Chapter 1 - Looking for Terry

Growing up in Shreveport, Louisiana, football was my passion. I loved it. I was captivated by it. I dreamed about it. All I wanted to do was play football. Even before I was old enough to play an organized game, I would fantasize about being a football player, about throwing touchdown passes, because I was going to be a great quarterback. I wasn’t very big, but I was always preparing, always practicing, always throwing something—rocks, acorns, walnuts, baseballs, a javelin. My brother Gary and I threw frozen snowballs at big trucks after we moved up to Camanche, Iowa, when we were in third grade. We broke the front window of one of those big Blizzard trucks, and Gary might still be hiding. Anything I could get my hands on that I could throw I was throwing.

One afternoon—I remember this so well—when I was about seven years old, I was throwing my torn-up old Sears and Roebuck football, one that my dad bought on layaway, against the side of our garage. Then I’d go running after it as it bounced away crazily. Suddenly, I realized a man was standing behind me. That was strange. I hadn’t seen him coming; he just sort of appeared. He was a compact, stocky man. There was a small gap between his front teeth. He was wearing glasses, a fedora, and a green windbreaker with Coach on the front.

“Young Terry,” he said in a gravelly voice, as if it was coming from heaven, “I’m here to make you an offer. How would you like to grow up to become the number one draft choice in the National Football League, play professional football for fourteen seasons, become the league’s Most Valuable Player, win three Super Bowls, and be elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame? Then you would have a career in television during which you would win six Grammys, get elected to the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame, make several movies, have a singing career with a hit record, become a popular speaker, write bestselling books, build a few ranches and raise champion quarter horses, and eventually produce an award-winning bourbon?”

I didn’t know what to say. Right then my biggest dream was making the seventh-grade football team. “Wow,” I finally responded suspiciously, “what do I have to do to make all that come true?”

This man hesitated, then took a deep breath and finally said, “You have to work with Howie Long.”

I knew there had to be some kind of catch. “Oh.” I hesitated, then finally asked, “For how long?”

He closed his eyes and admitted, “A long time, young Terry. Decades.”

I gave it some thought. Then I said forcefully, “Make it four Super Bowls!”

I know that story might sound impossible. But it is as good an explanation as anything else for the incredible things that have happened in my life.

Welcome to my book. I’m the guy who plays Terry Bradshaw on TV.

That’s only one version of me, my most popular version, good ol’ Terry. Anything to make people happy, Terry. I definitely enjoy being that person. I put on my happy suit and smile and let people joke on me and I laugh with them. But that’s only one part of me. Throughout my life people have met other versions of me. I’ve loved people, pleased people, entertained people, disappointed people, and even hurt some people. Never intentionally, never ever intentionally. There’s even a Roy—named by my wife, the amazing Tammy—and Roy still shows up on occasion when my days get dark. You probably wouldn’t like Roy so much.

None of that is planned. There have been times when I woke up in the morning and wondered, Which Terry am I going to be today? I don’t have to try to be me—well, except on TV—any more than you are the same person every day. I can’t claim I’m a good person because I want to be a good person; that’s just how God made me. That’s in my DNA, in my soul, in my blood. I can’t escape it. I believe a person is made the way he’s made. God made me to enjoy opening up my heart to other people, to welcome them into my life. I talk to people everywhere, standing in line at the grocery store, waiting at the airport. “How you doing? What got you here?” Anybody. Anywhere. I can’t help it.

Of course, God also made Roy.

All of our different personality parts are what make each of us unique. How are you feeling today? Same as yesterday? Are you wearing your own happy suit? It took me a long time to understand and accept that. The major difference between you and me is that I’ve had to be all my different Terrys in public. My life has been lived in public for almost six decades, so my successes, as well as my failures, have been on display.

Here’s how far I’ve come in that time. I was raised to be a good Christian, a strict Baptist. I sang in my church choir. I lived a sheltered life. We didn’t say bad words, we didn’t drink alcohol, and we were respectful to women. We got married once and once only. When I was being recruited by colleges to play football, I visited the great Baylor University—the largest Baptist university in the world—in Waco, Texas. I seriously considered going to Baylor because it might lead me into the ministry. But during my visit, I was sitting in a dorm room and watched as one of the football players pulled out a bottle of whisky from under his bed and offered me a drink of that alcoholic beverage.

Oh. My. Goodness.

That shattered me. Destroyed me. Football players at Baylor University were drinking alcohol! Oh Lord, why did you put me in this position? The situation got even worse when he asked if I wanted him to fix me up with a coed! He hinted that there might be some kissing available. I definitely could not go there. I knew I was flirting with Hell in that dorm room. Which is how I ended up at Louisiana Tech. Well, that and my ACT scores.

This is how far I’ve come. All these years later, I am the founder of Bradshaw Kentucky Straight Bourbon, which won Best in Class and a double gold medal at the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers competition. That’s what Heaven tastes like. The journey from that sheltered young man in a small dorm room to winning the 2026 blind tasting bourbon competition in Las Vegas pretty much encompasses the arc of my life. I’ve spent a lot of years gathering experiences, gaining knowledge, learning to appreciate my good parts, and accepting the less good parts.

And changing them when I can.

It starts with football. The great game of football is responsible for everything that has happened in my life, the good and the bad. My life has been blessed by a fifteen-ounce, eleven-inch-long, spheroid-shaped ball covered with four pebbled brown pigskin panels held together by white laces. It’s hard to believe how much impact that object has had on my life. Football enabled me to build my reputation. Football led to my success in business and horses. Football allowed me to sing at the Grand Ole Opry and run naked through the park with William Shatner! Without my four Super Bowl rings, there is no way I would have been a deer on The Masked Singer. I remember thinking as a kid, Boy, I would give an arm and a leg to be a pro football player.

Who knew that was just the beginning.

Life, I have learned, is like a football game. You spend your whole childhood developing a viable game plan, and just when you get it perfect, Lawrence Taylor moves into your neighborhood. From that point on you just got to keep scrambling.

I sometimes wonder what my life might have been like if I hadn’t been gifted with the ability to play pro football. Honestly, I never thought about that growing up because I knew I was going to be a great player. That belief wasn’t based in reality, but I always thought of myself as special. Would I have been a special fireman? Would I have been a special coach? The only other future I even considered was becoming an evangelist. I was comfortable in church and I liked to talk. I qualified. I do believe I would have made a fine evangelist, although maybe not that special.

As a kid I was not a great athlete. I couldn’t run fast; I didn’t have natural skills. In our pickup baseball games I pitched and played right field. Right field was where they put the worst players. At that time I had undiagnosed attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, which meant I had a hard time focusing. I didn’t even learn I had it until after I retired from pro football. Trust me, right field is not a good position for a boy with ADHD. Here comes the pitch—oh, is that a dandelion over there? Who’s that over in the bleachers? I was actually a good pitcher. I could throw a baseball, but I couldn’t hit or field. I just wasn’t good at it.

I never played basketball. I couldn’t dribble.

But football? I just stumbled onto something that thrilled me, and it was called football. All of a sudden, I had this new love in my life. And what did I want to do with it? I wanted to throw it. So I did, over and over and over, and eventually it began to go where I intended. I could throw a spiral, a smooth ball that didn’t wobble.

First thing, I gotta tell my mom about my spiral. I called her outside. “Look at this, Mom! That’s a spiral.”

She smiled. “That’s nice, baby,” she said and went on back inside the house.

Didn’t have the slightest idea what a spiral was. But I didn’t care. I just kept throwing it for the next thirty years.

I was captivated by football, but my career didn’t start out very well. We didn’t have tryouts for the team in seventh grade. You didn’t practice or compete. The coach just picked his team from watching kids in gym class. I remember sitting in the bleachers as the coach gave us a pep talk. I’d never heard a coach give a talk. This is amazing! I thought. This is just so great.

“Don’t be discouraged if you don’t get picked,” he said.

I was pretty sure that didn’t apply to me. I knew for sure inside that I was a football player, even if my outside appearance didn’t yet support that belief.

He began calling out names. I got my right arm way up in the air. I was waving it. Here I am, Coach! I pushed it up higher with my left arm. And higher. Pick me! Pick me! I’m right here.

He didn’t pick me. I was devastated. When I think about that day, I can still feel the hurt. That feeling never went away. Never. How could I be the quarterback if they didn’t pick me? That was the first great life lesson the game of football taught me: how to deal with disappointment. Don’t quit and don’t let other people define you. What I did was go to practice every day; I sat in the bleachers and watched them, wanting so badly to be out there. On Saturday I’d go to the games knowing, That’s going to be me out there. I don’t know how or when, but that’s going to be me. I never doubted I was destined for greatness. That’s the definition of confidence.

Or maybe that’s the definition of insanity. But I believed it with the wholeness of my heart.

After spending four lonnnnng years in Camanche, Iowa, home of the World’s Largest Mosquitoes, we moved back to Shreveport. One of the greatest days of my life was going back home. I attended Linwood Junior High School for eighth grade. At first, the same thing happened in football. “Sorry, Terry,” the coach told me, “but we don’t have enough uniforms.” But then, a few days later, he came up to me in PE class and told me with a big smile, “We’re giving you a uniform. You’re on the team.”

Those are magic words: You’re on the team.

I went into the locker room, my new home. New sights and sounds and smells. Oh, those smells. There’s nothing like the beautiful aroma of a locker room. That’s the smell of hard work. Still sets my heart beating.

They gave me my first uniform. No one ever forgets that. I put on my shoulder pads, and when I put on my jersey, I traced the letters and numbers on the front with my finger. I put on my helmet. It was scratched and old and smelled of worn-in sweat. It was a little big, so my head rattled around inside. It was beautiful. I don’t remember if we wore a jock strap in those days, but even if we were supposed to, I wouldn’t have known how to put one on. It could have been a mouth guard for all I knew.

I smeared black charcoal under my eyes; I knew what that was for—it was to make you look like a football player. I put on my shoes with metal spikes on the front. When I had all that equipment on, I stood in front of the mirror. Whoa. I couldn’t stop staring into that mirror. Just whoa, I thought. That’s a football player!

We don’t forget the firsts of our lives. The first time I put on that uniform. The first time I started in high school, first time in college, and in the pros. First touchdown pass. First house. First couch. First girlfriend. First girl I kissed. We were hiding behind a billboard, and I told her I had a surprise for her: I kissed her on the cheek!

First practice, I put on my uniform and went out to the field. I couldn’t wait to get dirty just like the real players I had seen. Gotta get me down in the dirt! Gotta get the uniform dirty. We had to cross the outdoor basketball court to get to the field. I walked across the court, and the spikes clickety-clacked on the pavement. That sound was so cool. Then I jogged over to the field, and I looked back at the tracks I’d made with my shoes. These were the rites of a boy’s childhood. It was so, so cool. Every last part of it.

I’d never played an organized game in my life. All I knew about playing football was throw the ball. Throw the ball again and again. I didn’t even know how to get into a stance. Coach put me on the defensive line, so I had to learn how to tackle. We had a running back named Tony Papa. He was a monster! He was the same size in junior high school that he was in college. In practice he ran right over me. I didn’t mind the contact at all; I liked hitting people. Getting hit? Not so much. They moved me from the line to safety. I was safe there; maybe that’s why they call it safety.

In ninth grade our quarterback got hurt, and I got to play the position for the first time. Football, at that time, was a running game with just a little taste of passing. The quarterback mostly handed off the ball to a halfback or fullback and got out of his way, so I didn’t get much opportunity to show off my arm.

In the springtime we rode a bus over to the high school for practice, and the coaches, Lee Hedges and Hal Williams, saw me throwing the football. They were impressed and made me the junior varsity quarterback. They taught me the basics of the position. It wasn’t that difficult: Hand the ball off, throw it to the open receiver, try not to get hit.

Being me—being Terry—at that time was simple. I didn’t have to make decisions because I didn’t have a lot of options. I had a loving family to support me, I had the teachings of my church to guide me, I had school to provide structure for most of the day, and I had my friends. When I got up each morning, I knew where I would be that night. Life is a lot easier that way.

Contrary to what my image was going to become, I actually was an outstanding student all through junior high school. I smoked all the basics. Go ahead, ask me to add numbers. Ask me who the second president of the United States was . . . okay, the first president.

Then I got to eighth grade and encountered algebra, biology, geometry. I had no interest in any of those subjects. In retrospect, I probably should have quit after seventh grade and got myself a job. Instead, I sat in class, pinching myself to try to stay awake.

Maybe to compensate for my lack of academic success, I became the class clown. Good ol’ Terry. I desperately wanted people to like me. I think more than anything else, that’s what defines me: I want people to like me. And as I learned, people like you when you make them laugh. So I learned how to make people laugh. I would do pretty much anything to make people happy, because happy people liked me. It’s a pretty simple equation: Making people happy makes me happy. If doing that required being foolish, then I was willing to be foolish.

I realized that people wanted me to be funny. So that’s the me I gave them. But I also found out if I showed them my other side, the complete human side with sorrow and the emotional pain, they didn’t like me as much. People didn’t need me to be sad. They could be sad on their own. So I found that I could hide behind that funny mask, and no one ever saw what was really going on.

That might have started my very first day in school. During the first hour of the first morning of my very first day, I got spanked. It wasn’t an auspicious beginning. We were standing, and I was leaning on the back of my chair, rocking back and forth. The teacher asked me my name.

“Terry Bradshaw,” I told her.

“Well, Terry Bradshaw,” she said, “please stop rocking in that chair. It’s going to slip, and you’re going to fall and hurt yourself.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. But being Terry Bradshaw, I kept rocking. I couldn’t help it. I wasn’t trying to cause an issue. I wasn’t being intentionally contrary. I was being me. I knew even then that I was different, that I wasn’t like everybody else.

Boom! The chair slipped and I went down. I didn’t hurt myself, but some of the other kids in the class started laughing. The teacher came over and hit me three times on my hand with a ruler. Three times! Man, that hurt. But I learned a very important lesson that day: Do something a little bit different and people pay attention to you. I’d been in school for one hour, and my classmates already knew my name.

The other place I got attention was sports. Not football—at least not at first. I didn’t even start on my high school football team until my senior year, but I could throw a javelin. A javelin is basically an eight-and-a-half-foot spear. At Woodlawn High School I set the national record for seventeen-year-olds with a throw of 244 feet, 11 inches.

This is the strategy for successfully throwing a javelin: First, you throw the javelin as far as you can. That’s it.

The rule back then was that, to be a legal throw, the tip of the javelin had to pierce the ground. My problem was, rather than arcing and digging into the ground, it went so high and so far that it floated and landed flat. The distance was there, but the throw didn’t count. That made my coach furious. Somehow I ended up holding the national record but not the state record, which tells you everything you need to know about track-and-field rules.

My senior year, our track coach, A. L. Williams, took me to the state meet. He was part of my introduction to the world of coaches. I never heard a negative word come out of his mouth. He was always building character, always encouraging, always making athletes feel good about themselves.

I thought every coach was like Coach Williams. Well, that was another mistake I made.

At the state meet, I threw the javelin one time, threw it so the point landed, and sat down. “That’s it,” I said. “That’s the record.” I was done.

Holding a national record made me a big celebrity in school. I got a lot of attention. I was somebody. During that same year, the rodeo came to Shreveport. To publicize it, the stars of the hit TV show Bonanza—Michael Landon, Dan Blocker, and Lorne Greene—made personal appearances. Michael Landon, it turned out, had thrown the javelin at USC. A publicist brought him to the school to meet me. He was the first celebrity I’d ever met. He was a really nice guy.

The Shreveport Times published a photograph of the two of us standing together discussing javelin-throwing technique. That was the first time, other than a headshot, that my picture appeared in the newspaper. I just stared at it. Looking right back at me was this really good-looking guy with a big smile on his face. And I was standing right next to him, a skinny kid with a flattop and a goofy smile showing the gap between my front teeth. Michael Landon was a star. Standing next to him, some of his celebrity just rolled down on me.

I was a track star who also played football. Actually, I sat football. As I mentioned, I didn’t start at quarterback for Woodlawn High School until my senior year. Trey Prather, who received a scholarship from Louisiana State University, was a year ahead of me. Our coach, Lee Hedges, was Vince Lombardi firm—a no-nonsense, no-laughing, run-it-again-and-again teacher who always pushed for excellence. He made you earn his praise and gave it freely when you did. I idolized him. Coaches Williams and Hedges were my coach models. I thought every good coach was as demanding but supportive as they were. That’s how much I had to learn.

All of their players respected them deeply. In fact, several years later, when Trey Prather was killed in Vietnam, both coaches were asked to serve as pallbearers at his funeral.

Coach Hedges’s philosophy was perfect for me: un the football, use passes to move the sticks, and get first downs. Run, control the clock, save the defense. Good basic tough-guy football. We didn’t have much size, but we had desire, and we had my best friend, Tommy Spinks, who was a great receiver. Tommy made me look better than I was at that time. Wherever I threw it, he caught it.

I have no memory of my best game in high school. I was handing off to our running back and fumbled the ball. I tried to pick it up and fumbled it forward. I was scrambling. I got a hand on it, lifted my head, and bam! My own teammate, Larry Brewer, smashed into my helmet and knocked me down. I kept playing, but I don’t remember anything after Larry hit me. Later, I watched the rest of the game on film, and, man, I played great! I executed.

A few months later, when I was being recruited by colleges, they told me they were particularly impressed by that game. That’s the way they wanted me to play for them. I could see where that could be a problem.

Right after the season the college recruiters began showing up. I definitely was not prepared for what was about to happen. This was when things started to become more complicated. Until then, I had a good sense of who I was, and my controlled environment allowed me to be that person.

Life was simple. I had good, basic values. I knew all the rules adults had imposed on my life, and I followed them. I had not been brought up to be materialistic. My grandfather Clifford Hezekiah Gay owned a forty-acre farm in Hall Summit, and we spent time there often. Hall Summit had maybe one hundred and fifty people, and instead of a traffic light, it had stop signs.

My grandfather had two Clydesdales that pulled his plow. When we went down to the farm, we didn’t have to wear shoes. We spent our days digging up worms, playing in the woods, catching crawfish out of the creek, and playing hide-and-seek. He had an outhouse, a two-holer, and we took baths in well water in a big wash tub. He grew watermelons; we’d load up the back of his ’52 Chevy truck and drive through neighboring towns, selling them for twenty-five cents each. On Saturday nights he drove us into Hall Summit in his wagon, pulled by the Clydesdales, and we stopped in front of Slim’s barbershop, where we all got the same buzz cut.

It was peaceful and quiet and uncomplicated. My grandmother made dresses out of fifty-pound flour sacks. She washed the clothes in a great big iron pot in the yard that we lit a fire under. We couldn’t afford the expensive things, but we didn’t need them. We had food, we ordered clothes through the Sears catalog, and my father had a car. Maybe our biggest luxury was a little black-and-white TV set.

One of my grandfather’s brothers farmed a couple thousand acres of cotton. We went to visit him one time, and we all got into the back of his truck and rode into town. He bought all these steaks and a case of Cokes. I thought he had to be the richest person I had ever met; he actually could afford a whole case of soda. That was my idea of being rich. I believed anyone who could buy soda by the case had to be rolling in dough. For a time, that was my goal. If I could just earn enough to buy a whole case of soda, I would be a happy man.

My values were just as basic: work hard, treat people with respect, be kind to all living things, and tell the truth. I tried to live up to those values. I only got spanked two or three times my whole childhood. I still remember the worst smacking I ever received. Our next-door neighbor was a Little League coach, and I had borrowed his really good baseball glove, which was like a $12 Henry Aaron model. I either lost it or it was stolen off my handlebars. I couldn’t believe it. I spent the whole day looking for it, but it was gone.

Gone. When he came over to our house to get it, I began searching through my closet, pretending it was there. I made excuses, trying to fabricate a story that would get me out of trouble. I was on my hands and knees, shuffling things around in the closet, when my father walked in.

“Where’s the glove, son?”

“I thought it was in here,” I said as honestly as I could lie.

He knew I was lying. I knew he knew I was lying. For him, that was about the worst thing imaginable: His son was lying to his face. In a fit of rage, he took off his belt and began hitting me with the buckle end of it. My mother had to jump in and get him off me. That lesson stuck with me. I never lied again.

I did, however, exaggerate. I exaggerated so often that, at times, I found myself exaggerating about how many times I exaggerated. But I do not lie, and I don’t accept people lying to me.

Values mattered in my family. Integrity mattered. While I didn’t learn about this until years after it happened, when I was being recruited, one college offered my father more money in cash than he earned in a year if I would go there. That money would have made a difference in my parents’ lives, but not nearly as big a difference as betraying their values. He didn’t even consider it.

That’s the way I was raised. I’m telling you all this to provide some idea of why all that confusion came later.

My life began changing as I got ready for college. I had received scholarship offers from a few schools, including LSU and Louisiana Tech. Then I was invited to play in the Louisiana State High School All-Star game. It was televised locally, and that was the first time I appeared on TV. I ran up to the camera, looked into it, and said with intention, “Terry Bradshaw. Woodlawn High School. Number 12!” That was so cool. I was on the TV!

I played well enough to attract considerable attention. The colleges were beginning to adopt a pro-style, pass-oriented offense, and they saw that I was pretty raw, but I had a big arm. No one threw it harder than me, even if sometimes I wasn’t quite sure where it was going.

Suddenly, I was offered scholarships by numerous colleges, both big and small. My grades were good enough for the service academies to get involved. I began meeting with coaches and recruiters. I had no preparation for any of this. I had no advisors.

“Just be yourself,” my father told me.

So I was. I wanted all of them to like me, so I definitely did not want to disappoint them. More than a few recruiters left our meetings thinking I might accept their offer.

There was considerable pressure on me to go to LSU. During my sophomore year of high school, I had been in Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge as one hundred thousand people screamed for the purple and gold. Oh, that was truly impressive. It also was scary to me. I hated disappointing one person, so imagine if I let down one hundred thousand people? Trey Prather was there, and he wasn’t playing yet. He had been ahead of me at Woodlawn. If Trey wasn’t starting yet, what chance did I have?

Admittedly, way down deep inside I wondered if I could really play on that level. I’d only started maybe a dozen high school games at quarterback. But I also knew that I had to play at a major college to become a professional. I decided to go to LSU because I believed it was the best place for me. But then I decided not to go to LSU because I realized it was not the right place for me. So naturally, being me, I succumbed to the pressure and signed a letter of intent with LSU.

The fact that I signed with LSU didn’t stop Louisiana Tech from continuing to pressure me. My older brother, Gary, was at Tech on an academic scholarship, my girlfriend was going there, and Coach Williams was an alumnus and was adamant that I needed to go there. It was a good football school and still small enough to fit my personality.

The more I thought about LSU, the more I knew Tech was a better choice. There was nothing I could do, though; I had made a commitment, given my word, and a good person never went back on their word.

This is how I became dumb.

I went down to Baton Rouge to take the College Board entrance exam. I failed it. At times I’ve said I failed it intentionally; all these years later, I’m not sure how accurate that is. But I definitely did not give a full effort, and I was relieved when I failed. The coaches asked me to take it again. I did, but that second time, I meant to fail it. Louisiana Tech was the right school for me, and this was the only way I knew how to get out of my commitment.

That might have been the worst mistake I’ve ever made. We’ve all had our share of moments when we’ve done something we later regretted. Yes, you have. Remember that time you . . . you know what I mean. It’s one of those moments when you make a choice that changes your life’s trajectory.

Believe me, if I had wanted to, I could have passed that test. I wasn’t dumb, but I did a dumb thing. I had no way of knowing how much that decision was going to affect my life. Within a few years I was going to be called dumb. It became my image. Roger Staubach had an image as a brilliant, always level-headed leader. Ken Stabler became “The Snake” because he was hard to tackle. Me? I was the not-so-bright hillbilly. Before Super Bowl XIII in 1979, Dallas Cowboys linebacker Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson told the media that Terry Bradshaw “couldn’t spell cat if you spotted him the C and the A.”

Everybody laughed at that. Except me, and my family. As evidence, people cited the fact that I had failed those exams. Even though Henderson later apologized for that remark, it caught on and became an accepted part of my character: Good ol’ Terry.

For a long time, I fought the image. Being considered dumb is painful. It’s an insult. People would come up to me, thinking they were being clever and friendly, and whispering to me with a smile, they’d say, “It’s an A, Terry.” Gradually, I accepted it, and I began to use it. I became very smart about being dumb.

I easily passed the entrance exam for Louisiana Tech. That turned out to be a wonderful place for me. I only had one little problem academically. Louisiana Tech didn’t have a dorm just for athletes. We didn’t get the level of accommodations there that football players were given at the major colleges. We were treated as regular students. My roommate was an engineering major, and he taught me how to study. I made the mistake of taking a full load of courses while trying to learn a whole new offense.

Our head coach, Joe Aillet, had designed a complex offense. It was so sophisticated that the Dallas Cowboys sent a scout to our spring practice to learn it from him. Coach Aillet was a fine man and so successful they later elected him to the College Football Hall of Fame and named the stadium after him. I never saw him without a cigarette in his mouth, and whenever he talked, I was mesmerized, just watching that cigarette wiggling in his mouth.

Freshman year was a challenge. For most high school graduates in the 1960s, going to college was the first time they had ever lived away from home. Everything was new and different. Trying to learn Coach Aillet’s offense while taking too many credits was a mistake. I failed a history course because I slept through the final exam. I knew the material. I woke up and looked at the clock.

Darn, I thought, panicking. I literally ran across campus to the professor’s office. “I’m really sorry,” I told him. “Can I take it now?”

He was understanding. “You know,” he said, “you never missed a class, and you sat in the front row. In all the years I’ve been teaching, I’ve never had an athlete sitting in the front row. You were always taking notes and I thought, Now here’s a young man who wants to learn.”

I was beaming. I got this one.

“But I’m afraid I have to fail you. Those are the rules. You’re going to have to take the course again next semester. This is a good lesson for you to learn.”

If I had known how to curse back then, this would have been the time for it. Instead, I took his course over. I definitely learned an important lesson from him: In life you’re going to encounter some jerks and you have to figure out how to deal with them.

In Louisiana Tech’s football conference, unlike Division I schools like LSU, freshmen were eligible to play varsity. But as I had in high school, I sat on the bench most of my first two seasons. Our starting quarterback was a clean-shaven young man named Phil Robertson. Now, there was a character. He was a very good quarterback but a much better hunter; he would walk into our locker room barefoot, maybe a squirrel’s tail hanging out of a pocket, duck feathers and fish scales on his clothes. He was always talking about the ducks he shot, the fish he caught, and the squirrels he had . . . Phil Robertson was demonstrating he was an excellent shot, so none of us ever complained too much. Anything you say, Phil. Man, that’s the most beautiful dead squirrel I’ve ever seen.

I thought I should be starting ahead of him. That was natural. Any player who is satisfied sitting on the bench, being second-string, should not be starting anyway. What kept me going was our quarterback coach, a former American Football League quarterback named Mickey Slaughter. He nurtured me, taught me, and encouraged me. Everyone should have at least one Mickey Slaughter in their life. It makes a difference. In my life, he made all the difference.

Many coaches never get the praise they earn. Being a coach is an incredibly difficult job, especially in high school and college. A coach has to try to build character while winning enough to keep the job. It’s a balancing act. Building character is an art; every person is motivated differently. There’s no one motivation that fits all. As Yankees Hall of Fame manager Casey Stengel once explained, “In any group, you’ve got those who love you, those who hate you, and those who are undecided. The key to leadership is to keep the ones who hate you away from those who are undecided.”

A successful coach has to know the X’s, the O’s, and the whys. Why skill level isn’t equaling performance. Why this play works against that defense. I talked about this often with Jimmy Johnson, Dallas Cowboys Hall of Fame coach and my teammate for decades on the Fox NFL Sunday show. He told me he treated players like Troy Aikman, Michael Irvin, and Emmitt Smith differently because they showed up on time, worked hard, did the job, and produced.

Mickey Slaughter figured out that I responded to nurturing. He sensed that if you beat me up, you got nothing out of me. I found out I need love and nurturing; screaming and hollering shuts me down. (My wife will confirm that.) So he just loved me up. Before I was even our starting quarterback, he kept pumping me up, telling me, “You’re gonna be the best. You’re gonna be a star.” He was constantly telling me how good I was to the point where I started believing it.

I was just learning the position, and I made mistakes. But rather than criticizing me, he told me, “It’s okay, don’t worry about it. Just shake it off. It’s gonna be fine.” It was all positive all the time. I flourished even when I made mistakes. I grew from them rather than shriveling up.

When he loved me up, I was comfortable and happy. I wanted to play well to please Mickey Slaughter, to make him proud of me. He saw the talent that I had inside me before I had the opportunity to display it, and it poured out of me through love.

What a great lesson for life. I’ve tried to be that way in my ranching. Sometimes, I’ve succeeded.

Phil Robertson loved hunting more than football, so after two seasons, he left the team, and I became our starting quarterback. He turned his passion into his business; he eventually invented a new duck call—much better than the old “Hey duck, get over here”—and built a large, successful company, Duck Commander. Then he grew a beard and became the star of the very successful reality TV show Duck Dynasty.

I didn’t understand how anybody could just give up football, but as he explained it to me, “I’d rather hunt ducks than have violent men stomp me in the dirt.” Or, as I learned after I became our starting quarterback, ducks don’t tackle!

I started for the next two seasons. With experience, my decision-making caught up to my natural skills. We won a total of sixteen games, lost only three, and went to the Grantland Rice Bowl both years. On the first play of my last game at Louisiana Tech, I was sacked for a nineteen-yard loss. On the last three plays of that game, I was sacked for big losses. Overall, I was sacked twelve times for 143 yards in losses. I also fumbled twice and threw two touchdown passes. We lost 34–13. But I got up and kept getting up. A dozen times.

“Bradshaw afterward was disheveled, battered, and bruised,” The Shreveport Times reported. “He appeared to have been on the losing end of a fight.”

I didn’t like getting hit, but I didn’t mind it too much either. I got hammered plenty of times through the years. But I just got up and went back in the huddle. My father had raised a tough son. I had filled out by my final year at college. At 6'3" and 215 pounds, I was considered big in those days.

The first time I was interviewed by Sports Illustrated, I said, “Football is a contact sport, and I love contact.” I probably meant it too when I said it. I was never very quick, but I loved running the ball.

Mickey Slaughter used to yell at me, “Quit running the ball or at least get out of bounds!” Because he knew I was going to get hurt.

I couldn’t help it. That just wasn’t who I was. I look back at that young man with some degree of wonder. That was me. A lifetime of experiences later, I understand he’s still a part of me, but now he occupies a different space. My attitude then was: I’m a football player and that is the way real football players play football. Never back down from contact. Take a sack and get up. Honor your teammates. Win.

We all carry our history inside us no matter how much we change on the outside. Somewhere, I’m still getting up the courage to kiss that young woman behind the billboard—but don’t tell Tammy, please. Those memories can be warm and wonderful, but they also can trigger feelings that carry hurt with them. I spent a lot of years figuring that out. Being labeled dumb, for example—that scarred me forever.

At the end of my senior season, I was named the Division II All-American quarterback, which attracted significant attention from the NFL. I was a big guy with a big arm. I was invited to play in the Senior Bowl, against almost all Division I players. I was aware a lot of coaches—in fact a lot of people—dismissed my success because I hadn’t played Division I football. In fact, there were rumors spreading that I wasn’t going to play quarterback in the game.

I was furious when I heard that. Soon as I got to our hotel I went up to see our coach, Don Shula. I told him flat out if I wasn’t playing quarterback, I wasn’t playing. Shula looked at me like I was crazy.

“I don’t know where you heard that,” he basically said, “but you’re my starting quarterback and you’re going to play until you want to come out.”

I was representing my team, my conference, and I had a lot to prove. I was not intimidated—they played with the same football—well, at least until our first practice. I took a snap from the center and spun around to hand off the ball to TCU’s Norm Bulaich, and there was nobody there. He’d already gone through the line. I’d never seen a player start so fast before. I knew I had a lot of catching up to do.

I was so excited to play in that game that I forgot to put on a chinstrap. I played the whole game without it. A chinstrap wasn’t going to stop me. Besides, I was already hurt. I had a pulled hamstring and bruised ribs. Here’s the truth: I didn’t feel pain once I got out on the field and adrenaline took over. I could still move around, and the last thing I was going to admit to anyone was that I was hurt. The game ended in a 37–37 tie. I played well. I threw two touchdown passes, and I was named the game’s most valuable player. I knew the pro scouts were impressed.

I don’t know when exactly I accepted the fact that I was going to be drafted, that I was going to have an opportunity to play in the National Football League. On the morning of the draft, I was pretty confident I was going to become a New Orleans Saint. I was going to play in front of my family and my friends. I was still just a big ol’ country boy aw-shucking my way through life. The people in New Orleans would understand me. I could be their kid. New Orleans was a perfect fit for me. They had the number ten pick in the first round, and I was just hoping they would use it to pick me. I never anticipated what was about to happen.