A Portrait of Andrew Luck: The NFL’s Nice-Guy, Mean-Competitor, Badass-Geek QB

INDIANAPOLIS — The room is somber and muggy and still. Facing their lockers, the Titans’ 46 active players are slouched on their stools and say nothing above a whisper. They stare ahead in a mad trance. 

Again, they have lost to the Colts. Again, Andrew Luck kept popping up from hits like some human jack-in-the-box. Of course linebacker Avery Williamson is exasperated.

In the first quarter, Luck eyed a lane, attacked, dove head first at the goal line and…whap! Williamson crashed over the top, inadvertently dinging Luck helmet to helmet. In the fourth quarter, two Titans players sandwiched Luck, and his helmet bounced off the turf.

Only later did Luck report he suffered a concussion. He should have never stayed in the game.

Then again, this is someone who lacerated his kidney and tore his abdominal last season. Someone who has been sacked 158 times in 71 career games. Luck gets smoked from the blind side, that Yukon Cornelius beard cracks into a smile and he says, “Nice hit!” He then rallies his offense to the huddle as if untouched.

This day, his 262 yards and two scores secured a 24-17 win—the Colts’ 11th straight (!) over Tennessee—and injected life into a season forever hyperventilating.

He was red-hot early, threw a costly pick late and then put the nail in the coffin with 2:35 to go. On 3rd-and-5, he stepped up, rolled right and threaded an 11-yarder to T.Y. Hilton for a first down to seal the Colts victory.

Williamson sighs and shakes his head.

“He’s the type of guy,” Williamson says, “that if you get a hit on him, he’s going to bounce right back up. It’s tough to shake him.”

He’s the type of guy who can silence an entire visitors’ locker room.

He’s also the type of guy who can come off as a cheeseball publicly, who has his own book club with an online video description that is straight out of a Saturday Night Live skit.

Luck is the one on road trips who is providing history lessons at every turn. He’s Ned Flanders in pads. LeVar Burton with a cannon. He’ll recommend a novel to your teenage child (Little House on the Prairie is this month’s recommendation!), and of course, he’ll congratulate that blitzing linebacker who is foaming at the mouth and drilling him in the rib cage.

When he was going 11-5 and making the playoffs every year, maybe that didn’t raise eyebrows. But as the Colts face the possibility of a second straight losing, non-playoff season, a new narrative faces the former No. 1 overall pick: Can the gosh darn nicest quarterback in the NFL…win?

Kirk Cousins shouts “How do you like me now?!” in his boss’ face. Tom Brady nearly steps into the ring with his own offensive coordinator. When Cam Newton loses a game, he acts like a doctor removed three vital organs. Philip Rivers? One of the best trash-talkers in the biz.

And then here’s Luck.

Hi-diddly-ho, neighbor!

You’d trust Andrew Luck to date your daughter or water your plants when you’re out of town. He’s not the cold-blooded killer we crave at the position. Everyone loves the the transcendent blend of a muzzleloader arm, 4.6 speed, Stanford smarts and punch-drunk toughness. But the niceness isn’t a usual part of that mix. So now he must prove nice guys can finish first. A robotically kind QB must now go in for the jugular this final month of the NFL season.

The Titans don’t want to hear about Luck’s congeniality, though. They were victimized yet again.

“He’s a competitor, man,” Williamson says. “He’s not easily shaken. It’s very frustrating.”

Teammates and opponents past and present repeat the same thing when asked about Luck.

They see a quarterback armed with the right amount of badass to take the Colts to the next level.

They say this is who he is, on and off the field.

The stories you hear when you ask about Luck depict an odd, delicate balance we haven’t seen this generation.

      

He loves a good book about…concrete

Once during college, childhood friend Marshall Hughes asked Luck what book he was reading. Well, a book detailing the history of concrete, of course. Hughes laughed; Luck was serious. The quarterback was an architectural design major at Stanford and found this book—the equivalent of walking into interstate traffic for most of society—downright fascinating.

“For me,” says Hughes, now the sports director at WATE in Knoxville, Tennessee, “that’d be an absolute struggle. Punishment.

“I said, ‘Golly! You are a different cat.'”

     

The TV was not on at the Luck household

When friends headed to Luck’s place in Houston to hang out, the television was turned off. There were books—everywhere. Usually, the TV was only on if the Houston Dynamo were playing. Oliver Luck, Andrew’s father, was the president and general manager of the MLS team.

Otherwise, why pollute your mind with such filth?

As early as Hughes can remember, Luck was on a mission to learn. Any book, any topic. He was a sponge. Whereas Hughes’ family spent nights watching sitcoms like Everybody Loves Raymond, the tenor was different in Luck’s home.

“There was a lot of reading,” Hughes says. “Any time I’d go over there, he’d always have a book. He’d come over to my house to watch TV.”

     

You do not want to play pingpong against Andrew Luck

Don’t think for a second that all Luck did was nestle into a La-Z-Boy and read eight to 12 hours per day during the summer. Hardly. One of his buddies had a garage equipped with a TV for epic games of Halo and a pingpong table that revealed what’s inside Luck.

This was where he fed his wild side.

“We’d just go out there and talk mess to each other constantly,” says Ben Bredthauer, another one of Luck’s closest friends who was his tight end through high school. “It would get way too competitive.”

Instead of playing classical games to 21, they’d play to five through a best-of-five series—and it was typically two-on-two. The losing duo then needed to take off their shirts, turn around and take three direct pingpong shots to the back. Welts were the norm.

A pingpong scar could last for days. A pingpong scar from Luck? That would last for weeks.

Luck’s zingers were sent, Bredthauer says, at “100 miles an hour.”

Whenever Bredthauer lost, he tried forcing his partner to take Luck’s missiles.

“If you’re asking about his killer instinct, something people on the outside can’t see,” Bredthauer says, “it’s there 100 percent.”

They played every sport and made up their own sports. Take “tennis court baseball.” Luck’s crew brought miniature wooden baseball bats to the tennis courts nearby, and a pitcher would one-hop a tennis ball to the batter. One summer, they were addicted. They played twice per day.

One’s basketball game can tell you all you need to know about someone’s personality.

Luck was Dennis Rodman without the tattoos. He set screens. He dove for loose balls. He was a menace on the boards and rarely ever shot.

On the soccer field? A natural. Luck spent 10 of his first 11 years of childhood in Europe, so futbol was his first love. Manic footwork in tight quarters later helped him dance in a collapsing pocket. Luck’s brother, Addison, plays at Yale.

In soccer, like basketball, Luck looked to set up teammates first.

“If he had a wide-open shot at the goal and somebody was running up next to him, he’d pass it off to score it,” Bredthauer says. “But then, when the game was on the line, and you needed him to do something crazy, he’d come in there and bicycle kick it!

“OK, he wouldn’t do that…”

But he would finish. Somehow. There is, Bredthauer and Hughes repeat, a killer instinct inside their friend.

     

He’s an architect at heart

During study halls, Luck didn’t thumb through iPhone apps. He drew. One desk over, Hughes watched Luck scribble designs of football stadiums. His passion for architecture ran deep. He’d detail to Hughes which stadium structures would go where.

When he wasn’t molding himself into the next John Elway, next Peyton Manning, next can’t-miss gem at the position, Luck was named the valedictorian at Stratford High—a school of 2,000 students that consistently ranks among the best in the country academically—and earned a 3.48 GPA at Stanford.

No wonder the convenient narrative to push is that Luck “flips a switch”—that he’s a nerd off the field and a maniac on it. When questions trend in this direction, everyone close to him hems and haws and disagrees.

There’s no total transformation here. He’s that inquisitive mind designing a stadium 24/7.

“I feel like I need to tell a story on how he can flip a switch …

continue reading in source www.bleacherreport.com