Doyel: Tony Walker, ex-Colts linebacker & gifted musician, plays anthem on trumpet Sunday
Gregg DoyelINDIANAPOLIS – Before he became a linebacker for the Indianapolis Colts, Tony Walker wasn’t going to play football. Mom wasn’t having it. Tony was a musician with the gift and passion of his dad, who loved the piano so much – but couldn’t afford one – that he drew the keyboard on a long piece of cardboard and sat there for hours, tapping away, playing music only he could hear.
Tony was a trumpet player in Birmingham, Ala. He was at the Phillips High football games on Friday night, but only as a member of the Phillips marching band. Matter of fact, that was him at halftime, playing a trumpet solo. Football? Tony Walker didn’t care about football, not even on the day he was walking past a park during his junior year, carrying that trumpet home from school, when kids playing football asked him to join. They had an odd number of players. Needed one more.
“I didn’t want to play,” Tony says, “but I felt bad.”
Next day at school, kids in the hall kept telling him: Coach Kelly wants to see you.
“Oh no!” Tony remembers thinking. “What I do?”
“He was a disciplinarian,” Tony says now. “I was ducking him all day until I feel this hand on my shoulder. It was Coach Kelly: ‘Come with me, son.’ The kids are like ooooooo!
“Coach Kelly told me: ‘Those were my best players (at the park), and they say you’re fast, you’re strong, and they can’t tackle you or get past you. Play for me next year.’”
Coach Nathaniel Kelly gave Tony a parental permission slip, which Mildred Walker ripped to pieces.
“She said, ‘You’re going to bust out your teeth and ruin your trumpet career,’” Walker says.
But there was something about football in the park, and the way Coach Kelly spoke to him. Tony wanted to do this, and had a friend forge the parental signature.
So here comes the first game of the 1985 season. Tony Walker’s parents are in the crowd, like always. Their son has another trumpet solo, you know? They’re waiting for halftime but they keep hearing it, again and again:
Tony Walker on the tackle.
A little later, Tony’s being offered a scholarship to play linebacker for Southeast Missouri. Then he’s being drafted by Indianapolis. That’s how Tony Walker came to play for the Colts from 1990-93.
How he has come to be playing the national anthem Sunday, before the Colts’ game against the Raiders at Lucas Oil Stadium?
That’s another story.
Clarinet, trumpet, piano – he plays 'em all
Tony Walker wasn’t going to play the trumpet. He was about 7 when he found a clarinet at the Salvation Army – “I begged and begged and begged,” he says – and talked his dad into buying it. By sixth grade Tony had taught himself to play that clarinet like nobody’s business, but as he stood in line to sign up for the school band, he noticed only girls were choosing clarinet. Now it’s Tony’s turn and they’re asking him what instrument he wants to play and he’s panicking. He looks around and sees something shiny.
“Trumpet,” he says.
This is how it begins. Pretty soon Tony is the best player at school, so good that teachers purchased him a trumpet of his own – most kids played on school-owned instruments – and by ninth grade Tony was being invited to audition for the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham. He nails the audition, but that first semester he heard a beautiful trumpet duet behind closed doors and took a peek at the players:
The teacher … and a kid in sixth grade.
“I was used to being the best, and here was this little kid who was a lot better than me,” he says. “I went home and told my parents, ‘I don’t want to go here anymore. All my friends are at the high school.’”
That’s how Tony ended up on the Phillips High football field in 1985, then at SEMO – where he was a music major and future Hall of Fame linebacker – and then with the Colts in Round 6 of the 1990 NFL Draft. He was a 6-3, 235-pound, heat-seeking missile on special teams, and such a gifted singer in the locker room that the team asked him to sing the national anthem before the Colts beat the New York Jets in 1992. Check the pictures. That’s him, No. 92 in cleats and pads, holding the microphone at the 20-yard line of the Hoosier Dome.
Tony retired from football in 1993 and focused on his music, performing around the city. He loved to sing, but as a solo artist he couldn’t sing and play trumpet, so here’s what he did:
Taught himself to play the piano.
Tony had fooled around on the piano as a kid, starting at age 9 when his mother told Tony and his sister, Tywanna, to have their dad take them to McDonald’s. The family didn’t eat out often – no money – but Mildred Walker had saved up to buy her husband an old brown piano for Christmas, and was having it delivered. When Andrew Walker came home with the kids and saw that piano in the living room, he blurted, “Oh Lord. Oh Lord!”
“He never got up,” Tony says of his dad, who had played when he was in the Army. “He played that thing. He got on it, I mean he was going to town. Beethoven, he’d play all that.”
Decades later, embarking on his own music career, Tony used some of his NFL savings to buy a piano. He started by learning one song at a time, mastering it enough to play as he sang on stage. He’d spend a few days on a song. That’s all it took.
“I’d sit down at 9 in the morning and look up and it would be 3 p.m.,” Tony says. “Time just was flying. I didn’t even know.”
Eventually, Tony put together a band. His wife, Estoshia, comes from a family of singers and has a beautiful, feisty voice. Their son, Tony Jr. – call him TJ – plays trumpet, piano and bass guitar. Pretty soon Tony Walker & The 2nd Half Band are playing all over town.
But that’s not how Tony Sr. – call him Big Tony – has come to be playing the anthem this week for the Colts. That’s another story, and it involves boxing gloves.
Raised a boxer, built Big Walk Boxing
Tony Walker wasn’t going to raise a boxer. This dad wasn’t having it.
TJ was a super athlete, a football and basketball star, thanks to those family genes. TJ’s sister, Jayda, is a talented artist and eighth-grade sprinter at New Augusta. Remember her name when she starts running for Pike. As for TJ, he was showing the family gift for music – a trumpet player, just like Big Tony – but at age 14 announced he wanted to box. Tony put it off and put it off until TJ asked one too many times.
“I got fed up and took him to a local gym,” Tony says. “He’s going to get his butt whipped and realize he doesn’t want to do this.”
Today TJ is 18, a Golden Gloves champion planning to turn pro in a few years at middleweight. Along the way, after all that time with TJ in various gyms, Big Tony got this idea.
“I saw the gyms TJ was at,” he says, “and told my wife, ‘I can to that.’”
In July 2022 he opened Big Walk Boxing at the corner of 86th Street and Ditch Road. Gym hours are 10 a.m.-9 p.m. five days a week and Saturday from 10:30 a.m.-2 p.m., but it’s not enough for TJ – who loves boxing like his dad loved that clarinet, and like his grandfather loved the piano enough to play a piece of cardboard. Before graduating from Pike in June, TJ was going into the gym some nights at 2 a.m., freeing his time for school and music.
The Colts keep tabs on all their former players and were well aware of Tony Walker & The 2nd Half Band, but word is starting to spread about the new Big Walk Boxing club run by their former linebacker, which is how Colts executive Pete Ward came to leave old No. 92 a message recently, asking for a return call.
“When he told me, I couldn’t believe it!” Big Tony says, standing behind the counter at his gym, surrounded by his Colts memorabilia and TJ’s championship belts.
Tony Walker will play the anthem on his trumpet, but he could play it on the clarinet, piano or keyboard. He could play it with his wife and son. Or he could sing it. He was built to play linebacker, this soulful giant of a man, but he was born to play music.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.