LOS ANGELES, Calif. — Peter Arbogast, the voice of University of Southern California football team, was a childhood friend of Kansas City Chiefs head coach Andy Reid.
According to Arbogast, Reid, whose nickname is "Big Red," was big back then too.
"He was a monster," Arbogast said. "He was huge."
The famous Punt, Pass, and Kick video of Reid as a kid was everyday life for those growing up in this East Hollywood neighborhood.
"He'd hit the ball all over the yard (in baseball) and in basketball, we'd just post him up," Arbogast said.
But Reid's best sport was of course football. He would attend John Marshall High School, several years after Hall of Fame defensive back Mike Haynes would go there.
"There's a famous story of Mike Haynes seeing him (Andy) on the sideline during practice early in his career and saying, 'Kid, how come you're not out here playing?'" recounted Arbogast. "And he said, 'I'm in the fourth grade.'"
But Reid's high school is known much more for the arts than the sports.
Grease, La Bamba, Bachelor Party, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Boy Meets World and Nightmare on Elm Street are just a few of the films and television shows to be shot at John Marshall.
"A lot of TV shows in the 60s and 70s," Arbogast said. "A lot of commercials, because it's right there."
Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher" music video was shot in the school library. The desks that Eddie Van Halen played guitar on are still used by students to this day.
"They're shooting movies and TV commercials pretty much once a month," Radu Nicolescu, the athletic director at John Marshall said.
Even actor Leonardo Dicaprio attended John Marshall.
But open up yearbooks from the mid-to-late 1970s and Andrew Walter Reid's name is all over them.
Reid was in student congress and leadership. He played baseball and of course, football.
Not only was he an offensive and defensive lineman for the Barristers, but he was also the team's kicker. His senior year he won two games with field goals at the end.
That was a change of pace.
"We couldn't win a game," Reid said.
Sure enough, even with Haynes and Reid's older brother, John Marshall was bad at football before he got there.
"For 20 years before that, we were terrible," Arbogast said.
"I kept telling them, 'When I get here we're going to win, we're going to win,' and we ended up winning," Reid said. "We had a bunch of good players, too."
Reid describes his old stomping grounds as a "beautiful melting pot."
"I was lucky enough to grow up around all different kinds of people," Reid said. "I had a head coach that was Japanese-American but spent time in a concentration camp during the second World War. How many guys knew that took place?"
After the Chiefs won Super Bowl LIV, Reid returned to John Marshall and spoke to the students. The school has a trophy named after him.
"I look back now and I go, 'Geez, that was an incredible, incredible upbringing,'" Reid said.
The big kid ended up making it big.
"He is virtually the same guy now as he was as a kid," Arbogast said.
