Why Cincinnati Was the Perfect Place for Peter King to Start His Career

In an excerpt from his new book, the longtime SI scribe revisits the 1984 Bengals season that kicked off his four decades covering the NFL.

W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Reprinted from THE GAME by Peter King. Copyright © 2026 by Peter King. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

A few days before the 1984 NFL draft, the rookie beat guy covering the Bengals for The Cincinnati Enquirer, me, sat in the office of the rookie head coach of the team, Sam Wyche, at Riverfront Stadium. I wanted intel on the Bengals’ draft plans. Since this was my first sit-down with the 39-year-old coach, I figured we’d chat for a bit first, then I’d get to the important stuff. But 30 seconds after he closed the door, Wyche asked me something that got my journalist’s pulse racing.

“Do you want to know who we’re going to draft?” Wyche said in a chipper voice, one I would come to know well.

I’m 26 years old. New kid on the beat. Know very little about franchise founder Paul Brown’s surprise pick to coach the team, Wyche, except: He’s unorthodox, a longtime NFL backup quarterback, Joe Montana’s former QB coach in San Francisco, and perhaps most interestingly, a magician in his spare time. A decent one, I’d heard. “It relaxes me,” Wyche says. But this question—­just what is he trying to do?

Today, the thought of a coach or GM asking a reporter if he wants to know who the team plans to pick before the draft is, well, something that seems out of 1684, not 1984. But I leaped at the bait. “Of course,” I said.

Wyche’s conditions were more than fair: Write what you want, don’t quote me, don’t say any of the picks are definite, don’t share information with out-of-­town writers. There was no internet in those days, no well-known draftniks. What was written in Cincinnati for the morning of the draft stayed in Cincinnati.

Illustration by Luke McGarry

The Bengals held the seventh, 16th and 28th picks in the first round, and the 38th overall in Round 2. Wyche ticked off the players high on the team’s draft board: Arizona linebacker Ricky Hunley, Vanderbilt safety Leonard Coleman, Maryland quarterback Boomer Esiason, North Carolina guard Brian Blados, Furman running back Stanford Jennings, Oklahoma linebacker Jackie Shipp. Maybe Cal linebacker Ron Rivera at some point if Hunley got picked before No. 7.

No reason to think Wyche was playing with me, but just in case, I found Hunley’s number and called him in Tucson. Yes, he said, the Bengals seemed very interested. A couple of blind questions to assistant coaches confirmed others on the Wyche list. So, on draft morning, for my Enquirer draft preview, the first four players I wrote about were Hunley, Esiason, Blados and Jennings.

The first five Cincinnati picks, in order: Hunley, Maryland defensive end Pete Koch (I’d never heard his name before Pete Rozelle announced it around 9:40 a.m. at the draft), Blados, Esiason, Jennings.

The Bengals scheduled an evening press conference to introduce some of their early picks, including the two Maryland Terrapins, Koch and Esiason. I got a Bengals staffer to tell me their flight information, and I drove to the Greater Cincinnati Airport in northern Kentucky at the appointed time, around 6 p.m. I walked to the gate and waited a few minutes for the USAir flight from Baltimore. Talk about a different world: No security. You could wait for your party at the gate, and passengers walked right off the tarmac into the terminal. I was standing there when two large 20-­somethings with duffels slung over their shoulders walked toward the terminal: a stiff-­looking, hulking 6'6", 275-­pound bouncer of a guy, and a 6'4", 225-­pound bright-­blond fellow who did not look happy.

I stuck my hand out, first to Bouncer Guy. “Hey, I’m Peter King with The Cincinnati Enquirer, here to pick you guys up. I cover the team.”

“Hey, Pete Koch,” he said.

Now I shook Blond Fellow’s hand. “Boomer Esiason,” he said. “You’re here to pick us up? They sent a media guy to pick us up?”

I pleaded ignorance. I knew there was a limo with a driver waiting at baggage claim, and I just hoped Koch and Esiason didn’t see him as we walked outside the terminal to my car—­almost a limo, but not quite.

A two-­door red Volkswagen Rabbit hatchback.

“You have got to be sh---in’ me,” Esiason said, looking at the King family car.

I suppose I could have washed and waxed it.

I popped the hatch and squeezed their two bags around the car seat for our 8-­month-o­ld daughter. At least I cleared out the back.

Koch got in the front bucket seat as Boomer folded himself into the back. He was hot about it.

“Jesus,” Esiason spat out. “Welcome to the f---in’ NFL.”

I tried to make small talk. Koch was quiet on the 20-­minute drive to downtown Cincinnati. Boomer talked. As it turned out, he was bitter (his word, not mine) about how the draft had turned out for him. Sitting in his dorm on the Maryland campus all morning, Esiason thought he was likely to go to Washington late in the first round. Instead, Washington’s first pick was Bob Slater, a defensive tackle from Oklahoma. Cincinnati, another team that had worked out Esiason and said a lot of nice things to him predraft, passed on him three times in the first round.

NFL wisdom had Esiason as the first Terps pick in the draft, but he ­sweated it out until he got a call midway through Round 2. Just before the 38th pick, his phone rang.

“Hey, Boomer! Sam Wyche. Wanna be a Bengal?”

Boomer, curtly: “I thought you lost my number.”

“We just found it! We’re gonna pick you,” Wyche said.

Esiason couldn’t have known it that day, but Cincinnati was the best place in the NFL for him. Lots of head coaches in the NFL then were militaristic types, or heavy-­run coaches, and Esiason had chafed under a collegiate version of the tough-guy coach, Jerry Claiborne, for his first two seasons at Maryland. Esiason was a “why?” guy. Wyche was a teacher. (Covering training camp that summer, I lived on the same floor as the coaches on the small campus of Wilmington College. Any time you have questions, Wyche said, just come down the hall and knock on my door. I did, several times.) Esiason loved throwing deep and mentally going deep; Wyche challenged his players to think differently, to be able to change on the fly, to adapt at the line of scrimmage.

I couldn’t have realized it then, but I was seeing the future of offensive football, in many ways. Wyche began introducing the no-­huddle offense that year, knowing he had a group of bright, high-­motor players: Esiason, Cris Collinsworth, Anthony Muñoz, Dave Rimington, Rodney Holman.

Wyche empowered Esiason to use code words to call plays faster. Example: Boss was the football term for “back on strong safety.” But if Esiason was going to change a play at the line, he couldn’t just have one word for the running back to take on the strong safety, because after defenders heard the word four or five times, they could figure it out. By 1988, the Bengals had three code words for Boss:

Bruce, in honor of the Boss, Bruce Springsteen.

Paul, for the Bengals’ patriarch and owner, Paul Brown.

George, for incoming President George H.W. Bush.

‘Boss’ could be triggered by the names of several important figures. | Illustration by Luke McGarry

---

Years later, Esiason said he realized he was in football nirvana for a brainy quarterback: “Sam and the coaches were the architects; I was the general contractor. I had to make things work on the field, and it wasn’t always easy. But we loved it! It was new; it was exciting; it was different. Sam made us feel like rebels. For five or six years, we were as unpredictable as any team ever in the NFL.”

But Esiason also got annoyed at what he called Bengaldom. The Brown family was a smart football family, but good, too, at cutting corners. Spinney Field, the practice facility, lay under a viaduct and was hard by an industrial sector. To call it archaic was to be charitable. “Lockers made of chain-­link fence,” Esiason said years later. “I thought it was a dog kennel.”

Young Peter King, as seen in his dorm room at Bengals camp. | Illustration by Luke McGarry

What could the coaches and players do? It was home. The office in front was Wyche’s, and that’s where he would invent and expand things, including the new no-huddle offense. Which eventually begat the “sugar huddle,” the crazy gathering of the 11 players on offense in what looked like an unorganized mishmash a yard behind the line of scrimmage. Years later, when I asked Wyche about it, he beamed. “It just came from thinking, actual thinking,” Wyche said in a self-deprecating way. “The thing about the no-huddle is you wanted to stop the defense from substituting. But if your quarterback had some things to say to [his teammates], he could do that by sugar-huddling at the line and talking to the guys. And if the defense tried to sub, Boomer would yell out, ‘Set alert!’ And we’re ready to go, the ball is snapped, and hopefully we catch the defense with 12 men on the field.”

The league hated the no-huddle. Steelers coach Chuck Noll privately belittled Wyche and, per author Michael MacCambridge in his book Chuck Noll: His Life’s Work, referred to Wyche as “Harry High School.” Noll found the no-huddle offense “a borderline dishonest way to run a football team.”

“Sam was always in the eye of the tornado,” Esiason said. “He liked it that way. He was different, and he used it to his advantage.”

Different in a way I have always thought the NFL needed. Wyche didn’t have a lot of friends in the league. Noll had no use for him. Houston’s Jerry Glanville hated him, and the feeling was mutual. Most coaches didn’t like anything unorthodox, weird or smart in an edgy way. But you know what unorthodox, weird or smart in an edgy way is? Part of life. And part of progress.

Now, Wyche was a different dude with some real issues. He hated women in the locker room, hated the league office almost irrationally, fought lots of needless battles, and tried to have me fired from the beat during the 1984 season because he was convinced I brought an out-of-town writer to spy on his practice. That bugged me, sure. But I judge people on their whole beings. Wyche the person, at least twice a week, detoured on the way to work to give food and money to Cincinnati’s street people. And Wyche the football coach was imaginative to the core, genuine fun for the No Fun League.

The week before the 1984 season opener, my editor asked me to do a story on Wyche ... the man, the coach, and, yes, the magician. I had an idea. I asked Wyche early in the week if he had a tuxedo. (Yes.) A top hat. (Yes.) Would he be O.K. posing for a picture for our photographer dressed in the tuxedo and discussing his hobby of doing magic? (Yes!)

One more question, from the Sometimes You Never Know Till You Ask Department: “If I could find a white rabbit, and bring the rabbit here to Spinney Field, is there a way you’d put the tuxedo on and we take a picture of you pulling the rabbit out of the hat?”

(Then I ducked.)

“Absolutely!”

You can look it up: Cincinnati Enquirer, Sunday, Sept. 2, 1984, page B-1 ... Sam Wyche, in tuxedo, white gloves and sheepish grin, taking up half the page. Holding a white rabbit above a top hat.

Sam Wyche was both a football coach and a magician. | Illustration by Luke McGarry

By 1988, I was working for Newsday out on Long Island, covering the New York Giants, and the NFL in general. Boomer was a Long Island boy, and Newsday was his hometown paper. So, I was dispatched to write about his season the week of the Bengals’ final regular-­season game, at home against Washington on a December Saturday afternoon.

How the game has changed. I think back to the openness of the NFL during my first year and the closed society it became by Year 40. I certainly don’t think that what happened the night before a big game would ever happen today. The Bengals needed a win to clinch home field advantage throughout the AFC playoffs. National TV—­CBS, with its top team of Pat Summerall and John Madden in the broadcast booth. Tense time around the team. Esiason cared passionately, but he wasn’t one of these players who had a set routine before a game. I phoned and asked how he would feel if I spent some time with him the day before the game. Fine, he said. So, I went to his home Friday afternoon. We talked for about an hour or so. Before he left for the hotel where the Bengals would be sequestered before the game, he said he’d be studying the game plan that night. I asked him if he’d mind if I watched him, or maybe even quizzed him on the plays. Sure, he said.

The quarterback and I sat in his room in the Cincinnatian Hotel. Esiason gave me a binder containing the game plan. I’d name the play, and Esiason would describe it in detail.

Me: Pepper 29 Boss Z Post.

Esiason, without hesitation: Formation is strong left, Z to the right. Z’s gonna be Eddie Brown. He’ll run a post. “Pepper” is a heavy play-action pass. By that I mean it’s gonna look like a run play. Basically, this is a play-action fake to Ickey Woods and I gotta hit Eddie Brown.

How could I know—­how could Esiason know—­that this would be the play of the game?

The next day, the Bengals trailed 17–10 with nine minutes left in the fourth quarter. The offense was struggling against future Hall of Fame coach Joe Gibbs and his team. Second-­and-­9 at the Cincinnati 31-yard line. Esiason ducked into the huddle and called Pepper 29 Boss Z Post. Woods was resting, so backup Stanley Wilson was in the game in his place. Great to have Wilson on the field, Esiason thought, because he sold play fakes like no one he’d ever played with. “Stanley would crash into the line at 100 miles an hour,” Esiason said. “He’d convince everyone on defense he had the ball.”

Wyche’s play design was smart; the run formation was the most obvious you’d ever see. Seven-man line—five offensive linemen, a tight end on either side—and one wide receiver, the “Z,” or flanker, to the right: Eddie Brown. Esiason under center. Two backs: one set left; the other, Wilson, directly behind Esiason. What was Washington supposed to think, with the great Anthony Muñoz and a blocking tight end on the left of the line, and likely the offset back blocking, too, and only one wideout in the game? Second-and-9. Had to be a power run.

At the snap, the seven men on the offensive line fired out. Esiason wheeled left, the ball in his right hand, and put the ball in a charging Wilson’s gut—­for a millisecond. Then he pulled the ball back, ducked while retreating, hid the ball on his hip, and transferred it to his left hand. “Boomer’s mechanics in play-action are perfect,” Wyche said. “There can’t be a quarterback in football better at play-­action.”

The preternaturally calm Summerall began his call on the broadcast: “Stanley Wilson ... ”

Wilson ran behind Muñoz, who let Wilson run by him so the defense would converge on the running back. It did. Wilson ran into the arms of two defenders, who tackled him hard. Washington defensive end Dexter Manley screamed at the offense, convinced the Bengals were now facing a third-and-10. “We got you f---ers!” Manley hollered gleefully.

Esiason, meanwhile, straightened up and saw Eddie Brown with a step and a half on Washington cornerback Barry Wilburn. Boomer let the ball go. Before the football hit its target, Esiason yelled in Manley’s direction: “NO, YOU DON’T.”

The pass sailed 41 yards in the air, in stride to Brown. Right into his hands. Wilburn still lagged behind.

Summerall told America: “The fake was to Wilson, and Eddie Brown ... He fooled everybody. Touchdown, Cincinnati.” Crowd noise. Pause. “He fooled us, and everybody else on that fake. Esiason got the ball to Brown with nobody seeing him!”

King and Esiason spent time studying plays together before a game in 1988. | Illustration by Luke McGarry

---

That was the vital play in Cincinnati’s 20–17 overtime victory. Wyche invention, Esiason execution, as so many plays for the Bengals were in the ’80s. Soon, the rest of the league caught on to what was happening in Cincinnati. Today, the no-­huddle offense, or “tempo” offense, are staples of every playbook, seen in every game.

I’ve often thought how fortunate I was that my rookie year covering pro football happened in Cincinnati, with a nutty professor of a smart coach, a franchise quarterback who was the most open book in the league, and a dividing line between reporter and team that was not the brick wall that it is today. Lucky me.

I was lucky in another way in my rookie year. In dusty, muggy Wilmington, Ohio, site of the Bengals’ training camp, one of the most important figures in pro football history watched every practice from the sideline. Paul Brown, who founded the Bengals and, two decades earlier, the Cleveland Browns, studied the team daily from under his wide-brimmed Panama hat.

In training camp, Brown didn’t mind company, as long as the company wasn’t excessively noisy. He was generous with his lessons. He answered every question I had with patience, wanting to help me, knowing I was a neophyte.

When I left for the job in New York in 1985, I stayed in touch with Paul’s son Mike, who was being groomed to take over the team. I mentioned to Mike one day that my father, a huge sports fan, was quite ill in Connecticut; he probably didn’t have much time left to live. Mike asked me for his address. I figured he might send a card. A few days later, my mother called to say a nice package had arrived by mail: Paul Brown’s autobiography, autographed by Brown himself, along with a handwritten note. She said my dad got emotional reading it.

The note read, in part: “Mr. King, you raised a fine boy.” 

King later went on to a long tenure at Sports Illustrated. | Illustration by Luke McGarry

---