For Proehls, Family Business Is Receptions - Rams Club
Austin Proehl watches intently the video clip running on a smartphone in front of him—the St. Louis Rams and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the NFC Championship game in early 2000, Tampa Bay clinging to a 6-5 lead, under five minutes to play, the ball hanging in the air, No. 87 Ricky Proehl battling a Buccaneer cornerback step-for-step and making an heroic one-hand catch in the corner of the end zone.
"I remember this so well,” says Proehl, who happened to be exactly four years and three months old at the time. “I remember every minute of it. He's got unbelievable hands and ran an unbelievable route. He's having to fight someone off every step, and the guy is holding his right arm and he catches it with one hand. No one can possibly understand how hard that is. And then to hold onto it going to the ground ...”
Proehl smiles and shakes his head.
"That's an awesome clip,” he says. “That moment and those memories of him playing and doing the things he did—I think he deserves so much more.
Two weeks later, the Proehl family was in Atlanta for Super Bowl XXXIV, Ricky taking the field with the Rams against the Tennessee Titans, wife Kelly in the stands with Austin, six-year-old daughter Alex and newborn son Blake. Austin's upper body was draped in an oversized Rams' jersey and his head sported a cap turned backwards, the youngster in total celebratory mood after seeing his heroes at the pinnacle of the sport.
"It was the coolest thing,” Austin says. “My dad would take me to work every Saturday, and I'd clean their helmets and polish them. I'd kiss Marshall Faulk's helmet, he was a special guy to me. They'd kid me and pick on me. I loved it. It was everything to me.”
After the Rams' 23-16 win, Ricky plucked Austin from Kelly's arms and paraded him around the field on his shoulders.
"That was such a special time for me,” says Ricky, the former Wake Forest receiver and now the receivers' coach for the NFL's Carolina Panthers. “We had a great group of guys on that team and it came together at the end. To share it with my family was something I'll always remember.”
"It was a such a beautiful moment as Austin was really close to those guys even at a very young age,” adds Kelly.
The memory cache for the Proehls runs deep and wide. Ricky played for six NFL teams over 17 years, with Austin being born in Seattle (“He called them the Hee-hawks,” his mom remembers), attending games as a two-year-old in the arctic clime of Chicago's Soldier Field and then migrating to St. Louis, Charlotte and Indianapolis. Ricky played in four Super Bowls, with the ecstasy of the win over the Titans tempered two years later by a seven-point Rams loss to the New England Patriots in New Orleans.
"He literally bawled, threw a full-blown temper tantrum, from the Superdome to the hotel,” Kelly says. “He was old enough to grasp it, not fully by any means, but he loved being around it.”
And of course, Austin and his younger brother Blake played football just as their dad had, the boys taking after Ricky and carving their niches as receivers with good hands, precise route-running, the ability to read coverages and overall toughness. Blake is a senior at Providence High and has committed to play at East Carolina next year.
"He taught me like I was an NFL player,” the 5-foot-10 Austin says of his development. “Getting in and out of cuts was the biggest thing. Obviously, I'm not the biggest guy out there. I'm not the 6-4 recruit a lot of big schools were looking for. He just told me if you are quick getting in and out of your cut, if you come back to the ball, you can make plays no matter how big you are.”
Tar Heel receivers coach Gunter Brewer was two years ahead of Ricky at Wake Forest in the mid-1980s and had followed Ricky's NFL career and remained in touch as he went into coaching and then Proehl retired from the NFL in 2006, entered private business and then accepted an offer from Panthers owner Jerry Richardson in 2011 to try coaching. Brewer recruits the Charlotte area and his eye caught the action from Austin at Providence High soon after Brewer began learning his territory in 2012 after joining Larry Fedora's staff. Austin was leaning toward Virginia Tech after his junior year until he had a great workout at Fedora's Freak Show in June 2013 and thought the slot receiver—or “A-Back” in Fedora's parlance— would be a good fit. He committed in July 2013 before his senior year.
"Austin competed well at the Freak Show,” Brewer says. “He ran well, his route-running was outstanding. His understanding of the game, the intangibles, were all there because he'd been around the game all his life. We tried to make room for him and had a spot open up. We offered him and he flipped to us.”
Proehl saw spot duty as a reserve and on special teams his first two seasons. But Brewer had him learn the two outside receiver positions as well and Proehl took Mack Hollins' spot in the first half of the Georgia game and was ready to become a starter when Hollins was lost for the year in mid-October. Proehl caught 36 passes for 506 yards and three touchdowns as a junior.
"He's the best route-runner on the team,” Brewer says. “He understands where the holes are on the defense. He can get sneaky. He can be sneaky fast as the defense sits on him and doesn't respect him on a deep ball. But he makes his living on the underneath ball. You can count on him in tough situations. He's made more catches than he's missed. He's extremely dependable.”
The 2015 football season was a vintage one in the Proehl family as Austin and the Tar Heels won the ACC Coastal title and knocked off 11 opponents in a row, while Ricky and the Panthers posted a 15-1 regular-season record and advanced to the Super Bowl before losing to Denver in QB Peyton Manning's last game. There again another connection—Ricky was a receiver with Manning at Indy in the 2006 season in winning that Super Bowl.
"It was an awesome year for both teams,” Austin says. “People always found a way to doubt both teams. With us, it was that we couldn't play with Clemson, we weren't big enough, they had more five-star guys. With the Panthers, they doubted Cam Newton, they said we didn't have big-time receivers. Each week, both teams put all that stuff aside, we'd showed up and for 60 minutes on Saturday or Sunday proved people wrong. It was really cool.”
From the Rams in 2000 to the Tar Heels in 2016, the Proehl family affair came full circle on back-to-back weekends in October. Austin scored a touchdown for the Tar Heel in mid-October at Miami, his five-yard catch at the back of the end zone coming in the same stadium where Ricky had won his second Super Bowl, the Colts edging Chicago in 2007.
Then in Charlottesville in late October, Ricky was able to see the Carolina-Virginia game in person since the Panthers had a bye week. He was standing between the Tar Heel bench area and the end zone to the west end of Scott Stadium midway through the fourth quarter when Austin snared a 46-yard scoring pass from Mitch Trubisky. Proehl juked a defender at the line scrimmage, ran a streaking post-route, found an extra gear to chase the ball down and caught it with his arms fully extended in the end zone.
Now it was father watching son.
"It was like an out of body experience,” Ricky says, “being able to watch up close and see him accomplish something he's dreamed about—playing college football at the top level. He was so enamored with many of my teammates, guys like Marshall Faulk and Torry Holt. So, for him to play at a high level, that's pretty exciting.
"He made the catch look easier than it was. It was a tough catch. Anytime the ball passes beyond your eyes and you have to follow it in, it's a tough catch. He caught that one below his waist. As a dad, I'm biased, but he made it look easy. I'm glad I was there to see it. I was very humbled by the experience.”
Next fall the Proehl family's attention will be split between Chapel Hill and Greenville on Saturdays and Charlotte on Sundays. Austin wistfully reflects on the passing of three years as a Tar Heel in the blink of an eye and notes he still has more dreams out there—to play in the NFL as his dad did so well. He thinks a Tar Heel receiving corps hit by the loss of three seniors will be motivated to prove the naysayers off base.
"The biggest thing my dad always told me was, ‘If you don't believe in yourself, no one else will,'” Austin says.<
This story appeared in the February 2017 issue of Born & Bred magazine.