TAMPA, Florida – Long before winning a Super Bowl as a Tampa Bay Buccaneer, head coach Bruce Arians was the Virginia Tech Hokie.
Arians, 68, played for Virginia Tech in the early 1970s. He continued to coach the team.
“It was very different, you know, we weren’t affiliated with a conference back then, we were an independent independent from the south,” Arians said during a previous Super Bowl press conference.
The Aryans 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 were not racially diverse.
“We had very few minority, black players,” Arians recalled. “One happened to be 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 history.
As Arians said in his autobiography, it was the first time a white player and a black player had ever been together at Virginia Tech. They even hung a sign on their bedroom door with the words, “Built-in salt and pepper.”
“Nobody thought about race issues in particular. We were all football players,” said Dr. Charles Martin, co-captain of that Virginia Tech team. “You were as likely to congratulate the black guy as the white guy. I didn’t even think about it.”
After the last blow of the game, Arians switched from player to coach.
“I was an older guy on that team anyway, being married all four years I was there,” he said.
Hokies head coach Jimmy Sharpe made the coach look easy.
“Jimmy taught me how to make players think they would win every game, even if they probably didn’t stand a chance, because we stink,” he said.
The Aryans learned that mutual respect was the best way to train players who were his teammates.
His night work also helped.
“I was also a bartender at their favorite bar, so I could watch them,” he said.
It’s been a long time since Arians left Blacksburg and became one of the great NFL coaches. But he said Virginia Tech is always close to his heart.
“I love hockey,” 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.”