My Life and Times

Andy Reid, during this year's N.F.C. title game, helped the Eagles reach the Super Bowl in his sixth season at the helm.

February 4, 2005
Eagles' Reid Is More Than Meets the EyeBy LEE JENKINS
JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Feb. 3 - Somewhere in the middle of all those sweatsuits and stopwatches, all those buzz cuts and bullhorns, is a football coach who writes poems, paints portraits and can restore a classic car.
Philadelphia Coach Andy Reid should be easy to find, even in the crowd of coaches that has descended here for Super Bowl week, because he weighs about 300 pounds and is usually surrounded by colleagues who are laughing at his string of self-deprecating fat jokes. He likes to say that if a chili burger is placed under his nose, he can identify the chain that produced it simply by its scent.
Reid developed his taste for chili burgers growing up off Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles and eating at Original Tommy's World Famous Hamburgers. He honed his subtle comedic timing serving meals backstage at the "Tonight" show. He learned how to use a paintbrush and write in verse from his father, Walter, an artist who created sets for movies, musicals and plays.
But even at 300 pounds, even with chili on his mouth and a personal diary in his hands, Reid is difficult to spot. At Super Bowl media day, Reid sat low in a makeshift throne, gripping both sides of a lectern, scowling at no one in particular and speaking so softly that Terrell Owens, even at some 20 yards away, managed to drown him out.
He made no mention of paintings or poetry, Tommy's Burger or the "Tonight" show. Asked about Los Angeles, he said, "I have a lot of memories." Asked about his other interests, he said, "You have to budget your time and take care of your business." Asked about the journals he keeps, he said, "It's worked good in a couple of cases when you can go back and look at a couple of things as references." Even next to New England Coach Bill Belichick, hardly a standup act, Reid could have put a classroom of kindergartners to sleep.
While most players and coaches use Super Bowl week to enhance their profiles, Reid has shown the world no more than he has already shown Philadelphia, hiding behind his bushy red mustache and his ubiquitous index cards. That this 300-pound poet/painter/tactician can come across as the most boring man in football is exactly what makes him one of the most intriguing.
The 1928 Ford Model A that sits in Reid's garage serves as the symbol for just about every philosophy he has ever had. When Walter died, he left his son the Ford that he had bought for $25 and driven for nearly 50 years. To resuscitate it, Reid needed to formulate an extensive plan requiring time and patience. He had to follow instructions, but he also had to trust his creative instincts. He went about his business quietly but passionately. One year later, he had taken the car completely apart and put it back together again.
"I saw that car before he started and I thought it should be in a junkyard," said Marty Mornhinweg, the Eagles' assistant head coach, who has been with Reid on three coaching staffs. "What he did with it is amazing. I know the perception of Andy is that he is a little stoic. But he's also incredibly worldly. Most people don't know that about him. I think he hides it on purpose."
At Glendale Community College in California, Reid started on the offensive line, but he was best known as the beefiest place-kicker in team history. When he transferred to Brigham Young University, he protected quarterback Jim McMahon. While at B.Y.U., he learned about the Mormon Church, and he later converted.
"He was never your typical jock," said Jim Sartoris, the athletic director at Glendale Community College, who coached Reid on the college's football team. "He was never flamboyant, never said too much. He was just very intellectual and extremely meticulous about every little thing."
For much of his college career, Reid thought more about writing than coaching. He was a part-time sports columnist for The Provo Daily Herald, studied the work of the former Los Angeles Times sports columnist Jim Murray and dreamed of writing for Sports Illustrated. He liked talking about other athletes more than himself. He liked seeing his name in print, but only at the top of articles.
"I know him best as a football junkie who would always beat you to the office in the morning and always stay later than anybody else at night," said Dirk Koetter, the Arizona State head coach, who worked with Reid at three colleges. "But I also know that there are many sides to Andy Reid."
Reid was a coach even if he did not necessarily yearn to be one. He would report to the football offices at B.Y.U. by 4 a.m. and either leave after midnight or sleep on the couch. When instructing offensive linemen, he would tell them to control their "three-foot by three-foot box." He mapped out his schedule every day on index cards and littered the campus with them.
"He was always on the cutting edge, always inventing new techniques, never leaving anything to chance," said Bob Stull, the athletic director at the University of Texas-El Paso, who hired Reid when he was the university's football coach. "The way Andy prepared, he never left a detail uncovered."
When Reid interviewed with Stull, he talked for 45 minutes about how a guard should position his hands while pass blocking. At one point, the other assistants in the room started giggling. When Reid interviewed to become the head coach in Philadelphia, he used a similar tack, explaining to the owner, Jeffrey Lurie, every detail of the art of long snapping. Lurie did not laugh once.
"He has intellectual capital with no ego," Lurie said. "He is comfortable with himself. He's not paranoid or worried about what others think. He's genuine and people follow that."
Lurie hired Reid even though he was just a quarterbacks coach in Green Bay who had the plush assignment of working with Brett Favre and shadowing Mike Holmgren. As the story goes, Holmgren once threw away a binder filled with schedules and diagrams, only to have Reid dig it out of the trash can and copy some of its contents.
At his first news conference in Philadelphia, Reid pleaded with the fan base to "hang with me." He opened his first training camp with what he called "three days of hell." He wrote an agenda for the future, known as The Plan, then made players read it and take detailed notes on how they were going to realize it.
The Eagles started calling their coach "Big Red," joked about his dry pregame speeches and wondered if he could handle such a demanding sports city. When Reid wanted to open up, he wrote in the personal journal that he has kept since he was a teenager. When he wanted to convey his feelings to his family, he wrote poems.
In the Reid house, everyone is expected to create. All five children have to play a musical instrument until they are at least 18. Reid builds cabinets and cupboards, cooks family dinners and still commemorates each birthday or holiday with a poem. When the kids were younger, he went outside while they were sleeping on Christmas Eve and threw pebbles on the roof to make them think reindeer were coming.
"He laughs all the time," his wife, Tammy, told The Philadelphia Inquirer this season. "But this is a business and he has to keep it a business at work. I always say, 'If he'd cut loose, oh my gosh, these people would die.' "
If Reid does have a lighter side, he has not felt the luxury to show it. He went 5-11 his first season with the Eagles and no worse than 11-5 in his next five, but he never made the Super Bowl until this season. When he came to Jacksonville this week, it seemed like an overdue opportunity to open that journal and share some pieces of his past. But Reid has apparently found The Plan that works for him, and it is doubtful he will ever deviate.
Players rarely give Reid an impassioned endorsement, but they do hail his honesty, respect his conviction, and say that he has scored a few cool points recently. Tight end L. J. Smith said of his coach, "I haven't even got yelled at this year." Linebacker Jeremiah Trotter said, "I've looked at him in a whole new light." And receiver Freddie Mitchell said, "He's actually pretty chill."
There may be no two people in the N.F.L. more different than Reid and Owens, but this season, Reid promised to appear in Spandex tights if Owens caught 15 touchdown passes. When Owens fractured his right fibula on Dec. 19, still stuck on 14 touchdowns, Reid and his thighs seemed safe. But this week, Owens said he would play in the Super Bowl and mentioned that he had packed a postgame outfit for Reid.
"Believe me, I brought those tights," Owens said. "A black pair and a white pair."
That's about as much as any coach can be expected to reveal of himself.
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