This West Philly native is an Eagles super fan. A local ex-CEO who moved to Brazil is advising her trip to see them play in São Paulo

Jamila Harris-Morrison, a West Philly native, is one of the Eagles fans following the team to São Paulo, Brazil, for their season-opening NFL game against the Packers, on Friday, Sept. 6.

And she’ll be there for more than the game, touring the metropolis of Latin America’s largest nation with guidance from her travel adviser, Philly native Howard Tucker. Three years ago, Tucker left his workday life as CEO of a South Jersey nonprofit, and moved to his wife’s native Brazil, where he started a travel business. Now he’s using the Eagles game as a chance to show off his adopted country to a few people from back home.

“I grew up in a houseful of Eagles fans,” said Harris-Morrison, executive director of ACHIEVEability, a housing developer and community-services nonprofit. ”My grandmother in particular. She used to get her nails done Eagles green. She wore Eagles high-tops.”

Televised games “were a family gathering time, with Sunday late-night dinner. It was a time to hang out, eat some hot sausages, watch the game, scream, show our pride.”

Harris-Morrison laughed: “The Eagles tortured us over the decades. And that got passed on to me.” The fan status works both ways: the Eagles have honored Harris-Morrison, and contributed to her agency’s anti-gun-violence program. “Last year they named me an NFL Changemaker, and sent me to the Super Bowl.”

Back in 2018 she saw the Eagles beat the Jaguars in London, and marveled at fellow fans “flooding the streets with Kelly green.”

So when the Eagles announced they were heading to São Paulo, she got her friend Lorpu Jones, a financial technology company project manager, to set aside an attachment to the Patriots long enough to join the adventure.

But the trip, the NFL’s first game in South America, offered complications, costs, and translation challenges beyond those of the Eagles’ London game. A colleague suggested reaching out to Tucker, a veteran education consultant, jazz drummer, and past chief executive of Better Tomorrows, a South Jersey housing and services agency.

Tucker had relocated in 2021 with his wife, Cleonice da Fonseca-Tucker, an accountant, dancer, and designer, to the beachfront town of Arembepe in her native Bahia state in northeast Brazil. After training and certifying as a travel adviser with the New York-based Fora Travel agency, Tucker began offering tours to Brazil, Portugal, and the Caribbean. The couple also keeps a residence in Philadelphia.

“He’s helped with everything,” working with the pair to plan the trip, also peppering reports and recommendations with popular Brazilian expressions, Bom Dia! to Tchau!, Harris-Morrison said.

The trip appeals to the travelers on several levels, beyond Eagles fandom and the fact “Brazil is on my bucket list,” Harris-Morrison added: “I’m African American, [Jones] is Liberian, and Brazil is connected to us all, through the African diaspora. There’s a cool African museum in São Paulo, and I’m excited for the music, the happiness, and the culture — welcoming, and casual.”

At Tucker’s suggestion, they are flying in the week before the game, and visiting Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s second largest city, before an hour-long domestic flight to São Paulo. They hope to join a pregame party.

Flying into Rio “will save some dollars on their airfare, and on the hotels,” while “hedging against any flight delays” from September storms in the Caribbean, which separates the U.S. from Brazil, Tucker said.

Fans used to paying maybe $250 for seats for Eagles games at Lincoln Financial Field have found themselves paying more than $1,600 to buy game-day ticket packages from the NFL, or risk using online brokers. “They were persistent in getting those tickets,” through ESPN’s brokerage site, “and thank God they got them,” Tucker said. With the savings compared to the league’s price, they were able to fund the four-day Rio side trip. The NFL says all tickets offered for sale have been quickly purchased.

American Airlines, which serves both airports, added a direct nonstop flight to São Paulo from Philadelphia on Sept. 5, with another returning Sept. 7, to accommodate fans, said spokesperson Gianna Urgo. The direct flights are so expensive — starting at $1,200 a seat, Tucker said — that it drove away another client, a busy lawyer, who priced the two-day trip and said, “No way.”

Tucker, who graduated from Saint Joseph’s Prep in 1982 and Saint Joseph’s University in 1986, worked for 30 years as an education consultant and social services executive before joining Better Tomorrows in 2017. By then, Tucker, with his children grown, was living a kind of double life, according to friends. One called him “the Batman.”

“That’s true: I was like Bruce Wayne, leading nonprofits and doing consulting work during the day, then at night out playing music and reading poetry,” Tucker confirmed over a long lunch of Brazilian meats and stewed fruits and vegetables at Picaha, a restaurant in Center City.

His explorations soon led Tucker to Philadelphia’s Afro-Brazilian scene: “I love to dance.” He met Cleonice at Brazilian dance classes she led at Wissahickon Dance Studio; the couple married in 2016. He developed a radio show featuring Brazilian music, The Sergio Experience (in homage to the late bossa nova leader Sergio Mendes), at community station WPEB 88.1 FM in West Philly. “We had Brazilian musicians playing live in the studio.”

He invited Juliano Braga, an expatriate writer, designer, and musician, onto his radio show, and Braga introduced Tucker to Brazilian creative people in Northeast Philly and in the Portuguese-speaking communities of Riverside, Burlington County, and organized networking events.

Cleonice invited Tucker to visit the pre-Lenten Carnaval parties in Salvador, capital of her native Bahia state, a cultural center of Brazil’s historic Black communities, in the country’s northeast, 1,200 miles from São Paulo. São Paulo is larger than New York; Salvador is nearly as populous as Chicago. Tucker did segments of his radio show from Salvador, “direct from Carnaval.”

In 2021 Tucker left Better Tomorrows, and the couple moved to the beachfront fishing town of Arembepe, a sometime hippy-tourist destination an hour north of Salvador. His wife has a line of clothing; he continues his consulting, and works to build his fledgling travel business; there is time for music and dancing. “Now my worlds are the same,” he said.

He became a certified travel adviser for the Fora agency, and began guiding people he’d met through his largely African American professional networks in Philadelphia to visit Brazil, especially the northeast. Tucker also spent time getting to know the country’s best-known tourist destinations, the international metro regions of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, popular with first-time visitors — and now with Eagles fans, who Tucker hopes will form a nucleus of future Brazil visitors.