Saints’ Roaf ruled the line

• By SHELDON MICKLES
• Advocate sportswriter
• Published: Jun 21, 2009

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For someone who will wind up among the NFL’s all-time greats in the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a three-time All-Pro and 11-time Pro Bowler in a couple of years, William Roaf’s career got off to a rather inauspicious start.

By his recollection, Roaf weighed about 80 or 90 pounds when he started playing organized football at age 10 in his hometown of Pine Bluff, Ark.

In high school, he played basketball and didn’t get to start in football until his junior year at Pine Bluff High, then received a scholarship to Louisiana Tech — where the 220-pound tackle was promptly redshirted.

But there were other reasons for his slow start.

As the son of an Arkansas Supreme Court justice and a dentist who also was a member of the School Board, Roaf’s first priority as a youngster was school.

“They made sure that I took care of my schoolwork first,” recalled Roaf, one of eight new inductees into the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame on Saturday, June 27, in Natchitoches. “They would rather have me apply myself more to academics.”

He found that out in his junior year, when he was forced to sit out the entire basketball season to get his grades in order.

“He was a good solid student all through junior high, but when he got to high school, he was playing football and basketball, and one year he didn’t do too well in school,” said his mother, Andree Layton Roaf. “He had to sit out of basketball one year, but he brought his grades back up.

“We never thought at that point that (sports) was anything he could make a living on,” she said, “or anything he could count on in the future.”

More on that later.

Back then, there were some good athletes at Pine Bluff High, a fact that kept him out of the starting lineup until his junior season. There also was his love of basketball, which he was good enough at — because of his quickness and agility — to receive a scholarship offer from Southeast Missouri State.

Still, by the time he graduated, Roaf was an All-Conference and All-Super Team football selection who was discovered by Louisiana Tech coaches when they traveled to his school to take a look at two of his all-state teammates — Trey Reid and Elshon Richmond.

Andree Roaf credits then-Tech coach Joe Raymond Peace and offensive line coach Petey Perot with seeing something in her son, who by then was just shy of 6 feet, 5 inches tall.