Andrew Luck: The Natural

Andrew Luck was born into pro sports. His father, Oliver Luck, was a star quarterback at West Virginia University, was drafted in the second round by the Houston Oilers in 1982 and carved out a career as a backup to the legendary Warren Moon.

He retired before Andrew was born, and in the Nineties he worked in Europe as an executive in the now-defunct World League of American Football. Andrew, as a result, spent a lot of his early childhood in Germany, where his father managed teams. At one point, Oliver worked alongside another ex-quarterback, former Washington State great Jack Elway, who had coached at Stanford and had a son, John, who was on his way to the Hall of Fame. Reached by phone, Oliver remembers Jack coming over to his Frankfurt home for a barbecue one evening.

“Andrew may have been two years, three years old — he was an infant still,” Oliver Luck recalls. “For some reason, Jack looked at his calves. And he said, ‘Your little boy has really nice calves. He might be a player someday.’ ” 

Oliver laughs. “For some reason I remember that, because it was a really odd comment,” he says. “Of course, he had a pretty successful son himself.”

Still, the elder Luck never forced sports on any of his four children (Andrew has two sisters and a younger brother). “He never pushed us to play,” Andrew says. “The only rule was if you start a season in a sport, you have to finish that sport.” While his brother, Addison, became an accomplished soccer player, Andrew took after his NFL father, whom he idolized. 

Luck returned to the U.S. when he was in the fourth grade, moving to Texas, where he started to play Pop Warner football. “I was a defensive end and a backup quarterback,” he says. “I loved it.”

He went on to have enormous success as a quarterback in the madhouse that is Texas high school football, passing for more than four miles of yardage at Houston’s Stratford High, in addition to graduating as the school’s co-valedictorian (there are a lot of these perfect-humanoid details cluttering up the margins of Luck’s biography). But even back then, he never had a road-to-Damascus moment when he suddenly decided he was going to play in the NFL.