Jordan Mailata is ‘massive’ in Australia now. (In Philly, too.)

PHOENIX — Was this a story? Was he being worked by an agent? Peter Badel, a veteran rugby reporter for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in Australia, remembers the phone call he got back in 2018.

“Hey, I’ve got a great story,” the agent, Chris Orr, told him. “We’ve got this big kid, Jordan Mailata. Have you ever heard of him?”

No, Badel had not. Mailata was a rugby player, but no rugby star, getting spot minutes on the South Sydney Rabbitohs youth team in a second-tier league, doing demolition work in the morning to pay bills.

“Mate, he’s a monster,” the agent said. “He’s 203 centimeters and 158 kilos …”

Almost 6-foot-7 and 348 pounds, to you and me.

“He’s too big for Rugby League,” Orr continued. “So we’re going to try to put him in the NFL.”

“Who is this bloke?” Badel said. “As if he’s going to make the NFL. Like, no way.”

Badel wrote the story, though. A tall tale of a different sort. In the Jan. 14 issue of the Brisbane Courier Mail: “Rugby league: South Sydney Rabbitohs rookie Jordan Mailata chases NFL contract.”

Yes, time for a follow-up. The same reporter was there Monday evening in the Arizona desert, standing to Mailata’s left at the first Super Bowl media availability.

Are most Australians aware of Mailata now?

“Massively,” Badel said. “He’s a huge name. I just had all my editors at the paper all on the TV watching the interviews, a live feed back to Australia. Jordan’s been back page news the last few days. He’s huge in Australia.”

Learning this new sport … a cool little story. Starting at left tackle … hey, nice. Starting in the Super Bowl … massive. TV crews are here from Down Under, too.

I’d told Mailata’s Australian story once myself in 2018. My daughter was getting her master’s degree that year from the University of Sydney. Would be cool to be there. Maybe the paper could help pay for the trip. The Sixers had a famous Australian player. (Whatever happened to Ben Simmons anyway?) And the Eagles had this rookie they’d just drafted who was creating a buzz, picking up the sport from scratch.

I went to the Eagles locker room, told Mailata where I was headed. Jordan was on board, said he’d put me in touch with his older brother. We’d talk when I got back.

» READ MORE: Jordan Mailata's Australian roots

“A lot of [stuff] happened — he’ll tell you about it,” Mailata said.

A few weeks later, I was sitting in Moana Mailata’s living room in Sydney, listening to all the [stuff] that had happened.

“I don’t know how to begin the story,’’ Mo Mailata said. “It is insane to think how far he has come.”

Both brothers explained how the whole family had been against Jordan’s trying this new sport, that he was so close to making it to the top division of rugby, how without his parents’ approval, Jordan was not going to make the move. The family didn’t trust this agent, thinking he was using Jordan to try to make inroads into the NFL.

At the time, Mo Mailata said, NFL, as they called it, was a game they played on PlayStation, with little understanding of the rules.

“Nothing but Hail Marys,” Mo said of the play calls he and Jordan and the others would repeatedly go for. “First down, Hail Mary! Second down, Hail Mary!”

Eagles fans know the basics of the story. It just bears repeating because picking up this kind of sport from scratch is historically significant. (And that agent? How spot-on was he?)

A close friend, Beau Cordtz, recalled Mailata’s calling him one night after the big family NFL discussion. Jordan was emotional, explaining how nobody wanted him to go try this three-month developmental program in Florida.

Beau gave his own advice: “You should go, mate. Drop everything. For this one moment, be selfish.”

Eventually, his parents agreed. They will be at Sunday’s Super Bowl. Does it ever scare Mailata how close all this came to never happening?

“I don’t think about that stuff anymore,” Mailata said this week. “Just kind of be where my feet are at. It helps a lot staying true to my process.”

» READ MORE: Jordan Mailata’s parents have traveled nearly 10,000 miles to see him play in the NFL

He does call all this “a very surreal feeling — it hasn’t really hit me that I’m playing in the Super Bowl. I’m just answering questions right now.”

The path, though, is cinematic. His first playbook …

“I thought it was an instruction manual to build a spaceship,” Mailata said. “All the diagrams, all the lines. What is this?”

Mailata can build a comedy routine around it now. Not as funny five years ago.

“I burned myself out my rookie year learning the playbook, because I’d go home, I’d sit in the hotel room for hours, ‘OK, what did Coach say today? X means this, Y means that. The two circles on this side means a ‘two’ formation, the three circles … the three by one. I burned myself out.”

New plan: Once Mailata got back to his hotel, he’d tell himself, “No more football. … I learned to separate work and my time off. When you have your time off, you need to learn to respect that. It was a big learning curve for me.”

He’s talked extensively about how lucky he got to learn from Eagles offensive line coach Jeff Stoutland. Saying he was from the University of Jeff Stoutland on national TV started as a joke, Mailata said, but it’s become a thing. His feet are off a couple of inches, he hears it from Stout. Learning from Jason Peters, and Jason Kelce and Lane Johnson — more great fortune.

“Jason Kelce is the epitome of a leader,” Mailata said Monday, nothing new from him. He pulled out his phone. “I’ve got him as my screensaver. That’s how big an inspiration he is. … Walks the walk, talks the talk, man.”

It’s turned out that Mailata fits in with this group. The fortune swings the other way, too. Kelce and Johnson didn’t include the kid in that Christmas album that went viral just because of Mailata’s sweet singing voice. They like having him around.

» READ MORE: The Eagles thought their Christmas album would fund a toy drive. It ended up doing much more.

“Dip your toe in the water, drown in it, learn how to swim,” Mailata said when asked by a reporter from the MIddle East about starting a sport from scratch. “Don’t be afraid.”

He repeated all that later for another reporter.

“I came up with that,” Mailata said, laughing. “You guys can Google that, you won’t find it, because I came up with it.”

Left tackle in the Super Bowl, protecting Jalen Hurts, keeping that simple, too.

“I don’t want to get my QB hurt and I don’t want to see him dirtier than I am,” Mailata said. “Those are my two goals.”

Of those days working on the morning demolition crew, they come along for the ride, too.

“Taught me grit,” Mailata said. “Kept chugging until something popped up. Something popped up!”

He’d had two heart ablations, too, age 17, to burn out the “extra pocket in my heart,” Mailata said in the 2018 interview, explaining that he was fully medically cleared. “It was causing me to have palpitations and I had no idea. I thought it was just me and my big body being unfit, being unaccustomed to the running style of rugby.”

A lot of stuff happened, so many hurdles. Now, this man, still just 25 years old, talks of being an evangelist of sorts for his sport in his native country.

“We’ve got some big boppers down there,” Mailata said. “We can train them and teach them some things. We’ve got to educate the folks Down Under on just the pads and helmet. I had that stigma where I was like, there’s no way football is tougher than rugby. Because we don’t wear pads. I was sorely mistaken. The nuances of it, I think we can get Australia on board.”

He’s not ready to start the University of Jordan Mailata Down Under just yet. Big in Australia? Bigger in Philly.

“It’s only just begun,” Mailata said the other day. “Still writing the story. Just trying to do my best every day. Whatever happens happens. Hopefully, I can walk away from the sport and leave a legacy that I’m proud of, something that will stay in America forever.”