ANDY REID WAS 9 when he orchestrated his first successful downfield bomb. The story goes like this: Standing atop Holly Knoll Drive, in the idyllic Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, Reid and his gang of childhood friends dropped a shot-put into the gutter and let it go, hoping it would bounce harmlessly onto the curb below. They soon watched in paralyzed awe as it careened down the street, transforming into a cannonball with each successive rotation.

"You can picture it: bunch of guys standing around giggling -- 'This is gonna be good,'" says Pete Arbogast, who grew up on Holly Knoll and is now the voice of the USC Trojans. "It jumps the curb going 40 mph, goes airborne and, like a cannonball, BOOOOM, it goes through one car door and out the other. We all just went 'Ahhhh!' bumping into each other, and then scattered like cockroaches."

The cannonball tale is just one of many in the vibrant life of one of the NFL's winningest coaches. Running late for a summer baseball league game, Reid once drove his car straight to the mound, got out and started warming up. Working as a caterer at "The Tonight Show," he famously stiffed John Wayne when the Duke asked for more meatballs. And, of course, there's Reid's now-legendary appearance as a 13-year-old man-child in the 1971 Punt, Pass and Kick competition. Reid was so huge that he had to borrow a jersey from 6-foot-1, 207-pound Los Angeles Rams running back Les Josephson.

Although Reid, who will go for his 200th regular-season win against the Indianapolis Colts on Sunday, rarely divulges the Holly Knoll Drive side of his personality, his prolific career provides a treasure trove of insights and anecdotes from across the football landscape. So ESPN asked the people who know him best to help tell Reid's story: the larger-than-life childhood, the transformation at BYU, the triumph and tragedy in Philadelphia, the discovery and development of MVP Patrick Mahomes, and whether this partnership can produce the one thing that will surely shot-put Reid into the Hall of Fame: a Super Bowl ring.

A two-way lineman and straight-toe placekicker for John Marshall High School, Reid once broke a church window with an errant kick, but as a senior he lifted Marshall into the playoffs with a last-second game-winning field goal. Reid then attended nearby Glendale Community College for two seasons before transferring to BYU. Although his college playing career was plagued by a knee injury, BYU still had a profound effect on Reid's life. It was the place where he found his profession, his wife and his religion -- although he says he had to drive 30 miles to Heber City for a decent taco.

Rick Burkholder, Kansas City Chiefs trainer: His mom was a doctor and his dad was an artist. His mom had an unbelievable, analytical mind. And his father's side gave him his outside-the-box thinking. So he's got a little art and a little science in his football.

Jimmy Evangelatos, Glendale teammate and lifelong friend: He started as a journalism major at BYU and, because of his mom, was also thinking about premed. Andy didn't really know what he wanted to do, even at the end of his time at BYU. But he told me, "LaVell Edwards for some reason saw something in me and he came up to me one day and said, 'Andy, you know what you'd be good at? You'd be a good coach.'" And the light just kinda went on for him right then.

Jim McMahon, former BYU quarterback: I saw Andy recently, and I said, "Man, I wish you were this big when we were back at BYU. It would've taken defenders a little while longer to get around you." He was a heck of an athlete, and he had really good feet. I also think the philosophy we had at BYU stuck with him: that the quickest way to score is to throw the ball, and that's never going to change.

John Cicuto, former Glendale coach: He was a gigantic monster of a kid, with a big smiley baby face, from the time he was about 12. He used to drive his parents' 1920s Model A Ford to practice, and it was the funniest thing you've ever seen -- this big old guy driving this tiny little antique car. He took up almost the entire front seat.

Evangelatos: His personality, even as a blocker, was more intellectual. Defensive players, we hit somebody and we go crazy running around the field. Not Andy. He'd block someone literally off the field and just walk to the bench and sit down.

Burkholder: He had a grandfatherly way about him even when he was young.

Tom Holmoe, BYU teammate and current athletic director: We were both Lutherans when we started school. It's an odd story, the only two Lutherans up at BYU. We'd go to the Lutheran church, had to be the smallest Lutheran church in the world in Provo. I joined the [Mormon] church six years after I left school. Kind of like me, Andy fell in love with a girl [his wife, Tammy]. When I heard he wanted to get baptized, I said to him, "Andy, why are you doing this?" He said, "I really believe for me this is the way."

Evangelatos: Tammy is Andy's neck. He still has his brain and he makes decisions, sure, but she decides which way his head is pointed, what direction he's facing.

Holmoe: After BYU, the first place he went to coach was San Francisco State, where he and Tammy lived in this tiny place on campus and the coaches had to sell hot dogs on the quad to raise money for the program. You're going to think: "What kind of a program was this? What a sloppy job." But I'm telling you, Andy Reid sold more hot dogs than any coach in the history of San Francisco State.

Reid spent a decade grinding his way up the coaching ranks from San Francisco State to Northern Arizona, UTEP and Missouri. In the summer of 1992, Mike Holmgren hired Reid, his former grad assistant at BYU, to be the tight ends coach on his staff in Green Bay, setting up perhaps the greatest meet-cute between coaches in the history of the NFL.

Steve Mariucci, former Green Bay Packers quarterbacks coach: I'm in Green Bay, right after getting hired, staying at a motor lodge with my wife so we can go house-hunting in the morning. In the middle of the night, the fire alarm goes off. That damn thing would not turn off. So I open the door in my tighty-whities to see if there's smoke or people running down the hallway or whatever. I look down one way -- nothing. I look down the other way, and three doors down there's this big giant redhead -- it looked like a dang lion's head -- sticking out a door staring at me. I'm looking at him. He's staring at me. The alarm's still going off. He's in his underwear too. And I go: "Reid?" And he goes: "Mariucci?" And we both go, "Oh! Hey, how ya doing!?" and come marching out, hugging in the hallway in our underwear. Then he goes, "Hey, you wanna meet my wife?" So now the wives come out wrapped in blankets to meet each other, and there we are the four of us just gabbing away in our underwear with the fire alarm still going off.

Doug Pederson, Philadelphia Eagles coach: There's never a stone that's left unturned. Every stone has been turned over once, twice, three times. That's something people have talked about, but they really don't know the extent with Coach Reid. I go back to when I was a player. I was a quarterback in Green Bay, and he was the tight ends coach. One of the things he mentored me with that carries over to today is just the details of the work.

Mariucci: Holmgren threw us in the same office, which was more like a closet. So yeah, you get to know someone really well. But it was fun. We started from the bottom like you're supposed to. We coached against each other in T-ball. And we ate. We ate, man. One night we were at the Prime Quarter and we both order a giant 40-ounce steak. This thing is huge. The girl comes out and tells us if we eat this thing in under an hour you get your picture on the wall and a chef's hat and all that. Andy finished his in 19 minutes. I ate mine in 30. Our picture is still on the wall there.

Brett Favre, former Packers quarterback: We had the same chain crew for years, and one of them was a big overweight guy. So during a home game in the early 1990s, Andy is pacing up and down the sidelines with his headset on, and suddenly the cord catches and his head is yanked back hard. He looks to see who is on his cord and it's the overweight guy. Andy goes, "Hey, get off the cord, you fat-ass!" And the guy looks right back at Andy, confused, and he yells back, "Who you calling a fat-ass?!"

Mariucci: Andy's a big man, but he's a teddy bear and a gentleman. Seldom loses his cool. But one time at Lambeau, we were hurrying through the concourse from the coaches box down to the locker room during halftime, and things weren't going our way, and some fan said something to us. I don't know what it was -- "You suck, go back to college," maybe -- but whatever it was, it didn't sit well with Andy. It stopped him dead in his tracks, and his face turned the color of his hair and mustache. I have never seen him like this before, but he was so pissed, he stopped and kinda like bowed up on this guy. I don't want to say he was ready to fight, but he was ready to confront this guy. I had to run back and grab him by the shirt.

Reid spent seven seasons in Green Bay during a stretch when the Packers reached two Super Bowls, winning one, and Favre earned three straight league MVPs. On Jan. 11, 1999, after Holmgren jumped to Seattle, the Eagles announced they had hired Reid as their 20th head coach. The Eagles' unique job search and a series of then-unorthodox interviews helped Reid, a relative unknown at the time, beat out Jim Haslett for the job. The Eagles' offer made Reid, then 40, the second-youngest head coach in the NFL (behind Jon Gruden) and the first to make the jump from QB coach to head coach without any experience as a coordinator.

Joe Banner, former Eagles president: We made a list of every coach that had been to at least two Super Bowls, going back to the Bill Walshes and the Joe Gibbses, and we tried to study what they had in common. Some were older, younger, offensive-minded, defense, ran the ball, passed the ball; what they had in common had nothing to do with football. ... So I started calling GMs and asking, "Do you have anyone on your staff that the players complain about because he's so obsessed with details?"

And in comes Andy to our interview with a giant book -- they are common now but not back then -- and this book is 5 inches thick and had everything laid out in such detail, about every part of how he'd run the team. I mean, everything: from how he'd run camp, to his top 10 candidates for every assistant-coaching position, and summaries, honestly, summaries of every opening speech of every coach he had ever worked for.