MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — “MAN ALIVE!” Andrew Walter Reid bellowed from his toes as he marched through his Kansas City Chiefs locker room,
glowing like a teenager who had just scored a date with the prettiest girl in school. Reid had just finished handing out credit for this epic Super Bowl victory as easily as one would hand out a business card at a job fair, even giving a shoutout to Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie, the billionaire who fired him.
Man Alive! Those two shouted words on the way to his office said it all. Reid was letting it all out, all those seasons of chasing in vain that NFL grail that was finally, mercifully, in his hands.
Reid ended his 20-year title drought by ending the Chiefs’ 50-year title drought by coming from behind to beat Kyle Shanahan’s 49ers 31-20.
After the game, still on the field, Reid kissed the Lombardi trophy and raised it to the South Florida sky, and then Andy did what Andy always does.
Andy said this wasn’t about Andy. He talked about his whirling dervish of a quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, and the executive who long ago saw Mahomes as a developing Mozart, Brett Veach.
He talked about the Hunt family, his assistants, his players in Kansas City, his players in Philly. If Andy went long enough at his news conference podium, he would’ve gotten around to thanking his mailman, too.
But if Reid thought he was getting away with his selfless act, sorry pal, that was a no-can-do on this forever Sunday night.
This one was about the human teddy bear with a rainforest for a mustache, the guy who once put away a 40-ounce steak in 19 minutes.
This one was all about Big Red.
“He’s one of the best coaches of all time; he already was before we won this game,” said Mahomes, the MVP of Super Bowl LIV. “But we wanted to get that trophy just because he deserved it.
The work that he puts in day in and day out. He’s there at like 3 in the morning, and he leaves at 11 [at night]. I don’t think he sleeps.
I’ve tried to beat him in, and I never can. He’s someone that works harder than anyone I’ve ever known, and he deserves it.”
The rifle-armed son of a former big league reliever, Mahomes said he had two goals when he became the starting quarterback of the Chiefs.
One, to win the AFC championship and bring the Lamar Hunt Trophy back to the hometown of the late Chiefs owner who came up with the term “Super Bowl” for what has effectively become a national holiday.
“And the second-most important thing was to get Coach Reid a Super Bowl trophy,” Mahomes said.
Will this liberating triumph change Coach Reid? What do you think? This is a man who said he celebrated his AFC title game victory over Tennessee — which booked him a trip back to the Super Bowl for the first time in 15 years — by eating a cheeseburger and then going to bed. “I’ll have a double cheeseburger tonight,” Reid said Sunday. “Extra cheese.”
And why not? With this win, Reid finally proved that nice guys do indeed finish first, even if they have to wait a little while to get there.
In the weeks leading up to his crowning career achievement, it was clear the 61-year-old Reid had already proven you can be almost universally admired and adored even if you don’t finish first once across two decades as an NFL head coach.
But man, it will be so sweet for this grandfather of nine, the son of a Los Angeles-based doctor (his mother, Elizabeth) and a Hollywood set designer and artist (his father, Walter, a Navy veteran of World War II), to never again answer for his inability to win the big one over 14 seasons in Philadelphia, and then over his first six in Kansas City.
No more questions about time management, about choking in the playoffs, about Dee Ford lining up offside against New England, about watching his Eagles treat a two-score deficit late in their Super Bowl loss to the Patriots 15 years ago as an opportunity to move at a pace better suited for a ballroom walk-through.
Just like in that crushing defeat in Jacksonville in February 2005, Reid’s team was down 10 points in the middle of the fourth quarter. Only this time his players ran a Showtime fastbreak through the league’s most ferocious defense, led by a visionary, Mahomes, who handles the ball and passes it the way few quarterbacks ever have.
“Keep going,” Reid told his players as they struggled to put points on the board. “We’re going to be OK. We’ve done it before; we’ll do it again.”
Reid was a prophet carrying an oversize dinner menu for a play card. So now the questions will not be about Reid’s failures. Instead, they’ll ask Reid about the night he became football’s champion, the night his 222nd career victory silenced all that noise about him being the sport’s most prolific winner without a ring.
Now they’ll ask Reid about the night he almost certainly sealed his future induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
“Nobody deserves this trophy more than Andy Reid,” Chiefs owner Clark Hunt, son of Lamar, told the crowd and the Fox TV audience during the postgame ceremony.
“We got that ring for Big Red,” Travis Kelce said. “He acts like a father figure to everyone in the building, and you appreciate that. … We’re married together forever now.”
Many of Reid’s friends and colleagues had spent the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl being asked how they would react in the event that Reid finally won a Super Bowl.
Some predicted they would cry. All predicted they would be choked up, and as happy for Andy as Andy was for his wife, Tammy, his sons, Britt and Spencer, and his daughters, Crosby and Drew Ann, and all those wearing Chiefs jerseys around them.
“Andy gave me a kiss right on the cheek when we won,” said Dave Merritt, his defensive backs coach and an assistant who won two titles with Tom Coughlin’s New York Giants.
“As soon as it was over I thought about Andy’s family, his kids, his wife, his cousins, his brothers, everyone associated with him.
Not only Coach Reid became a world champ, they all became world champs. I was so moved watching Andy on the stage with his family around and all that confetti coming down on top of them.”
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