WHERE ARE THEY NOW?: ANDY REID : A Leader With the Pack : Former Glendale Lineman Is a Green Bay Assistant

Andy Reid is a football player, a 265-pound senior from Marshall High, and he is sitting in the office of legendary USC Coach John McKay. McKay is telling him that he just isn’t good enough to be a Trojan.

“So what do I do?” Reid asks. “What do I do to make it here?”

“You play for a couple years at Glendale College,” McKay says. “One of our former players, Mike Scarpace, is the offensive line coach there. He’ll whip you into shape.”

Reid goes to Glendale. He’ll do anything to play for USC.

Andy Reid is a football coach. He is sitting in the offices of the Green Bay Packers, showing a friend the “zipper” that runs down his right leg, a scar from surgery performed two years after that meeting with McKay 17 years ago.

Knee surgery has a way of changing plans. Reid never played for USC--after blowing out his knee during an all-star game his sophomore season at Glendale, he became a fill-in on the offensive line at Brigham Young--and he never played in the NFL. But things aren’t so bad.

On Jan. 21, Reid was named tight ends coach/assistant offensive line coach of the Packers, who face the Rams in Anaheim today.

Mike Holmgren, formerly the offensive coordinator of the San Francisco 49ers, became head coach in January. He has assembled the youngest staff in the NFL, and Reid, 34, is the second-youngest member.

His meteoric rise comes as little surprise to Jim Sartoris, Glendale’s athletic director who was head football coach during Reid’s days as an offensive tackle there in 1976-77.

“He was kind of a mature kid,” Sartoris says. “He was a good studier. He was conscientious, and he had good work habits.”

Reid often rises at 5 a.m. and gets to sleep at 1 a.m. He has been the first coach in the office and the last one out, whether coaching at San Francisco State, Northern Arizona, Texas El Paso, Missouri or Green Bay.

Reid’s ties with the Packers were formed during his earliest days in the coaching profession. He was a graduate assistant at Brigham Young. Holmgren was the quarterbacks coach.

Even as Holmgren departed for San Francisco State in 1983, Reid remained connected with him. As an offensive coordinator, his playbook was patterned after the one Holmgren and Coach LaVell Edwards used at BYU. At Northern Arizona, UTEP and Missouri, Reid worked for programs that emphasized the pro-style offense Holmgren continued to employ.

“Mike always said he would call me when he got to the NFL,” Reid says. “But would it really happen?”

It happened, and when he arrived in Green Bay he found himself working in Vince Lombardi’s building. Strolling through the same end zone Bart Starr made famous during the 1967 Ice Bowl. Getting paid to do it.

“There’s a little bit more to life than the money you’re making,” Reid says. “I have friends who are doctors. They’d kill to have my job. You have to be happy with what you are doing.”

Andy Reid is a father. The morning practice has ended and he makes a brief detour on his way to the Packers’ pre-lunch meetings. Along the sideline he is swarmed by his wife, Tammy, and their five children.

The girls--Crosby, 4, and Drew Ann, 2--get a running start at their father, who wraps one arm around each girl and launches them into the air.

Two of the boys--Garrett, 9, and Britt, 7--are enchanted less by Andy and more by the players who have begun trickling off the field. Tammy keeps 2-month-old Spencer occupied.

Garrett is asked about being the son of an NFL coach, because one wonders what these 18-hour work days do to a family.

“It’s awesome,” Garrett says. “You get to meet a bunch of famous football players like Sterling Sharpe and Ed West and Don Majkowski and maybe even guys from other teams.”

Certainly, there must be some drawbacks? “Dad doesn’t get to spend much time with us,” Garrett says. “That’s probably the only bad thing.”

He doesn’t mention that his mother spent her 11th wedding anniversary watching the Missouri Tigers play the Kansas Jayhawks on a frigid November afternoon in Lawrence, Kan. He doesn’t say how upset he was when the family moved from El Paso, leaving the dog behind.

Still, here Garrett is standing next to his father beside the Green Bay Packers’ practice field, while the other kids watch from beyond a fence.

And there Garrett was outside the locker room in Madison, Wis., last weekend as the players and staff walked in to discuss their 24-7 exhibition loss to the New York Jets. There was his NFL coach-for-a-dad, stepping out of line to exchange high-fives with him and his brother.

There were high-fives even in defeat. Reid comes home after any loss and playfully wrestles the kids. Later, he will watch the highlights on television without knocking over the set. His job has its place.

“He doesn’t bring his bad mood home,” Tammy says. “A lot of coaches aren’t like that. They have to be alone and kick things.”

Andy Reid is a thinker. He keeps a journal. He has written a poem upon the birth of each child and pasted the verse into a scrapbook. When Reid is asked a question, he invariably pauses before answering.

“He doesn’t say something unless it’s true or he means it,” Tammy says.

The kid who never made it to USC appears quite content.

“Really, I couldn’t have done anything better,” Reid says. “In fact, I did the right thing. John McKay was right.”