TAMPA, Fla. Long before he won a Super Bowl as a Tampa Bay Buccaneer, head coach Bruce Arians was a Virginia Tech Hokie.
Arians, 68, played quarterback for Virginia Tech in the early 1970s. He became a coach on the team.
“It was very different, you know, we weren’t affiliated with a conference then, we were a Southern Independent,” Arians said at a press conference prior to the Super Bowl.
Arians said those Hokie teams were, in a way, a melting pot with teammates from cities like Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York and Atlanta. But like many college football programs at the time, the Hokies weren’t very racially diverse.
“We had very few minority players, black players,” Arians recalled. “One happened to be my roommate, James Barber.”
Barber’s sons Ronde and Tiki went on to become football stars at both the University of Virginia and the NFL.
By sharing a room, Arians and Barber wrote their own history.
As Arians recounted in his autobiography, it was the first time a white and black player ever shared a room at Virginia Tech. They even hung a sign on the door of their dorm that read, “Salt and pepper Incorporated.”
“No one had given any particular thought to racing issues. We were just all footballers,” said Dr. Charles Martin, the co-captain of that Virginia Tech team. ‘You would congratulate the black man just as much as the white man. I haven’t even thought about it. ‘
After Arians took his last shot, he switched from player to coach.
“I was a bit of an older man on that team anyway, because I had been married for four years,” he said.
Hokies head coach Jimmy Sharpe made coaching easy.
“Jimmy taught me how to make players believe they are going to win every game, even if they probably didn’t have a chance, because we smelled,” he said.
Arians found that mutual respect was the best way to coach players who used to be his teammates.
His night job also helped.
“I was also a bartender at their favorite bar so I could keep an eye on them,” he said.
It’s been a long time since Arians left Blacksburg and became one of the NFL’s great coaches. But he said Virginia Tech is always close to his heart.
“I like the 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.’