In 1982, the NFL was changing, although most scribes who covered professional football were years away from recognizing what a young sportswriter already saw. This author, big and beefy and already sporting a glorious red mustache, hailed from Los Angeles and moonlighted as a backup offensive tackle on the BYU football team. He wrote the following sentence, as part of a series of freelance articles for the :
The kid who wrote that sentence stood 6'3", weighed around 230 pounds, accumulated zero college statistics and played only in spring games through three seasons. He majored in physical education. He counted Jim McMahon among his teammates.
This kid, with his notepad and his shoulder pads, his mustache and his pen stash, still wasn’t sure what career he wanted. “Professional athlete” seemed improbable. He found teachers—and their profession—inspiring. His father, Walter, was creative, a designer of movie sets; his mother, Elizabeth, analytical, a doctor with embedded in her soul. And he thought, way back then, that “writing for might be pretty cool.”
He did not yet realize. He saw football like a . . . .
Reminded before this season started of that sentence he wrote nearly 31 years ago, the author chuckles over the phone from Kansas City. Practice had just wrapped up. “I know, I know,” Andy Reid says. “That’s just kinda what it was. I didn’t know [the NFL] was gonna end up where it ended up.”
So brash with the long-ago pen. So buttoned up now, at least in public. That’s the difference between a man in charge of a possible burgeoning sports dynasty with the Chiefs and a kid hunting for a story. But one concept speaks to both worlds, which bump up against each other and sometimes intersect. Perhaps writing about sports projected or even aided Andy Reid, winner of Super Bowls, offensive innovator, Hall of Fame shoo-in. Storytelling likely made him a better coach.
