When Jerry Rice was at the peak of his NFL career, he became the face of Breathe Right nasal strips and created the “Air Jerry” Breathe Right ad. And now that his son, Brenden Rice, is looking to make a name in the football world, he is working with Breathe Right and recreating the iconic photo. PopCulture.com spoke to Brenden Rice about the new ad and why he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps.ย
“Just seeing that legacy passed on, I’m a big man of legacy, and just continuing to thrive within the Rice legacy and just having that Breathe Right’s passed down from one generation to another, it’s a huge impact on me,” Rice told PopCulture. “Just to go ahead and share my experiences about nasal congestion and how it helps improve my game is huge.”
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Rice, a wide receiver at the University of Southern California, also talked about seeing the photo of his father for the first time, which was when he was 8 years old. “Just seeing that being brought up as we were doing the campaign was like, ‘Whoa,’” Rice said. “It was huge nostalgia and just going ahead and watching how it progressed throughout generations. I was like, ‘Yes, I want to go ahead and take this on. I want to go ahead and be a part of this big brand and go ahead and move it into my game.’”
Along with Rice recreating the photo, he appears in a couple of videos with Jerry to promote Breathe Right. One of the videos shows Jerry quizzing his son about his career. Rice answered most of the questions right and was shocked to learn some stats about his father, including him playing 303 games, the ninth-most in NFL history.ย
As Rice gets ready to make the jump to the NFL, he goes to his three-time Super Bowl champion and Pro Football Hall of Famer father for advice. “I go to him about a lot of stuff. I send him all my one-on-one tapes,” Rice said. “We go over blocking and the fundamentals of the game. He tells me a lot of times I’m too high on my routes, and then I started to fit a little lower, run a little lower, be a little more dominant within my game of football. One thing that we go at each other a lot is for how I’m faster than him 40 time-wise, but he was always talking about how he never got caught from behind, though.”
