Zak Keefer

zak.keefer@indystar.com

I. London . 1995-97.

This was his introduction to the sport that would reward him with a $140 million contract before his 27th birthday: a scratchy VHS tape of a football game from 1985 he found in their house off Finchley Road. He popped it in the VCR. His eyes lit up. He was mesmerized.

Dad was pretty good that day. Went 24-for-42 for 286 yards and a touchdown. The Houston Oilers beat the San Diego Chargers. The boy watched it, and re-watched it, and re-watched it. Andrew Luck was 8 years old.

“He must’ve seen that game 1,000 times,” his dad, Oliver, remembers.

Soon enough he was teaching his friends this strange sport, American football, tracing routes on the palms of his hand during recess. It was a test of patience. This wasn’t the States – his friends at the American School in London were from all over the world. Pakistan. Korea. Italy. Japan. Most didn’t even know the rules. “I remember a Swedish kid who couldn’t learn it for the life of him,” Luck says now.

Another chapter of a normal childhood in an abnormal setting — the Lucks were Americans living abroad. Oliver’s circuitous career was why. The former NFL quarterback-turned-law-student-turned-failed-congressional-candidate had hauled his wife and one-year-old son to Germany seven years earlier to start a pro football team. Now he was president of the NFL-generated World League of American Football . The family had ballooned to six. London was home, for the moment at least.

Pagano switches up Colts schedule ahead of London game

Two decades later it remains home to Andrew Luck’s earliest memories. Football at recess. Birthday parties for his Pakistani best friend at Lord’s Cricket Ground. Wearing sweatshirts for jerseys during soccer games. “Must’ve been the weather,” he says now, shaking his head. A ride on the school bus one morning when word came from the hospital: His baby brother had been born.

It shaped him, stimulated him, broadened him. Luck spent 10 of his first 11 years in Europe, seven in Germany and three in London, drinking in cultures, customs, history, architecture. He pressed his nose against the car window on weekend jaunts to Paris and Madrid and Berlin. He toured museums. He learned to speak German. He sketched stadium designs. He watched rugby and cricket matches. He fell in love with a different kind of football.

For him it was normal: He grew up thinking everyone’s dad played quarterback in the NFL, and everyone’s dad ran a pro football league in Europe. Now, on the eve of Luck and the Colts venturing across the pond to face the Jaguars on Sunday at London’s Wembley Stadium, just six miles from where the star quarterback spent a slice of his childhood, he can fully grasp the distinctiveness of his youth. It left him a citizen of the world.

His experiences then remain embedded in him now. Luck’s a perpetually curious intellectual, a connoisseur of international eats, a nerd-jock hybrid who can talk Spider 2 Y Banana with Jon Gruden in one breath and Greek fiction with a history professor the next. He’s an excursionist; so remote are the vacation spots Luck disappears to in the offseason his coaches have to look them up on a map to find out where he is. He, too, is an everyman’s quarterback, resolute to blend in while playing the one position that’ll never allow it.

IndyStar: Andrew Luck's passes: from Austin Collie to Zurlon Tipton

“A weirdo,” Luck’s left tackle, Anthony Castonzo, affectionately calls him. “He knows so much about so many places. We’ll be driving into a city for a road game and he’ll be like, ‘Did you know the history of this building?' I’m like, ‘No, Andrew, I have no idea.’ ”

The prototypical American gunslinger? Luck may look the part, but he doesn’t live it. Internally he’s always fought the stereotype, bouncing to the beat of his own interests, interests that were influenced by an eye-opening adolescence spent overseas.

It started in Frankfurt, Germany, long before he ever picked up a football.

II. Germany. 1990-95, 1997-2000.

The first football games he attended were half-sport, half-circus. They were parties.

That was the WLAF (later to become NFL Europe) back in the 1990s: game days short on good football but long on good beer. American football had no tradition, no hold on fans’ interests, certainly not compared with soccer, which was and is borderline religion. So Oliver, first the president of the Frankfurt Galaxy and later president of the league, turned the games into events. The crowds came. They became massive spectacles.

82-year-old man fatally shot in Zionsville; police search for gunman

Dad ran the show. Andrew tagged along. He remembers standing in line for the football toss before one game, watching one hopeful contestant after another throw and miss. These guys don’t know how to throw a football. Wait until I get up there. When he did, he rifled it through. Still fuming, he walked away before they could give him his prize.

He watched NFL exiles slog through Europe, clinging to hope they’d get another shot. Kurt Warner played for the Amsterdam Admirals. Refrigerator Perry for the London Monarchs. Jake Delhomme for the Frankfurt Galaxy. Some guy named Adam Vinatieri kicked for the Amsterdam Admirals.

Still, it was soccer, soccer, soccer for Luck early on. Football was foreign. When Oliver and Andrew would throw the ball back and forth in their front yard, they’d draw stares from the neighbors.

And the more he watched that Oilers-Chargers game from 1985, the more the passion deepened. Andrew begged dad to let him stay up one Sunday night in January 1998 – he’d never seen a Super Bowl before. To this day he can still see John Elway’s historic helicopter dive for a first down in the Broncos’ upset of the Packers. Luck was nine years old that night. By the time he was 22, scouts labeled him the best quarterback prospect since … John Elway.

But Europe for the Lucks was always about more than sports. The family toured museums and historical sites on the weekends, scouting some of the world’s greatest structures and stadiums. Italy. Spain. Holland. Scotland. France. Ireland. A seed was planted in their oldest son. What started with Lego castles in the family’s living room in Frankfurt led to a degree in architectural design from Stanford.

The overseas education runs in the family. Like her son, Kathy Luck attended the American School in London before returning to the states for college. “Between my siblings and I and our mom and aunts and uncles, there’s something like 50 years of schooling for the Lucks in London,” Andrew notes proudly. Kathy still has family who live in Germany; they’ll make the trek to London this weekend to watch Andrew play football for the first time.

Even now he doesn’t hide his German heritage.

“Gut geworfen!” Stanford teammate Konrad Reuland would shout in the huddle in college.

Good throw.

Rating the Colts rookies

“Gut gefangen!” Luck would bark right back.

Good catch.

On game days with the Colts early in his career, Luck and Bjoern Werner, a native of Berlin, would pump each other up by shouting back and forth in German.

III. London. Summer 2016.

He returns almost every summer, relishing the anonymity London offers. Even as the NFL’s highest-paid player, Luck can stroll the sidewalks, ride The Tube and swing into the pubs in peace. He speaks to students at his former school and stops by the family’s old home on Finchley Road, in northern London. He’d never be able to pull that off if he played soccer.

The specter of celebrity that comes with being a star athlete has always made Luck uneasy. He accepts it now, shrugging it off as “part of the job,” but his aversion to attention traces back to his childhood abroad. The Lucks moved. A lot. By his count, 13 times before he was 11 years old. He was always "the new kid," and he hated it. He just wanted to blend in.

He still craves that now, no matter that he’s the face of an NFL franchise and one of the league’s bright young stars. It’s one of the reasons he loved Stanford. On a campus flooded with future scientists, politicians and Silicon Valley CEOs, a Heisman Trophy candidate can toil in the shadows. Luck rode a mountain bike to class, met his sister for pizza dates and played intramural soccer. He’d routinely return to his dorm room on Saturday nights and get asked by oblivious floormates whom the team had played and whether they had won. Imagine that scene at Alabama. Or Notre Dame. Or Texas.

Luck gets etiquette lessons in London

When he chose to return to Stanford for his senior year, Luck said one of the reasons was because he’d miss his professors too much. When he signed the richest contract in NFL history this past summer, he celebrated that night by attending a fundraiser at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis.

When Luck returns to London, he catches one (or two or three) English Premier League soccer games, dabbles in the culture and pretends to be a normal 27-year-old. His eyes light up when telling of the time he saw soccer star Clint Dempsey – another Texan – play for Tottenham. “We got to go on the field afterwards and meet him,” Luck says in the same manner a 13-year-old Colts fan would say of meeting Luck. “To get to be a fan is so much fun.”

He spreads his love for football. He’s hosted quarterback clinics with his dad in years past, and this past summer, assisted by teammate Dwayne Allen, Luck hosted an NFL UK Camp at Royal Holloway University. He ran the campers through basic drills, indoctrinating the youngsters in the fundamentals of a foreign sport. For Luck, it was like elementary school recess all over again.

On Sunday he’ll suit up for the Colts six miles from the house he lived in as an 8-year-old, the same house where his passion for football was born. It started with that scratchy VHS tape, the glow of a television screen and a football game from 1985. He started by watching dad.

The Lucks returned to the States in 2000, landing in Houston. Andrew Luck was in the fourth grade. He’d already seen half the world.

He figured it was a good time to go out for quarterback.

Call IndyStar reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134. Follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.

Download the Indystar Colts App