The 2024 Super Bowl is being played in Las Vegas, Sin City.
And a Mormon is the coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, the favorite of a very close game against the San Francisco 49ers.
He is the current champion, he has Patrick Mahomes, the Messi of the league, and he is going for his third ring in five years.
But behind that man with a Ned Flanders mustache there is a life marked by improvement, sacrifices, defeats and achievements but also by the worst anguish.
Andrew Walter Reid was born on March 19, 1958 in Los Angeles, California, and at 65 years of age he defies the trend of these times, which aims to hire younger coaches.
In the season of the goodbye of Bill Belichick (71 years old) and Pete Carroll (72) (the retirement of Nick Saban, 72, college football legend could be added), the old "Big Red" became the head coach oldest in the NFL.
Many already put him among the best of all time, others wonder if he is close to closing the blinds and saying goodbye, everyone respects his role in these Chiefs who go for everything.
His childhood near Hollywood marked his path: his father Walter was a set designer for film, theater and television, and from him he inherited his creativity, his energy and the art of improvisation;
From his mother Elizabeth, a doctor in radiology, he adopted a passion for numbers and planning.
Together with his brother Reggie he had a happy upbringing, although from a very young age he had to deal with being overweight, eating "five double cheeseburgers a day", as he himself confessed, turning that food into a nickname and wink that accompanies him until these days.
At the age of 13, he participated in a talent competition at halftime of a Los Angeles Rams game, televised throughout the country on the still current Monday Night Football: he was 1.88 meters tall and weighed almost 100 kilos, and as There was no children's shirt that would fit him, the organizers gave him the
jersey
of
Les Josephson
, the home team's starting runner.
The film record of that night is one of the many pearls of the NFL archive.
50 years ago today, Andy Reid was a head and shoulders above the rest of his punt, pass, and kick competition đ@Chiefs pic.twitter.com/Yi992ibZ4O
â NFL Films (@NFLFilms) December 13, 2021
During his adolescence he stood out 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 the offer of a scholarship, they advised him to take a previous step through the Glendale Community.
There he was a champion and was able to attract the attention of USC, which wanted to add him to their ranks, but a knee injury, in the last game of the season, deprived him of fulfilling his dream.
The alternative was to go to study in Utah, where he played little but discovered the two passions that would mark the rest of his life: the Mormon religion and coaching teams.
In the Yankee homeland where 70 percent of its inhabitants practice that cult, Reid shared the locker room with players and coaches who encouraged him to develop as a coach.
He wanted to be a doctor and sports writer, in between he met his future wife, Tammy Reid, in a tennis class.
It was her father who introduced him to her Mormonism.
They married in 1981 and had five children: each of them born in a different US state, while Reid's career moved from team to team and advanced in status.
And in demands.
âEvery day is a special day, that's why I call her my girlfriend.
You never lose interest if they do that, right, guys?
Call them your girlfriends and always do special things for them,â advises old Reid, who has been by Tammy's side for 44 years.
"She is the head coach's head coach," he recently introduced her in a Zoom broadcast they did from the living room of her house for a religious congregation.
"Destiny, hope and football," was the name of the one-hour seminar that the couple began by praying, with their eyes closed.
His beginnings in banking were complicated in economic matters.
At San Francisco State his salary was so low that to support his family he worked selling hot dogs during the day and at night he earned a few extra dollars by officiating as a referee.
They were poor but it was the price he was willing to pay to continue developing in the career that he was passionate about.
The job that catapulted him as an assistant was at Northern Arizona, and he got it thanks to courage.
He learned that a coach who had an opening on his team was flying to Sacramento, and he decided to drive two hours to meet him at the airport.
"Coach, I want that job," he told her.
And he conquered it.
He broke into the NFL 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 memory of this sport, a dream team with Jon Gruden, Steve Mariucci, Ray Rhodes and Dick Jauron, all future head coaches with more than 500 victories combined.
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 in the morning in freezing Wisconsin, worked in his office and returned home to take his children to school: it was a routine he respected for more than ten years.
In 1999, to his interview with the Philadelphia Eagles for his first time as head coach, he arrived with a five-inch-thick book in which he explained how he would manage the team.
They hired him, he changed quarterbacks halfway through his first season, and his instincts allowed the passionate green franchise to win its first postseason game since 1995. It was the beginning of a 13-season cycle in which he won 6 division titles and He 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 the leader of his division and absolute dominator of the American Conference, with three Super Bowls played and two won: on Sunday he is going for his fourth.
It would be the perfect closing for a season in which he went from less to more, reinvented himself on the fly and became relentless in the peak moments, the playoffs, his hallmark: from 2019 to now he has a record of 13 wins and 2 losses in postseason.
In addition, it would be the ideal ending to the great soap opera of the year, the romance between its other star player,
Travis Kelce
, with the singer
Taylor Swift
.
If Reid was missing something, it was knowing Taylor long before she became a music star: the artist's father was an American football player in Philadelphia and had contact with the former Eagles coach, so Andy I remembered her as a child.
A couple of weeks ago, after winning the conference title, the coach and the most famous woman on the planet pointed at each other from a 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 presenter while a camera shows the smiling face of Andy Reid, in advance of 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 guy who today shines under the Nevada sun and was recently a meme for his frozen mustache in the middle of the Kansas game, is also a man whom the great sports public in the United States has linked to tragedies.
His eldest son died of an overdose, and another, also an addict, was responsible for an accident that left a 5-year-old girl in a coma and she ended up in prison.
It all started in Philadelphia, more specifically in 2007, when the coach began to have a presence in the police pages of the NFL.
A judge described the Reid home, where brothers Garrett and Britt, ages 22 and 24, lived with their parents as a "drug empire."
A police search had found numerous pills and illegal medical prescriptions to acquire painkillers and painkillers, a habit that young people had acquired in their college
football
days .
Britt was the most complicated, because in addition to using he was a
dealer
in his neighborhood, and a court sentenced him to 23 months in prison.
That same year he had argued with another person on the street and threatened her with a weapon that he did not have registered;
It was later discovered that she had used heroin.
"It is a family in crisis," concluded the judge who sent him behind bars, who also highlighted the effort that Andy and Tammy were making to rescue their children.
The worst was yet to come.
Coach Reid faced the criticism that began to define him as an absent father with a specific decision: he took his children 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 revive him with a defibrillator but to no avail, the 28-year-old had already died.
Days later, an autopsy confirmed that he had been the victim of a heroin overdose.
A photo of Andy Reid and his son, Garrett.
I hope the family stays strong in this tough time.
pic.twitter.com/huGXv4Hm
â Kickoff Coverage (@KickoffCoverage) August 5, 2012
"It's a sad situation, my son has been fighting this for several years, our whole family has been fighting," Reid said on his return to training, after a funeral attended by more than 900 people. "That doesn't mean "That you stop loving your son. That's not what you do. You love him and many families face this type of things," he expressed in a conference in which he defined himself as a "humble man," who was forced to thank everyone. the support and affection he was receiving, 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.
She married, had three children and remained strong working under the wing of her father, already in the winning stage of Kansas City.
And together they arrived at Super Bowl LV, in 2021, in what seemed 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 was driving drunk and caused a traffic accident near the complex where the Chiefs trained, crashing his truck at 135 kilometers per hour into the car of a woman who was waiting in a traffic light with his two children in the back seat.
April, then 5 years old, spent 10 days in a coma and was left with motor difficulties.
The Chiefs took care of all hospitalization and recovery expenses.
Britt 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 no less than seven.
"My prayers and thoughts are with everyone involved," said coach Reid in his first appearance, several days after that bitter Super Bowl that crowned Tom Brady for the last time.
"Due to the legal situation I cannot speak but for a human issue, my heart goes out to all the people who are going through this," added a beaten Reid, who took refuge in his family and in the two great engines that carried him through life. : God and American football.