On Andy Reid’s Los Angeles: Tall tales and forever friends embodied in a tree of life

With a squint and some guidance, young Andy Reid’s handprints remain visible where concrete meets asphalt in front of his childhood home on Holly Knoll Drive.

Still standing in the backyard of the house Reid sold not long after his mother, Liz, died in 1998 is a rock wall Reid built with his father, Walter.

And soon after buying the home in 2006, Ben Kreader discovered an old Lionel train platform signed by a number of Reid’s childhood friends. But it wasn’t until a renovation in 2020 that he unearthed the most direct declaration of Reid’s roots.

Scrawled in chalk on a wall above ceiling drywall and insulation over the kitchen, in a spot Kreader had never seen because it required navigating a hatch in a closet: “COACH ANDY REID LIVED HERE.”

To the amateur eye, anyway, some of the handwriting characteristics resembled Reid’s handwriting. At least as that appeared in a 1978 yearbook message to his friend Mark LaBonge — a message punctuated with Reid’s then-customary self-portrait doodle emphasizing a round figure and a belly button.

So Coach Reid sure did live here, in the tight-knit Los Feliz neighborhood, as we’ve explored before.

But he also lives on here, to be sure. And not just when his Chiefs are playing in LA, as they were on Sunday in their 13-12 victory over the Chargers in the regular-season finale.

He’s ever-present through the enduring legends of his teen escapades and the abiding friendships he has sustained since he graduated in 1978 from John Marshall High.

Amid a panoramic tour of Reid’s Los Angeles old haunts on Saturday with longtime friend Mark LaBonge, those bonds were visible in a particularly poignant way high above the city in Griffith Park, near the famous observatory and the iconic Hollywood sign.

That’s where his best old friends, in their grief over Andy and Tammy Reid’s agonizing loss and seeking to offer consolation, planted a tree that commemorates Garrett Reid, who died in 2012.

“Wherever you are in the city, you can see the Garrett Tree,” said LaBonge, later adding that anywhere Reid might be here this weekend he could look up “and know it’s up there.”

Still the same

Reid’s early life is brimming with idyllic elements: Bunyanesque tall tales that more often than not actually are true, the home nestled walking distance from all his schools and near all of LA’s most fabled sites, the fascinating dynamics that came from his artist father and radiologist mother.

Along with his brother, Reggie, though, nothing is more tangibly enduring than his relationships with those friends.

Never mind those two Super Bowl triumphs to his name and becoming one of the winningest coaches in NFL history and being bound for the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

The engagement among them remains essentially the same.

When Reid and Tammy came home in 2018 to be shown the Garrett Tree, during a reception at LaBonge’s house Reid went to the kitchen to start washing dishes.

“‘You’re one of 32 (NFL coaches) in the world. You will not do the dishes,’” LaBonge recalled saying. “And he … gave me that hard staredown over his glasses. And I get very scared when he looks over his glasses. I know what his assistant coaches must feel like when he looks at them.”

Another of Reid’s oldest friends, Ted Pallas, said Reid just the other day texted him about a namesake Reid had recently come across — the Pallas’s cat, considered by some to be the “grumpiest cat in the world.”

“Out of the blue,” said Pallas said, laughing and noting that football rarely comes up when they connect.

Every offseason, Reid gathers with his surviving high school coaches and eight or so of his forever friends for what LaBonge calls a night of celebration and laughter.

Before their too-early deaths, that group also included LaBonge’s older brother, Tom, a former city councilman considered “Mr. Los Angeles,” and Tony Stewart — whom Mark LaBonge considered the “connective tissue” of the group and the one who thought of planting that tree.

When they ventured to Kansas City en masse for a 2016 game against the Raiders, Tammy Reid suggested they enter the postgame press conference. When Reid saw them, LaBonge said, “He had to use everything he had not to bust up.”

Those feelings are hard-wired, after all, through a time and place that formed Reid. And harkening to that era of his life, LaBonge and Pallas both reckon, helps keep Reid young.

“Especially what he does day-in and day-out,” Pallas said. “He needs, I would think, to just get away from that for five minutes and laugh and act like a 12-year-old.”

Biopic material

Speaking of when Reid was 12, he towered over his friends and was a dominant multisport athlete. He was daunting as a football lineman, baseball catcher and basketball forward and might well have competed with adults — whose jersey size he’d wear in baseball.

That also was apparent on national television in 1971, when the 13-year-old Reid, wearing the jersey of Los Angeles Rams running back Les Josephson, practically blotted out his nearby competitor (who was 8, Reid likes to remind) in a Punt, Pass and Kick competition on Monday Night Football.

A year before, when older brother Reggie was playing for Marshall High, the late Tom LaBonge once told the Los Angeles Times, Andy was a sixth-grade water boy who ran off the sideline to tackle an opposing runner who had broken away.

Told the tale on Saturday, Mark LaBonge, two years younger than Reid, couldn’t confirm it. But he verified some stuff that sounds far-fetched really did happen.

Over at the Lemon Grove Recreation Center, LaBonge laughed as he considered the distance: At either age 12 or younger, Reid hit a baseball not just over the centerfield fence now marked at 180 feet … but some 20-30 feet past it … and over a 20-foot high wall onto the Hollywood Freeway.

“And that was before aluminum bats,” Pallas said.

That shot would make the biopic of Reid, LaBonge said. As would an episode in which Reid, Pallas and Bobby Volkel got into a makeshift competition throwing wood scraps. From three houses away, the perhaps-10-year-olds were trying to hit the nearby Shakespeare Bridge oblivious, until the police came, that they were effectively strafing a man in between sunbathing in his backyard.

“That’s a scene. Because it’s so visual,” said LaBonge, a longtime camera operator inspired in part by the filming of some of “Grease” at Marshall High. “And that’s the mark of a good movie: that if you turned the volume off, the images would just tell the story.”

In Reid’s case, the childhood images alone would go on and on:

Picture Reid driving his 1968 Volkswagen Beetle, crammed full of friends — often en route to Original Tommy’s World-Famous Hamburgers — or taken straight out to the field for a winter-league game because he’d been running late in traffic.

Consider him as a catcher bracing for a runner trying to score: “He would take that mask off,” LaBonge said, “and just stand three feet in front of the plate (saying), ‘Come on … I dare you.’ ”

And as Marshall High’s field-goal kicker, who converted three game-winners his senior year but also once sent an errant kick through a window of St. Kasimir Catholic Church some 25 yards across the street.

Visualize him refusing an extra meatball to John Wayne, the macho actor, when Reid was working as a caterer at The Tonight Show.

Or, to more nuanced effect, envision Reid immersed in wood-working projects and drawing — passions that he maintains today, including through his affinity for play design.

Most of all, though, you’d see the charismatic Reid among friends who would last. In relationships often forged through times as teammates who understood each other in that context — including how to look out for each other.

Tree of life

Garrett Reid, then an assistant coach with his father’s Eagles, was 29 when he died at training camp in August 2012 from what a coroner ruled was an accidental drug overdose.

In the days after his death, his childhood friends grappled with ways to offer consolation.

After Stewart pushed for a tree and galvanized the group, LaBonge and Stewart spent time on the trails of Mt. Hollywood seeking the right spot. One day from on high, they spotted a tractor clearing an area below, creating a plateau that seemed meant to be.

Some 21 friends showed up the day they planted the sycamore tree — trees, in fact, including another for Tammy and Andy.

They took turns digging and getting the soil backfilled and watered for the trees understood to be immensely durable with a rapid growth rate and expansive root system, as savatree.com puts it.

On one page of the book of captioned photos they sent the Reids from that September day, they referred to Reid’s high school jersey number and wrote, “#76 in your program but #1 in our hearts, Andy Reid.”

Toward the back of the book are personalized notes to the Reids from most who took part.

On his City of Los Angeles stationary, Tom LaBonge wrote, “A tree planting often reflects the continuation of life for those who went before us. Also, a tree has been planted for your family in the same area so that your roots continue to run deep in Los Angeles.”

The tree is marked with initials and name carvings now, and as Mark LaBonge and I admired it on Sunday no one else nearby knew its meaning. It’s grown so tall, perhaps 45 feet, it’s hard to find the “GR” decal originally attached; could be that it’s longer tethered to the tree now maintained by the City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks.

Even so, the friends still nurture it by watering and weeding from time to time. And they give it all the more life by speaking of and thinking of the tree and sharing its meaning: memorializing Garrett Reid and cherishing the friend who remains entwined with them.