Jahan Waltè Dotson was born on March 22, 2000 in a Newark, New Jersey hospital so overcrowded that his mother Robin had to give birth to him in an examining room.
There isn’t much about the blur of that day Robin really remembers. Although she remembers the pain — that’s hard to forget. But everything else just mixes together in a sea of emotions, of worries and hopes, of excitement and exhaustion. What will this boy become? What will make him happy? What will make him sad? What is his story?
His name is a nod to both of his grandfathers. John on his father’s side and Walter on his mother’s. He will one day become his own man, but for now he is a testament to the ones who came before him.
Back in the examining room it felt as though everyone held Jahan before Robin, but then there he was, her second son, a passenger of the past nine months put out into the world to breathe and live and exist on his own.
And that’s where his story begins.
Nearly 21 years later, Jahan Dotson is talking to himself as he paces around Penn State’s weight room, the sounds of music shaking the air, his teammates just as loud. It’s max-out day. It’s time to put up or shut up. It’s time to find your limits, time to dig just a little bit deeper.
Simply put, it’s time to lift some weights. There’s no scheme here, no complex football jargon or concepts to understand. It’s just you and your body.
In this particular moment Dotson is coming up short, and he’s angry.
The reason: the existential anxiety that comes packed within the next year of Dotson’s life. He has journeyed so far. His parents have given up so much; he has given up so much. Sacrifice is how you get to where Dotson wants to go, and he knows what that truly means.
But what happens if he fails? College football is full of players who want to play in the NFL, and a fair number of them have the ability to do so but may find it simply wasn’t in the cards. It may not even be their own fault – it just might not work out.
So everything matters now: every lift, every catch, every rep, every practice, every film session, every little moment of paying attention to the details.
But Dotson isn’t about sneaking through that door. He wants to blow through it. There will be no leaving things to chance, no hoping that everything was enough.
The weight lying on the floor is real, but there is another weight inside of Dotson, resting in the back of his mind as he paces around the room. It’s the weight of all the sacrifices his parents made, all the support he has gotten from them over the years. All the things they did for their son, born into a loud and crazy world.
Because in truth, we can all find a way to live with our own failures. It’s letting people down, letting down people who care and help and try and worry and sacrifice alongside us, that keeps everyone up at night. We can’t come up short for them.
“I was thinking about all the things that people have done for me and like in that moment how I don’t want to let them down,” Dotson said later in reflection. “That just kind of fuels me to go harder every day and to work even harder to get 1% better every single day.”
So he walks up to that weight again, and lifts it.
The list of sacrifices made by Jahan’s parents is a long one, albeit not all that dissimilar to the sacrifices made by parents for children in all walks of life, let alone sports. There are the trips back and forth to practices and games, a three-hour commute for work in New Jersey from their home in Pennsylvania. There are the football camps and trips to different workout locations. It’s a lot, but it’s worth it.
Oh, and there’s that seven-day road trip around the country — crammed inside a 2016 white Volkswagen Jetta — all for the sake of seeing colleges in person.
“It was cramped,” Al Dotson, Jahan’s father, said with a laugh over the phone. “And we drove and drove. We went to Alabama, Clemson, Ohio and Michigan…”
Dotson would settle on UCLA, and then — because these things are never simple — end up signing with Penn State later on down the line. By this point Jahan’s entire family has long established this is for real, that the dream of playing football as a career isn’t just some childhood fancy which has yet to end.
Of course ever since Jahan won camp MVP in eighth grade, things started to feel a bit like their son was different. That’s when things started to change, and when a life of football went from that casual boyish enthusiasm to something that started to become feasible.
Like any worthwhile journey there are bumps in the road, or at least exercises in patience along the way. In 2018, his freshman season, things are fine but Jahan is forced to wait, making just 13 receptions during his first year on campus. Dotson knows his time will come, and that time might be soon, but there’s still an antsy feeling in the waiting.
And then it happens: his mother, the rock of his world, is diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a type of cancer that, among other things, impacts bone marrow. Everything stops. The world just freezes in this moment that seems to last forever — the blood rushing out of your face, your stomach dropping into an endless pit.
“When I first got told that my mom was being taken to the hospital…” Dotson says as he finds the words. “That was huge because my mom is the one person in my life who’s always been there. Like literally since I was born she’s always been there and supported me.”
Life was harder after that moment. When Dotson scored two touchdowns against Buffalo his sophomore season, the first of his career, she wasn’t there to see it happen. Instead he had to call her afterwards to celebrate from the hospital. They were happy but it wasn’t quite the same, and in the middle of all that happiness there is still that reminder that things aren’t OK. Not just yet, even as Robin reminded him as she wore his jersey in the hospital bed, that it was going to be OK.
And no matter how much he told himself it would be OK, no matter how much the doctors told him it was going to be OK, something changed, something that would never change back.
“You think of that person as invincible or that nothing can ever really happen to them,” Dotson said. “And when it happens it’s just a culture shock — everyone’s human.”
“I still to this day think my mom’s invincible,” he adds with a laugh. “She can make it through anything.”
Robin is healthy now — as healthy as she can be — and that in and of itself gives Jahan some peace. If you remember the bad moments, those scary moments that etch into your mind so vividly that they feel like yesterday, you can remember the other moments when the joy washed over you. Those moments when you can finally breathe again.
“When we were told that the cancer was removed it was a huge exhale for me,” Dotson said. “Just because I know she persevered through it. She works so hard just to get back to where she was and she finally overcame. She’s helped me overcome so many battles in life, and just to be there for her and see her overcome one of her own, it was huge for me.”
Now the trio faces a different kind of battle: finishing the journey they started all those years ago. Jahan is right there, if healthy and otherwise capable, Jahan Waltè Dotson will be playing on an NFL team in just over a year. Life will never be the same. Time will tell what round he goes in or where he ends up or what obstacles he will have to overcome in the league, but they can see the finish line. In the very least, it’s a checkpoint a lifetime in the making.
There is something remarkable about this moment in a player’s career. Years and years have led up to a few games, a few catches, a few split-second decisions. Jahan Dotson might be one of the best receivers in America this season, and that will be fun to watch and Penn State will be a better team for it. That said, what fans will truly be watching is someone turning blood, sweat and tears into a reality. College football is the intersection between all those dreams and the realities they do or do not become.
And when it works out, when everything comes together, there’s nothing like it.
“Breathtaking,” Al Dotson said. “Because, you know, he worked so hard. There were so many obstacles to get to that. He’s such such a humble kid. There was a lot to get to here.”
“Patience,” Robin chimes in.
“Yeah. A lot of patience.”
Jahan himself, he says he tries not to think about it, that you can’t get caught up in what you’ve almost done and miss the final steps of completing the task. But he knows. Maybe it hasn’t hit him yet, but suddenly he has a chance to do what he has always wanted to do. And he knows it. That’s empowering, and how you go from being one of the best to becoming the best.
There are still tough days, like just a few months ago this January, the last time he got to hug his mom, or a few weeks ago when the weight was too heavy the first time around. There are going to be good days and bad days, but they’re all headed toward something.
“I’ve been literally writing it in my notebook every single day when I take notes. At the top I just put ‘Be legendary,’” Dotson said.
There’s something fitting to this, a quiet boy born into a loud world, looking to go out making as much noise as possible.
