The Quarterback Whisperer

by Bruce Arians

  After I got Peyton to focus on his footwork, it was as if his worries magically melted away. He was one smooth operator, brother. Playing cool, calm, and cerebral, he threw two touchdown passes and no interceptions in our 20–15 win over the Patriots, which was Peyton’s first-ever victory over those guys. He would finish the season by earning his first invitation to the Pro Bowl.

  But I think it was that pregame moment against the Patriots that was the turning point in my relationship with Peyton. I had pushed just the right psychological button. Recognizing and understanding nonverbal cues in others is essential to coaching at all levels, and I like to think I learned how to read people a long time ago in an unlikely place—behind a bar in Blacksburg, Virginia.

  On Saturday afternoons during my fifth-year senior season at Virginia Tech, I called some of my own plays as the starting quarterback for the Hokies. We ran the wishbone, a formation that features a fullback and two halfbacks lined up behind the quarterback. My throwing stats weren’t exactly Hall of Fame–worthy—I completed 53 of 118 passes for 952 yards with three touchdowns and seven interceptions—but I was a pretty good runner. I rushed for 243 yards and 11 touchdowns, still a school record. Not even Michael Vick when he played at Virginia Tech topped that TD mark!

  But in what may have been a first in college football history, after the home games I dished out drinks from behind the bar at a restaurant named Carlisle’s. I probably violated some NCAA rule, but I needed that dollar an hour and the free steaks.

  I was familiar with the rhythms of the bartending world. Growing up in a blue-collar neighborhood in York, where my dad was a machinist and my mom worked on the line at the York Peppermint Pattie factory, I often visited a bar my grandfather worked at in Paterson, New Jersey. There, sipping on my nonalcoholic birch beer in the smoky haze, I observed and listened. You can learn a lot about human nature in a bar.

  At Carlisle’s I met all types of people—rich and poor, black and white, educated and high school dropouts. What I loved to do was just listen to people tell their stories. They’d open up to me about their life and times, their hopes and dreams and fears. I quickly realized that everyone has something valuable to say, from the janitor to the corporate executive, and if you’re willing to just shut your mouth and listen you can learn so many valuable lessons from everyone you come across.

  Listening is a dead art—especially in coaching, where too often people in charge just shoot off their mouths or rant and don’t first ask questions of others and listen closely—but it’s the only way to truly understand the narrative of people’s lives, to know what they’re feeling, to get what’s important to them. I learned this at my grandfather’s joint in Paterson, and I carried it with me when I attended Virginia Tech.

  One Thursday night in Blacksburg I was bartending when virtually the entire team showed up at the bar. With my long blond hair and my big bushy mustache, I certainly looked more like a hippie student than a football player, which perhaps was why so many of the customers felt comfortable talking to me.

  On this night the hours ticked by. Everyone was having a great time, and then suddenly a few coaches strolled through the door. Man, the players hauled ass out the back door; I don’t know if I’d ever seen some of them move so fast, like their damn pants were on fire. The players weren’t supposed to be there and I tried to cover for them. I saw one of the coaches and asked, “Hey, Coach, what are you doing here?”

  “We heard all the players were in here drinking,” he said.

  “Nah,” I replied.

  “Well, what are you doing here?” the coach asked.

  “Man, I’m just working,” I said. “I need the money, Coach. Can I buy you a beer?”

  I pushed a beer at him and it defused the situation, reinforcing what I had learned years earlier watching my grandfather: Free beer can often be the sweetest elixir.

  Perhaps the most important thing I learned from behind the bar was how to measure people—a skill that would serve me well in coaching. It wouldn’t take me long, just by looking into someone’s eyes, to figure out a customer’s emotional state. You always need to be hyperaware of your surroundings when you’re bartending, and I think I developed a good sense of how to gauge situations and people’s mental makeup simply by employing the powers of observation and listening. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was like I was getting an education that prepared me to handle the psychological side of being a quarterback coach. The skills I learned bartending—reading nonverbal cues, finding the right words to say to someone who looks downtrodden, grasping the power of listening—certainly helped me with Peyton.

  In 1974, my fifth-year senior season, we finished 4–7 at Virginia Tech. I became the first in my family to earn a formal college degree. But I also earned my unofficial degree in coaching—although then I was never actually a coach.

  During my first three years in Blacksburg I backed up future NFL QB Don Strock. I ran the scout team, because, frankly, I wasn’t good enough to start. This meant every week I’d pretend to be the starting quarterback of the opposing team we were about to face. Some players hate being on the scout team, but I loved it. I let myself slip into the mind of the coaching staff we were about to play, analyzing why they did things certain ways, why one coach preferred one style of offense and other coaches used different ones. So I wasn’t just mimicking their offenses; I was feeling them out, learning them, assessing what I personally liked and what I didn’t. No, I wasn’t formally a coach, but my coaching philosophy was slowly crystallizing.

  After my final season of football in Blacksburg, I got a call from the Dallas Cowboys. A scout said they were interested in me. Then they sent me a letter and a pen. “We hope to sign you to your contract with this pen,” the note said. I was thrilled. I proudly showed off the pen to Coach Sharpe, who had become my mentor.

  “You do realize,” Sharpe told me, “that the Cowboys have sent about a thousand of those pens to college seniors across the country.”

  Ah, I hadn’t, but I tried to play it cool. “Of course,” I said. “I’m not holding my breath or anything.”

  I knew I wasn’t an NFL player. I was always honest with myself about my limitations as a quarterback. So after graduation, as I was still trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life, I became a graduate assistant coach on the Virginia Tech staff. The pay was minimal—and by minimal, I mean nothing—and Coach Sharpe allowed me to coach the quarterbacks, which was more responsibility than was given to virtually any other GA in the nation.

  But I still needed more money to pay bills—even though my wife, Chris, was working at a bowling alley and pool hall while finishing her degree in biology—so I got another job on the side. I left Carlisle’s to tend bar at a basement nightclub in Blacksburg.

  One evening a man who I knew lived up in a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains sauntered in looking for trouble. He looked like he was straight out of the movie Deliverance. His long Rip Van Winkle–like beard may have been home to several different critters.

  “Tonight,” the man declared to me, “I’m going to drink and I’m going to fight.”

  “Well,” I replied, “let’s make the beer free for you, but go fight somewhere else.”

  A few hours passed. Then the man, filled with liquid fire, started pinching the posteriors of several different young women. I told him he had to leave.

  The mountain man pulled out a black handgun and stuck it in my belly. “Throw me out now,” he calmly said to me.

  I was terrified. It’s generally not good when an intoxicated man is pointing a gun at you. But just then the nightclub owner, wielding a blackjack, clubbed the man over the head, knocking him out cold.

  “I never miss,” the nightclub owner said to me, smiling wide.

  “Well, the damn gun wasn’t pointed at your stomach!” I replied.

  That was my last night of bartending. I realized, when that gun was jammed in my gut, that perhaps coaching would be a better career path. My
beautiful wife agreed.

  Chris was my compass, my true north. Without her, I wouldn’t even have lasted a year in college. We met our freshman year of high school. We had homeroom class together and I sat a few rows over from her. I couldn’t take my eyes off her—or her nice butt. The next year she was in a French class that I had already taken. I volunteered to help her with her homework. She agreed—and man, I’ve loved the French ever since.

  “Bruce sat three rows in front of me in our homeroom class when I first noticed him,” Chris says. “He was real quiet. I mean, really quiet. He was tall and gawky. But then he started helping me with my French homework. Or at least he pretended to help me, because it gave him an excuse to talk to me. We started dating but it wasn’t anything exclusive until our junior year. But then things got pretty hot and heavy. My family loved him.”

  I grew close to Chris’s father, Robert Allen. He had earned a college degree in chemistry from Mount St. Mary’s and he taught me the value of education. Before I met him, I’d never even thought about college. I came from a family of factory workers and all the Arians men simply went to work once they finished high school. That was the way of our world. I didn’t know a thing about college until I met Robert. We’d play chess deep into the night—he taught me how to play and I’d only have a shot at beating him if he was on his third whiskey—and he’d spend hours talking to me about the value of higher education. Suddenly I began to look beyond my hometown for my future. My dreams expanded.

  There were times in high school when my own father couldn’t make it to my football games because he had to work late. But Robert Allen would always be there. And when I’d look up into the stands and see him, it was the ultimate motivation for me. I always wanted to impress him, because I knew winning his approval was a key to capturing Chris’s heart.

  Chris would often be seated next to him at the games, and man, she was a vision. She had short, dirty blonde hair and a smile that could stop traffic. She was five feet tall if you stretched her—and brother, that was five feet of fire—and her presence could fill up a room. Even back then, I knew not to argue with her. She was the smartest girl in her class and she always got in the last word. No surprise that years later she would become a lawyer after earning her JD from Temple.

  When I went away to Virginia Tech, Chris enrolled at York College. I missed her dearly. So on Fridays after class, with two bucks in my pocket, I’d hitchhike to York—345 miles away—to spend two blissful days with her. Then on Sunday afternoons I’d hitchhike back to Blacksburg.

  My GPA after my first semester without Chris wasn’t exactly stellar: 1.6. I was on the fast track to flunking out. In the spring semester of my freshman year I decided enough was enough. I walked to a pay phone and dialed Chris’s number. “I can’t do this anymore,” I told her. “I just can’t do this anymore.”

  On the other end of the line I heard her scream, “What do you mean? What do you mean you can’t do this anymore?”

  “No, babe, I can’t stand being here without you,” I explained, ever so urgently. “So I guess we’re going to have to get married.”

  “So that’s your proposal?” Chris asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Oh my gosh.” Chris gulped. “Then, well, okay!”

  We were married three months later at St. Rose of Lima Church on Market Street in York. Our reception was at the Tremont Restaurant, where Chris’s grandmother used to cook meatloaf and pot pies. Later that night we hopped in her ten-year-old Buick Special and drove halfway to Blacksburg. We spent the night at a little roadside hotel in Staunton, Virginia. That was our honeymoon.

  The next morning we rolled into Blacksburg around 8 a.m. That night at midnight I started a job at a steel mill in Roanoke. The rest of our lives took off happily from there.

  We never asked our parents for anything—not money, not cars, not help with housing. We were incredibly young, but Chris and I believed that it was up to us to make our own way in the world, chart our own course. Heck, we didn’t even ask our parents for advice. Our problems were our own, not theirs, and it was up to us to solve them. One of the most satisfying things I’ve ever read was a letter that Chris’s dad sent to her shortly after we were married and living in Blacksburg. He wrote, “I don’t worry about you because I know Bruce will never quit.”

  I still haven’t quit—and I never will as long as I have air in my lungs and strength in my muscles.

  “There’s always been a lot of yin and yang to our relationship,” Chris says. “Bruce is the social one and I’m more capable of solitude and just being alone. I feel like in our relationship one person’s weakness is balanced by the other person’s strength. And Bruce has always really valued me. Even when he’s being a total idiot, I know he values and cares for me. That’s why we work. And Bruce really is an affectionate guy. That’s part of his appeal to so many of his players throughout the years. He makes you feel good about yourself so you like being with him. He’s always searching for perfection, but if he sees you’re trying your best, he’ll tell you how much he appreciates what you’re doing and how much that means to him. Hell, he’s really just a big softie.”

  In 1975, my first season as a graduate assistant, our defensive coordinator at Virginia Tech was Charley Pell, who two years later would become the head coach at Clemson and then later at Florida. Charley was a defensive mastermind—he excelled at the Xs and Os of coaching—and many nights he’d see me as I was walking out of the office.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Charley would ask.

  “Home, Coach,” I’d say. “I got my work done.”

  “Oh no you don’t,” he’d say. “Come in here and sit down.”

  Then for several hours Charley would make me pretend that I was the starting quarterback for the team we would face on Saturday. He wanted to know how I planned to beat our Virginia Tech defense.

  I remember one time we were playing Wake Forest in three days and I told Charley that if I’m calling the plays for the Demon Deacons, I’m going to run a weak-side zone running play because on film I’d seen our outside linebacker consistently step the wrong way when this play would come at him. And sure enough, when we faced Wake seventy-two hours later, the Demon Deacons offensive staff must have called that play twenty times during the game. But Charley and our defense were prepared. We beat Wake Forest 40–10.

  So almost every night as a graduate assistant, I matched wits against one of the best defensive coaches in the nation. I loved that back-and-forth with Charley—it was an engaging intellectual chess match. For hours we would talk strategy and how a defense could beat certain offenses. For a budding offensive coach, this was truly my graduate-level work.

  I got to know Peyton Manning when he was a high school junior and I was the offensive coordinator at Mississippi State. His father, Archie, had been a legendary quarterback at Ole Miss, and it didn’t take a recruiting genius to understand there was no way Peyton would ever come and play for us at Mississippi State, the sworn rival of the Ole Miss Rebels. But I was in charge of recruiting quarterbacks and so I called Archie one afternoon and asked, “Hey, is there any way Peyton would consider coming to play for us?”

  Archie laughed so hard he must have doubled over. No, Archie told me in his southern, sugar-polite way, Peyton would not be attending Mississippi State.

  But I already knew all about this young Peyton Manning kid. I always wanted to know where the next generation of quarterbacks would come from, so I identified many and studied everything I could about one of them in particular—Peyton.

  As boys, Peyton and his older brother Cooper were regulars in the training room of the New Orleans Saints, where Archie played quarterback from 1971 to 1982. One time, Cooper, the family comedian and a natural smooth talker, convinced one of the trainers to tape him up as if he were a member of the team. The trainer wrapped his ankles and wrists in tape. When Peyton saw his brother getting worked on, he asked to be taped up as well. A tradition was
then born. Before many practices, the two boys would run through the locker room looking like miniature versions of their dad with their ankles and wrists mummified in tape. And after practice they would jump in the whirlpool or sauna—just like players.

  Why was this important? Because Peyton was learning the culture of football and the sacrifices it took to make it to the NFL.

  After Saints home games little Cooper and Peyton would wait for their dad outside the locker room. They’d see Archie emerge, walking gingerly, so sore it was hard for him to move. He would always give a big hug to his lovely wife, Olivia, then his kids, and then he’d interact with fans, signing every piece of paper thrust at him. Peyton sometimes said, “Dad, let’s go home,” but Archie would just smile at his son and tell him to put a grin on his face. Years later Peyton would realize that out there with the fans, his dad was playing the role of the starting quarterback, remaining upbeat and patient even in the face of soul-crushing defeats week after week.

  In my research and by talking with Archie, I learned that Cooper loved to show off the football skills of little brother Peyton. When Peyton was three he could take a snap from center and perform a five-step drop, which he proudly demonstrated to Cooper’s friends. Peyton could also execute a seven-step drop. He’d bring a Nerf football up close to his ear, just like his dad did, run seven steps back, and then throw that squishy, almost-as-light-as-air thing with amazing distance and accuracy across the living room.

  But maybe what was most surprising during Peyton’s early years, in terms of his future in the NFL, was that as an eight-year-old he’d crawl onto Archie’s lap and watch game film. Peyton would grow wide-eyed at the action, hypnotized. He soon began firing questions, machine-gun-like, about the game of football, about what his dad was looking at, why different players lined up in different spots on the field. It wasn’t long before he badgered Archie incessantly: “Daddy, daddy, can we watch film?” So began Peyton’s utter obsession with watching film.