TAMPA, Florida – Long before winning a Super Bowl as a Tampa Bay Buccaneer, head coach Bruce Arians was Virginia Tech Hokie.
Arians, 68, played quarterback with Virginia Tech in the early 1970s. He became the team’s coach.
“It was very different, you know, we weren’t affiliated with a conference at the time, we were an independent from the south,” Arians said during a pre-Super Bowl press conference.
Arians said those Hokie teams were, in a way, like a melting pot with teammates from cities like Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York and Atlanta. But like many college football programs back then, the Hokies did not have much racial diversity.
“We had very few minority players, black players,” Arians recalled. “One was my roommate, James Barber.”
Barber’s sons, Ronde and Tiki, became football stars at both the University of Virginia and the NFL.
Just sharing a room, Arians and Barber made their own story.
As Arians explains in his autobiography, it was the first time a white player and a black player had hosted Virginia Tech together. They even hung a sign on the bedroom door with the words, “Salt and pepper incorporated.”
“No one had any thoughts on the problems of the race in particular. We were just football players,” said Dr. Charles Martin, the captain of that Virginia Tech team. “You were likely to congratulate black as white. I didn’t even think about it.”
After Arians made his final move, he went from player to coach.
“Anyway, I was a bigger guy on this team, being married the four years I was there,” he said.
Hokies coach Jimmy Sharpe made the coach easy.
“Jimmy taught me to make players believe they will win every game, even though they probably didn’t stand a chance because we cause a stench,” he said.
Arians knew that mutual respect was the best way to train players who used to be their teammates.
His night work also helped.
“I was also a waiter at their favorite bar, so I could watch them,” he said.
It’s been a long time since Arians left Blacksburg and he became one of the great coaches in the NFL. But he said Virginia Tech is always close to his heart.
“I love Hokies,” he said. “I’ll be a Hokie for life. I won’t be anything else for life, but I’ll be a damn Hokie for life. I know that.”