went to running back Kenyan Drake, who went on to play for Alabama and the Dolphins, in Hillgrove’s Wing-T offense. As a tight end in a running scheme, it was hard for Engram — a speedy receiving option who is now a hybrid tight end/wide receiver — to get noticed.
So his talent was hidden, and he had to work to get schools interested in him. He went to camps, trying to catch a team’s eye. Eventually, he did.
“It’s almost embarrassing for me to tell you exactly how it happened, but he was just not recruited,” Ole Miss head coach Hugh Freeze said. “Sometimes we coaches foolishly buy into that.”
“He came to our elite camp and totally dominated the camp. I almost messed this whole thing up because I knew what my eyes saw, but at the same time I was wondering why no one was really on this kid,” Freeze continued.
The camp was right before Engram’s senior season, and when it ended, the tight end thought he was going to get the offer from Ole Miss he coveted. But he didn’t. Instead, he left in tears.
Freeze said over the next two days, his assistants pushed him to make an offer to the kid from Powder Springs, Ga., who had impressed them all. Finally, Freeze did, and Engram became a Rebel.
He immediately burst on the scene in Oxford, becoming a starter right away as a freshman. But even in the midst of his starting role, Engram said he, to a degree, lost focus on football.
“I would see guys miss practice or I would see guys get hurt and get to sit out for a day. And I would be, like, jealous,” Engram said. “I would just want a day off, just because I was in like a little slump. I was just tired. The practices sucked.”
But that all changed in October of his freshman season against LSU, when he suffered a ligament injury in his ankle, requiring surgery and knocking him out for the rest of the regular season.
“Once that play happened and I was done for the year, that just put everything in perspective,” Engram said. “From that day on I literally enjoyed every single practice. I didn’t take one snap for granted.”
Also in his freshman year, Engram ended up meeting someone who had a profound impact on his life. Members of a sorority on campus were having lunch with Chance Tetrick, a young Rebels fan who was suffering from leukemia, and asked Engram to come over and meet him.
The two struck up a friendship and Engram — as well as Engram’s family — became close with the Tetricks. Engram and his family visited Tetrick in the hospital in New York in summer of 2014, as the 11-year-old’s condition became worse.
“He was going through so much and he was just so smart and he had like no care in the world. That mentality, and how strong he was for his family... puts a lot of stuff into perspective,” Engram said. Tetrick died soon after, on Aug. 4, 2014. “I think that really opened Evan’s eyes to how fragile life really is,” said Zelina, who is a nurse.
Engram and his family remain close with the Tetricks. Just by coincidence, Mackenzie woke up Thursday — the day Engram was drafted — wearing the T-shirts made up
GETTY & COURTESY OF MICHELLE ZELINA for Tetrick when the family made the trip to New York.
Back on the football field during his early years at Ole Miss, Engram didn’t put up the numbers he would later in his career but did quickly become a key cog for the Rebel squad that had a fair amount of success while he was there. During his sophomore season, Engram and the Rebels beat Alabama in Oxford, and the students brought down the goal posts.
There was something of a “black market” for pieces of the goal post later, Engram said, and he knew his mother wanted one badly. The tight end secured a piece of the goal post from the game and gifted it to her for Christmas that year. She still has it displayed in her home.
After being a solid contributor for three years, Engram faced a tough decision after his junior year: whether to declare for the NFL Draft or remain at Ole Miss. He chose the latter, and it could not have paid off more. He’d caught 38 passes as a junior but that number jumped to 65 in 2016. He finished his senior season with 926 receiving yards and eight touchdowns, and went on to wow the Giants when he ran a 4.42 40-yard dash at the NFL Scouting Combine. Two months later, Big Blue — in need of weapons for Eli Manning and an offense that dragged last year — selected Engram with the 23rd overall pick.
“I just re-texted him the text I sent him... (saying) the decision of staying your senior year, will be one of the best decisions of your life,” Zelina said. “He had the perfect season.” @SethWalderNYDN