Super Bowl 2024: Andy Reid, the NFL coach everyone loves and suffers internally from his sons’ two tragedies

The 2024 Super Bowl will be played in Las Vegas, Sin City. And a Mormon is the coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, favorite of a hotly contested game against the San Francisco 49ers. He is the reigning champion, has Patrick Mahomes, the Messi of the championship, and is aiming for his third ring in five years. But behind that man with the Ned Flanders mustache there is a life marked by improvement, sacrifices, defeats and conquests but also by the worst anguish.

Andrew Walter Reid was born on March 19, 1958 in Los Angeles, California, and at 65 years old he defies the trend these days of hiring younger coaches. In the farewell season of Bill Belichick (71 years old) and Pete Carroll (72) (to which one might add the retirement of Nick Saban, 72 years old, college football legend), the old “Big Red” became the coach oldest in the NFL. Many already place him among the best of all time, others wonder if he is close to closing the shutters and saying goodbye, everyone respects his role in these Chiefs who aim for everything.

His childhood near Hollywood marked his path: his father Walter was a set designer for cinema, theater and television, and from him he inherited creativity, energy and the art of improvisation; From his mother Elisabetta, a doctor in radiology, he inherits the passion for numbers and planning. Together with his brother Reggie he had a happy upbringing, even if from a very young age he had to deal with being overweight, eating “five double cheeseburgers a day”, as he himself confessed, making that food a nickname and a wink that accompanies him. until these days.

At the age of 13, he participated in a talent contest during halftime of a Los Angeles Rams game, which was broadcast nationwide on the still current Monday Night Football: he was 6 feet 8 inches tall and weighed almost 100 pounds, and since there were no children’s t-shirts that fit, the organizers brought them the Sweater From Les Josephson, starting runner for the home team. The footage of that evening is one of the many pearls of the NFL archive.

During his adolescence he distinguished himself as an athlete at John Marshall High School playing basketball, baseball, track and field and American football. His goal was to play at the University of Southern California, but since he did not receive a scholarship offer, they advised him to take an earlier step through the Glendale community. There he was a champion and was able to attract the attention of USC, who wanted to add him to their ranks, but a knee injury in the last game of the season prevented him from fulfilling his dream.

The alternative was to go to study in Utah, where he played little but discovered the two passions that would shape the rest of his life: the Mormon religion and coaching teams. In the homeland of the Yankees, where 70% of its inhabitants practice this cult, Reid shared the locker room with players and coaches who encouraged him to grow as a coach.

He wanted to become a doctor and sports writer, meanwhile he met his future wife, Tammy Reid, during a tennis lesson. It was his father who introduced him to Mormonism. They married in 1981 and had five children: each of them was born in a different state in the United States, while Reid’s career moved from team to team and progressed in status. And in requests.

“Every day is a special day, that’s why I call her my girlfriend. You never lose interest if they do, right guys? Call them your friends and always do special things for them,” advises the elder Reid, who has been by Tammy’s side for 44 years. “She’s the head coach’s coach,” he introduced her recently in a Zoom broadcast from his living room for a religious congregation. “Destiny, hope and football” was the title of the one-hour seminar that the couple began praying with their eyes closed.

His beginnings in banking were complicated by economic issues. At San Francisco State the salary was so low that to support his family he worked by day selling hot dogs and made a few extra dollars by night by umpiring. They were poor but it was the price he was willing to pay to continue developing the career he was passionate about.

The job that catapulted him as an assistant was in northern Arizona, and he got it through courage. He heard that a coach who had an opening on his team was flying to Sacramento and decided to drive two hours to meet him at the airport. “Coach, I want that job,” he told him. And he conquered it.

He made his NFL debut as an assistant for the Green Bay Packers, in the glorious nineties, under the wing of Mike Holmgren, when he was part of one of the most prestigious coaching staffs in the sport’s memory, a dream team with Jon Gruden. , Steve Mariucci, Ray Rhodes and Dick Jauron, all future coaches with more than 500 combined victories. In 1992 they received and molded quarterback Brett Favre, and in 1995 they won the Super Bowl after beating the Patriots.

While all this was happening, Reid left home at 4 a.m. in freezing Wisconsin, worked in his office, and returned home to drop his kids off at school — a routine he stuck to for more than a decade.

In 1999, at his interview with the Philadelphia Eagles for his first time as head coach, he arrived with a five-inch-thick book explaining how he would run the team. They hired him, he changed quarterbacks midway through his first season, and his instincts allowed the hot green franchise to win its first postseason game since 1995. It was the beginning of a 13-season run in which they won 6 division titles and reached Super Bowl XXXIX, where he failed against Tom Brady’s Patriots.

The rings would come later, with the Kansas City Chiefs, and when he was already enjoying being a grandfather (today he has 12 grandchildren), despite the blows to his soul. In 2013 he joined the team and since 2016 he has been leader of his division and absolute dominator of the American Conference, with three Super Bowls played and two won: on Sunday he goes to the fourth. It would be the perfect ending to a season in which he went from less to more, reinvented himself on the fly and became relentless in peak moments, the playoffs, his hallmark: from 2019 to today he has a record of 13 wins and 2 losses in the postseason.

Furthermore, it would be the ideal ending for the great soap opera of the year, the love story between the other star, Travis Kelcewith the singer Taylor Swift. If Reid missed something, it was knowing Taylor long before she became a music star: the artist’s father was an American football player from Philadelphia and had contact with the former Eagles coach, so I remembered Andy as a child. A couple of weeks ago, after winning the conference title, the coach and the most famous woman on the planet went long distance.

Reid, a family “in crisis” and the greatest pain

“It takes a lot of courage to move forward after what that man suffered,” says a CBS anchor while a camera shows the smiling face of Andy Reid, before the fourth Super Bowl that the franchise founded in 1959 by Lamar will play. Hunt, one of the pioneers of professional sports in the United States.

This big smiling boy who shines today in the Nevada sun and who recently became a meme for his frozen mustache in the middle of the Kansas game, is also a man who the general sports public in the United States has linked to tragedies. The eldest son died of an overdose and another, also a drug addict, was responsible for an accident that left a 5-year-old girl in a coma and she landed in prison.

It all started in Philadelphia, more precisely in 2007, when the coach began to be present in the police pages of the NFL. A judge described Reid’s home, where brothers Garrett and Britt, aged 22 and 24, lived with their parents as a “drug empire”. A police search had turned up numerous pills and illegal medical prescriptions for the purchase of painkillers and painkillers, a habit the young people had acquired in childhood. soccer schoolboy.

Britt was the most complicated, because in addition to consuming he also acted as reseller in his neighborhood, and a court sentenced him to 23 months in prison. In the same year he had argued in the street with another person and threatened him with an unregistered weapon; It was later discovered that he was using heroin. “It’s a family in crisis,” concluded the judge who sent him behind bars, also underlining the effort Andy and Tammy were making to save their children. The worst was yet to come.

Coach Reid addressed the criticism that began to define him as an absentee father with a specific decision: he brought his sons to work for the Eagles, as assistants in different areas of the team.

In August 2012, Pennsylvania police found Garrett’s lifeless body surrounded by syringes in his room at the team’s training camp. The doctor tried to resuscitate him with a defibrillator but without success, the 28-year-old had already died. Days later, an autopsy confirmed that he had been the victim of a heroin overdose.

“It’s a sad situation, my son has been fighting for several years, our whole family is fighting,” Reid said on his return to training, following a funeral attended by more than 900 people. stop loving your child. That’s not what you do. You love him and many families face this type of thing”, he expressed in a conference in which he defined himself as a “humble man”, who was forced to thank all the support and affection he received, because it was what his son would have wanted .

Britt had already been released from prison and what had happened with his brother was much more than a wake-up call, it was also pain, loneliness and guilt. He married, had three children and remained strong working under his father’s wing, already in the winning phase of Kansas City. And together they made it to Super Bowl LV, in 2021, in what appeared to be a recovery story that only needed Garrett’s presence to make it perfect.

However, three days before the big game against the Bucs in Tampa, Britt drove drunk and caused a car crash near the Chiefs’ practice complex, crashing his truck at 85 mph into a waiting woman’s car. at a traffic light with her two children in the back seat. April, then 5, spent 10 days in a coma and was left with limited mobility. The leaders took care of all hospitalization and hospitalization expenses. Britt once again had to pay in court: in September 2022 he was sentenced to 3 years in prison, which seemed little to everyone, especially to his mother, who was expecting seven.

“My prayers and thoughts go out to everyone involved,” Coach Reid said in his first appearance, several days after the bitter Super Bowl that crowned Tom Brady for the last time. “Due to the legal situation I can’t speak, but as a human matter, my heart goes out to all the people who are going through this,” added a defeated Reid, who found refuge in his family and the two big engines that they transported it. through life. : God and American football.