Doyel: Arm-ripping former Colts LB Barry Krauss has become an ... artist?

CARMEL – The question caught him by surprise, and so did his answer. Barry Krauss doesn’t know where they’d been hiding, but the words felt good when they came sprinting out of his mouth.

For so long he had denied one of his true gifts by immersing himself in others. There was football, of course. Krauss, who first joined the Indianapolis Colts broadcast team in 1992 and for years has worked their postgame radio show, played middle linebacker for the Colts from 1979-88 and for Alabama coach Bear Bryant before that, a first-round pick after making the most famous tackle in Alabama history in the 1979 Sugar Bowl.

Krauss doesn’t assume anyone knows about the tackle, or his career at Alabama, and he’s not one to talk about himself, which is funny given that he’s a coveted motivational speaker. That’s another of his interests, public speaking, another way he has avoided an essential truth about himself until he finally spoke that truth into existence a few weeks ago.

You name it, he’s dabbled at it. He sold insurance, sold real estate, wrote a book. About 20 years ago a buddy of his ran for mayor and asked him to help run his campaign. That’s how Barry Krauss became a political operative for Jim Brainard in Carmel, even serving on Brainard’s first planning commission. All those roundabouts in Carmel? Krauss was there for the first one. That’s another thing few people know, though it’s not an essential truth.

Last month Krauss found himself on the media elevator at Lucas Oil Stadium with one other person, heading to the press box for a Colts game. I know this story, because the other person on that elevator was me. Barry introduced himself, maybe the third time he’s done that, because that’s who he is: unassuming to the point of absurdity. Several floors still to go, so I’m asking him a question:

Barry, how do you spend your time when you’re not here?

Krauss doesn’t pause. Caught off guard, he says the first thing that comes to mind. He is about to tell someone else, someone outside his family, the essence of who he is – something as fundamental as the football ability that set his life on the course that led to this moment.

“Well,” he says, “I’m an artist.”

* * *

Bear Bryant didn’t coach a chicken. If you were scared he’d run your ass right out of Alabama, and several times a year he tried to do just that to everyone on roster.

“He pushed all of us to the point of quitting,” Krauss remembers, “just to see if you had it in you. He’d rather you quit in practice than a game.”

They’d practice for hours at a time, full pads, no water. This was the 1970s, remember, prehistoric days in the evolution of football. Krauss remembers a game early in his sophomore season when the Crimson Tide won – they almost always won – but fell short of Bear Bryant’s standards. So Bear convened practice for the next morning: Sunday at 6 a.m. Full pads.

“We’re going to play the game again,” he told his team, and that’s what they did.

Bear Bryant fostered fear in his players, but for those who survived it, the Bear sent them onto the football field and then out into the real world with a fearlessness earned under the Alabama sun.

But Krauss can admit it: For years he was scared of his art. Scared to show it to anyone. Scared that their reaction would reveal his talent to be less than a calling and more of a hobby. So he didn’t draw, not for anyone else to see. Oh, he’d get bored at school or work and find something to draw, mainly his hands and feet. He’d crumple up the paper and throw it away.

“You really put yourself out there to be criticized, and it’s a hard thing to do,” says Krauss, 60. “If I do a piece of art, OK, I eventually have to show it to somebody. Oh (expletive): Is the guy going to go, ‘It sucks?’”

Before Krauss was willing to consider himself an artist, he painted a piece. Just to see what would happen. He put it out there, and here’s what the art world let him know:

It does not suck.

* * *

The play that changed everything came late in the 1979 Sugar Bowl, Alabama and undefeated Penn State, Bear Bryant and Joe Paterno. Alabama leads 14-7 but Penn State has the ball at the Alabama 1-yard line, second and goal, less than five minutes left. Twice Penn State tries to score by running into the teeth of the Alabama defense. Twice Alabama says: No.

Now it’s fourth down. Say “the goal line stand” in Alabama, and they know what you’re talking about: Penn State quarterback Chuck Fusina hands to Mike Guman, who churns toward the end zone and leaps atop the pile, where he is met by Barry Krauss. Guman goes backward. Krauss slides off the pile and toward the Superdome turf, where he lies motionless.

“Watch the video,” he says. “I’m down on the ground. I had no feeling in my arm. That happened to me once or twice a game. In those days you just played through it.”

Krauss is convinced the goal line stand is why Baltimore Colts owner Bob Irsay drafted him in the first round a few months later. Maybe a decade ago, long retired from football and finished with Carmel politics and now dabbling in sales and public speaking, Krauss notices the market for hand-painted sports memorabilia. A skilled Birmingham artist named Daniel Moore has tapped into it and is selling paintings of famous plays in Alabama football history, selling them faster than he can paint them, when someone suggests Krauss give it a try: Paint the goal line stand.

So Krauss gives it a try. This is about 10 years ago. He sets up a handful of photographs of the most famous defensive play in Alabama history, draws it by hand and paints it with water color. He calls it Goal Line Stand and makes prints. Word spreads.

The Paul W. Bryant Museum in Tuscaloosa ordered 1,000.

“This is like ($60,000) or $70,000 I just made,” Krauss says. “I’m like: ‘Wow. Really?’ Next thing I know I had a website, but I’m kind of … I get distracted a lot. I don’t know if I have issues, but I go from one thing to another. I went away from painting. My wife posted that print again a few weeks ago on Facebook, and I sold about $5,000 in prints in the last few weeks. And then you asked me that question: ‘What do you do?’ Well, I’m an artist.”

Krauss is about to say something funny and ridiculous. We’re sitting in his living room in downtown Carmel, under a giant water color of Bear Bryant. It’s something he painted years ago on a piece of plywood, shortly after selling those prints of Goal Line Stand but before he got distracted and stopped painting. Instead he sold real estate. Helped his wife, Michelle, in her role as publisher of the Homes and Land Magazine in the Chattanooga area, where they also have a home. He even went back to school, 16 hours short of the degree he’d always promised his father and Bear Bryant that he’d get. He’s taking mostly online classes now, and will graduate in 2018.

“I’ll even wear my little outfit and walk (for graduation),” he says, and it’s funny, but that’s not the funny and ridiculous thing I was telling you about a few moments ago. A conversation with Krauss is a glimpse into his life – it’s fascinating, and it’s all over the map – and now I’m asking him to get back to the point: My question about what he does in his spare time. His answer about being an artist. And what happened next.

“Oh, OK,” Krauss says to me from his living room in Carmel. “I told my wife: ‘Oh no, he wants to talk about it, and I don’t have any inventory. I’m just getting into it and I don’t want to disappoint him.’ So I was ducking you at the next few games.”

You were … what? Come to think of it, maybe I noticed subconsciously, because at the most recent Colts home game – Nov. 26 against Tennessee – I found Krauss and handed him a piece of paper and said: Give me your contact number.

“I’d been ducking you,” he says again, smiling as the Alabama coach who tolerated no fear glowers over his shoulder.

Hey, life isn’t as linear, as simple as the TV makes it look. After his wife put Goal Line Stand on Facebook and sold all those copies several weeks ago, Krauss wanted to start painting again but just … couldn’t. And didn’t. Out in California, his daughter Ashley was going through something similar. She’s a photographer who wasn’t inspired to take photos. Together, with the help of a motivational book, they made a pact to start a new habit: Every morning, she’d take photos of something, anything. Every morning, he’d paint. Something. Anything.

“You don’t have to show it to someone,” he says. “Just do it. So I started doing that with drawings. Every morning, create that new habit. Now, I think I might have had breakthrough where I’m enjoying getting up and thinking and looking at things. What’s my next project?”

They’re coming easy to Barry Krauss now, pictures he draws with pencil or paints in water color. All of it happens fast, nothing to be sold commercially, just the habit he is building. For the last week my cell phone has been dinging with text messages from Krauss, photos of his latest dabblings: Bear Bryant in pencil, all jowls and scowls under that porkpie hat. A water color of Alabama quarterback Jalen Hurts throwing a football, the ball coming right out of my phone, so real I want to catch it. Oh, look: Here’s a pencil drawing of Krauss’ four adult children. And an abstract of former NFL linebacker Ray Lewis, snarling beneath a helmet perched atop his head. And there’s Peyton Manning – as a Colt, not a Bronco – arm cocked to throw.

They are remarkable, they are art, but for Barry Krauss they are practice, something he has whipped up in an hour or two. In a matter of weeks he has been coming to terms with who and what he is, and reveling in the reaction it brings. That includes old teammates from Alabama and the Colts, most of whom had no idea their monstrous middle linebacker was so … artsy.

“It’s kind of funny, because I played this violent game and I loved it – I wanted to rip a running back’s arm off and throw it at him – but, yeah, I’m an artist,” says Krauss, who played at 6-3, 265 pounds. “Remember (singer) Barry White? Some people criticized his music, and he said: ‘I don’t care what people say about my music. This is my music, and I express myself.’

“Well, that’s where I’m getting: This is from me and it’s my art and I don’t care. I do this because it’s an expression of who I am.”

You heard the man. He’s an artist.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter: @GreggDoyelStar or at facebook.com/gregg.doyel.

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