Galu Tagovailoa was a power-lifter who played defensive line.
At 5-foot-9, he isn't a towering presence. And as a lefty, he was a rarity in his Hawaiian family. That bugged him until his son came along. When a young Tua Tagovailoa didn't deviate from the dominant genes in the family, dad stepped in.
"You know," Galu Tagovailoa said well over a decade later, "I switched him to a left hander. But he's actually a right hander."
It's funny now since neither father nor son could have known this preschool-aged Hawaiian would grow into one of the top high school quarterbacks in the country. His family didn't necessarily have quarterback builds in the gene pool. Even if they had, these were the days of Michael Vick's prime. Left-handed Chris Simms was a starter in Tampa Bay and Tim Tebow was about to become a star.
Those days, for some reason, have passed. Stepping on the Bryant-Denny Stadium turf for Saturday's A-Day game, Tua Tagovailoa is especially rare in college and pro football.
Only one lefty remains in the NFL these days. Alabama had Ken Stabler and Mike Shula, but hasn't had a passer throw with the other arm since David Smith graduated in 1988.
To this day, Alabama's true freshman quarterback does everything but throw a football with his right arm. Dad just wanted another lefty to throw the ball when son was about three or four.
It stuck.
"It just became fluent and he just grew into it," Galu Tagovailoa told AL.com. "That's the crazy part about it. I never thought I could make him adapt to that. As we constantly kept putting the ball on his left hand, eventually he grew into throwing the ball with his left."
An early enrollee playing behind returning starter Jalen Hurts, Tagovailoa is athletic just like the incumbent. His ability to run and move the pocket made him one of the nation's top quarterback recruits in 2017.
The fact he throws left just makes him unique in modern football. There are theories as to why there are fewer Tebows and Vicks the game today. The investments in left tackles that block specifically for the blind side of right-handed passers has been cited. A tendency to design offensive plays and formations around quarterbacks throwing righty was also thrown out there.
"I know you have to change things a little bit from a schematic standpoint relative to protections and things that you do on offense to accommodate a left-handed guy maybe a little bit more than it would a right-handed guy," Alabama coach Nick Saban said.
Even Stabler, who went on to a Hall of Fame career with the Oakland Raiders, was met with resistance when he got to Tuscaloosa in the 1960s.
"I never trusted left-handed crap shooters or left-handed quarterbacks," coach Bear Bryant told Stabler according to Keith Dunnavant's 2006 book "The Missing Ring."
None of this entered Galu Tagovailoa's mind more than a decade ago. Nothing about the gene pool suggested his son would grow to be 6-foot-1. As a flag football player, Tua Tagovailoa was an outside linebacker. It took an injury to the quarterback for coaches to have that lightbulb moment.
A few years later, Vince Passas got a first look at the next big thing. The quarterbacks coach at St. Louis High School in Honolulu, Passas remembers the young southpaw slinging the ball around with high school kids when he was no younger than eight.
If there's a universal knock on left-handed throwers, it's the speed of the throwing motion. Tebow's long mechanics were a constant criticism of the 2007 Heisman Trophy winner.
Passas never saw that with Tagovailoa.
"I think it's amazingly quick. Nice, compact," Passas said. "Throws are super accurate. The ball always seems to be coming out in front of his body. The point of the football is always going down. I haven't seen anyone like him before. I taught Marcus Mariota and he was accurate. And this guy is super accurate. He's the measuring stick, especially here in Hawaii."
Several quarterback coaches interviewed had a hard time explaining why left-handed quarterbacks are disappearing from the game. All, however, acknowledged how rare Tagovailoa's skill set is these days.
"It's definitely noticeable," said Ken Mastrole, a Fort Lauderdale-based quarterback coach who worked with former Alabama starter Blake Sims. "Even in my business where it's year-round training here in South Florida. I could count on one hand the number of left handers that you see out there."
David Morris of QB Country has worked with left-handers like Tebow, though 90 percent throw with the right arm.
"So, when you see a lefty," Morris said, "it almost tricks your eye a little bit."
Neither thought left-handed players were discouraged from playing quarterback. Mastrole said he only heard a low-level coach or two say a left-hander would not be welcome in a given offense.
There are a few things that take adjustment when a quarterback throws from a different arm. Coaches are split on the impact of the spin tumbling a different direction with the lefties.
Alabama receiver Calvin Ridley noticed a difference in Tagovailoa's throws.
"It kind of comes out weird," Ridley said early in spring practice. "But it's all the same and you have to catch it."
The same applies to Morris when he's working with the rare left-handed passer.
"Still to this day," Morris said, "I don't have a tough time catching it, but it takes an adjustment period to catching a left-handed ball."
The examples for Tagovailoa are fading away. Growing up, Vick was his favorite quarterback to watch. The left-handed No. 1 pick in the 2001 draft retired this year. That leaves third-string Dallas Cowboy Kellen Moore as the only one remaining in the NFL. The days of Steve Young, Mark Brunell and Boomer Esiason are gone.
None of the last 70 quarterbacks drafted in the last six years has been left-handed, according to NFL.com.
The SEC had a run of talent in the early 2000s with Kentucky's Jared Lorenzen and Georgia's David Greene before Tebow's Heisman and two national titles.
"We're a dying breed," Brunell told the Chicago Tribune in 2015. "We need someone to relight and carry the torch for us. If we don't find that, we could become extinct here soon."
There were high hopes for Malik Zaire at Notre Dame before breaking his leg in 2015 and losing the job to DeShone Kizer. He's still looking for a new school after leaving South Bend at the end of last season. Brent Stockstill of MTSU faced Alabama in 2015 and threw for 174 of the 7,279 career passing yards thrown by his left arm.
That's where Tagovailoa fits in.
The dynamic with returning starter Hurts and his three years of eligibility won't make things easy. A-Day should mean serious playing time with a national TV audience watching.
They'll see what Galu Tagovailoa witnessed over the years back in Hawaii. He always liked watching left-handers throw a football.
"They would look smooth," dad said. "When Tua first started off, I had him throwing the ball but throwing thinking he would be a quarterback."
Yet here he is, a highly-ranked recruit who moved 4,300 miles to the mainland with a left arm throwing motion you just don't see these days.
Fifteen years after the right-handed toddler began the switch, Tua Tagovailoa still jokes with his dad about the change.
"He gives me a hard time about it," Galu Tagovailoa said. "'Dad why did you switch me to a lefty?'"
They laugh, perhaps because the answer isn't a complex scheme to mold the perfect quarterback.
"I just always wanted someone to be a lefty with me," Galu Tagovailoa said.