4th and Goal

by Monte Burke

  The coaches gather around him, most of them standing. Joe tells them he’s been on the phone all morning with the commissioner and owners of the league. He has disturbing news. No one is allowed to take the practice field. No players, no coaches. On any team. The issue is with worker’s compensation—which pays an employee who is hurt on the job in exchange for waiving the right to sue. Needless to say, it’s an essential thing for a professional football league to have. Though the league has had months to do it, they have not fully paid the 2010 bill for worker’s comp, and thus cannot even begin paying it for the 2011 season. Joe’s face is taut. The league’s owners are scrambling to find some liquid capital to pay the bills, he says. Everything will be in limbo for a few days. If they fail to do so, there will be no season. “And there is a decent possibility that they won’t figure this out,” says Joe.

  Audible sighs fill the room. The coaches look at each other, raise their eyebrows and shake their heads. Joe scans the room, his eyes flaring. His voice becomes sharp and louder. “Guys, we need to make this a positive. Let’s not complain about it. The players will respond to the way we handle this. Set a good example. The measure of a coach, the measure of a man, is how you handle stuff when your back is up against the wall.”

  Joe later addresses his players in the Kroc’s chapel, telling them that there is a chance the league will fold. They won’t know anything for a few days. He says they will all make the best of this time. They will spend extra time in the classrooms learning the playbook, will use the gym to walk through plays, and will hit the weight room hard and get stronger.

  He doesn’t show it in front of the players or his staff, but Joe is as heartbroken as anyone else at the thought of not playing the season, maybe more so. First of all, he feels responsible. After all, he is the one who hired all of these coaches and staffers. Some of them left other jobs to come to the Nighthawks. All seventy players came to play on his team. What would they do without a season? He even took on a dozen interns, some of whom passed up other internships to work for the Nighthawks.

  Then, of course, there’s his own dream, which, ironically, might be done in by just the sort of business mistakes that he himself would never have made or tolerated in the career he had left behind.

  The players spend the next four days shuffling from the meeting rooms to the gym then to the dining hall, all in that slow-gaited, toe-stubbing manner typical of seasoned athletes, as if they are perpetually sore or trying to save energy. They look antsy and bored out of their minds, like kids in a driver’s education program stuck in the classroom, waiting to get behind the wheel. “I want to do some hitting,” says Dvoracek, the nose tackle. The players are not optimistic about the UFL’s chances. Resignation swiftly settles in. After all, these are players who have had their football dreams crushed before, many very recently. They’ve been booted out of the big show, or, after stellar college careers, they never made it there in the first place.

  Joe updates the team every day. “In times of crisis, the rule is ‘meet more,’” he tells them. Out of his own pocket, he continues to give the players their meager $50 per diem, which is usually paid for by the league, but had been cut off due to the delay. “If the league doesn’t like that, screw ’em,” says Joe.

  Then, finally, on the nineteenth there is some news. The league has decided to push back the start of the season by thirty days. Presumably the extra time will allow them to come up with some money and, with the NFL lockout all but over, rejigger the season schedule. To many outsiders, it all seems like merely a postponement of the UFL’s inevitable death, useless life support for a league that is showing no vital signs. The Nighthawks’ coaches and players believe that as well.

  In his last address to the players before they leave, Joe tells them that he does believe the league owners will do everything in their power to keep the league afloat. “They’ve put so much money into this league so far,” he says. “I don’t think they want to just walk away from it.” But he admits that he is not totally sure they will pull through.

  “You guys are free to do whatever you want,” Joe says. “You can join an NFL team, you can stay here and train, you can retire, you can go work. Anything. But we are going to plan as if training camp starts in a month. If you want to play, please do all you can to stay in shape. I promise you this: if you want to come back, we will honor that and welcome you back and give you a fair shot to make the team.” He even offers to put up, on the team’s dime, the players who want to stay in Omaha and train. Around twenty of them will take him up on the offer.

  Then Joe bids them—and maybe his dream—adieu.

  Chapter Four

  His Mother’s Son

  Joe Moglia was born on April 1, 1949, in the Inwood section of Manhattan, the first child of John and Frances Moglia. He was baptized Giuseppe Hugo Moglia, in the Italian tradition of naming a firstborn son after his paternal grandfather.

  Joe’s mother, Frances, was Irish. While she conceded the naming of her baby to her husband’s homeland tradition, she did decide that there was no way in hell that she was going to call her son “Giuseppe.” And she knew that using the English version, “Joseph,” wouldn’t work—John’s Italian relatives would just translate it and call him “Giuseppe” anyway. She needed something completely different. Fortune smiled on her in that regard. Joe’s paternal grandfather, for reasons unclear, had always been called “Jim.” So Joe’s mother decided to call her son by the same name. By doing so she would still, technically, be hewing to the Italian tradition.

  It worked. Everyone in the family—aunts, uncles, cousins—called Joe “Jim” or “Jimmy.” His three living siblings do so to this day.

  As a toddler, Joe thought his name really was “Jim.” He had no reason to believe otherwise. No one had ever told him his real name.

  That is, until he went to school. When Joe was five years old, his parents enrolled him in kindergarten class in a little stone house on the grounds of the Payson Playground in Inwood. On the morning of his first day of school ever, Joe and his mother made the five-minute walk from their apartment to the playground. Streams of other kids were walking with their moms in the same direction.

  When they reached the stone house, Joe and his mother went in and found a classroom filled with the clamor of small children. Joe’s mother smiled and made small talk with some of the other moms. After a while she crouched down in front of her son. Joe started to feel nervous for the first time that morning. His mother patted his head and gave him a good-bye kiss on his cheek, then told him “I love you” in her mellifluous Irish accent and started to walk away. But she stopped suddenly in her tracks, whirled around and came back. “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” she told Joe. “They’re going to call you ‘Joseph’ here.”

  “Why?” asked Joe.

  “Because that’s your name,” she said, then patted his head again and left.

  Joe gave her what he now calls his “what the hell?” face. From that day on, the outside world knew him as “Joe.” Within the family, he would always be “Jim.”

  “My cousins would always say, ‘No wonder Jim’s all messed up. He never knew his name,’” says Joe.

  Joe’s father, John, was born in Pessola, Italy, a small, valley-bound rural hamlet in the province of Parma. With tensions between the socialists and fascists in the country rising, and with rapid industrialization resulting in a scarcity of jobs outside of cities, the Moglias moved to the United States in 1927, when John was eleven. They lived in an apartment at 4535 Park Avenue, in the Italian section of the Bronx.

  John never went to school in the United States. During the day he worked in his father’s fruit store. In the evening he took classes in ballroom dancing. He became quite good at it and would eventually compete in national dancing events. He wanted to be a dance instructor when he grew up.

  But John’s father thought his son’s dancing was utter nonsense and forced him to go to work instead and help support the family. In his early twe
nties, John opened his own small fruit store, Hillside Market, on busy University Avenue in the Bronx.

  Then, as his new country entered World War II to fight against his old one, John was drafted. After basic training at Fort Bragg, he served as a sergeant in the 57th Quartermaster Sales Company in France, supplying the Allied forces with all of their basic material needs, save for ammunition and medical supplies. John’s experience in the fruit stores prepared him well for the detail-​oriented job. Relatively speaking, it was a good post to have during wartime: John did most of his work from well behind the frontlines.

  Sometime after V-E Day, as the Allied war effort wound down, quartermasters were taken from their posts near the battlefields and dispersed across Europe to help supply the war-ravaged citizens. John was reassigned to Belfast, where he started the 58th Quartermaster Sales Company. An Allied quartermaster, because of his access to food and other basic goods, enjoyed a role of prominence in many of these destitute European cities.

  Within the grounds of the Belfast Zoo, on the northeastern slope of a promontory known as Cavehill, there was an art-deco building named Floral Hall, which was built to host dances. It had opened just before the war but was only now being properly used, as American servicemen and local lasses were caught up in the ecstatic joy of the Allied victory. John Moglia still loved to dance, and fancied himself, in his dashing uniform, as a young Rudolph Valentino. He became a regular patron of Floral Hall. So did a young Belfastian woman named Frances McLarnon.

  One evening, as Frances was leaving the hall with some friends, John, standing outside, spotted her. She was singing along to a dance tune. She had a pretty voice. John was immediately smitten. He walked over and introduced himself. “I want to dance with the person who was singing,” he announced.

  Frances was hesitant. But the American serviceman eventually got his way. They met the next night at Floral Hall, and danced together for hours. “My mother was initially really reluctant to get involved with this guy,” says Joe’s sister, Mary. “But my father was pretty charming then, and he could dance well.” Frances was relieved to find out that John was Catholic and not Protestant, which to her family—proud members of Northern Ireland’s minority denomination—would have been a nonstarter. Their courtship in Belfast was chaste. “My mother was a good Catholic girl and my father respected that,” says Joe’s youngest brother, Paul. He believes that John may have endeared himself to the McLarnons by pilfering for them a few of the much-desired items they had lived without for years—like new undershirts and stockings—​from the quartermaster store.

  Just a few weeks after meeting Frances, John was sent home to the United States, and he went back to work at the fruit store. He was heartbroken but undeterred. When he got back to the Bronx, he unleashed a steady barrage of letters upon Frances. “He was a good letter writer. He expressed himself well,” says Paul. John corresponded with Frances for the better part of two years before he asked her, via letter, to move to the United States and marry him.

  According to family lore, the McLarnons studied the mailed proposal and weighed its pros and cons. They knew John was Italian. That was a mark against him. But he was Catholic, which was a good thing. And he was a business owner. Another check in the “pro” column. Then they examined the return address on his letters. It read “Park Avenue.” The McLarnons asked their Irish friends who’d been to New York about Park Avenue. “That’s where the millionaires live!” their friends told them. “Then my mother’s parents said, ‘You can’t let this guy get away!’” says Joe.

  Frances sailed to the United States without her family. There she discovered that John’s “business” was a ten-by-thirty-foot fruit store on a busy, grimy street. She moved into John’s two-bedroom apartment, which was indeed on Park Avenue, but the significantly less-gilded portion of it in the Bronx. The apartment overlooked the noisy, sprawling, industrial wasteland of a railroad yard. John had also failed to mention that he still lived with his mother, his sister, and two of his brothers. They spoke mostly Italian to each other, just as the rest of the neighborhood did, and rarely bothered to try to include Frances, who spoke no Italian, in their conversations.

  Despite all these presumably unnerving departures from Frances’s expectations, she and John were married almost right away. None of her family made the trip for the wedding. One of John’s brothers (and her new apartment-mate) walked her down the aisle and gave her away.

  As the story goes in the Moglia family, Frances wrote her parents a few months later and told them: “I have no idea why people here make such a big deal about Park Avenue.” Though the entire story may be apocryphal, it does accurately convey her humor, good-natured disposition, and willingness to adapt. “She always told me that story with a huge smile on her face,” says Paul. “She never said she was disappointed.”

  She did, however, have ample reason to feel that way. The young American serviceman whom she married—back home after the terrible war, struggling to make a living—was a lot less charming than she remembered. “All traces of that expressive man who loved to dance quickly vanished,” says Paul. “He seemed angry about his lot in life, about the fact that he had to work grueling hours in the fruit store six days a week to make ends meet.”

  In 1949 John and Frances Moglia finally moved to an apartment of their own at 1825 Riverside Drive, a six-story, utilitarian, brown brick building in Inwood, a predominantly Irish neighborhood in Manhattan. The Moglias lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the building’s uppermost floor, for which they paid a monthly rent of $88.

  Inwood is the northernmost neighborhood in Manhattan. Legend has it that this is the place where the cunning director-general of the New Netherlands colony, Peter Minuit, “bought” the island of Manhattan from the native Lenape Indians for a few trinkets worth $24 in present-day terms. It was also the home neighborhood of Harry Houdini, Jim Henson, and Lew Alcindor (later known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar).

  The Moglias had five children: first Joe, then Johnny, Bernadette, Paul, and Mary. All seven of them were crammed into that two-bedroom apartment. The boys slept in one bedroom (Joe and Johnny shared a bed for a while) and the girls slept with their parents in the other one. In addition to the two bedrooms the apartment had one bathroom, a foyer, a kitchen, and a living room. “There was always a line for the bathroom, and the living room, which was the biggest room in the apartment, was off limits to the kids,” says Paul. “But what strikes me now is that it didn’t feel to us like we were all on top of each other. It didn’t feel small. We didn’t know any other way.”

  At the time Joe’s father owned a fruit store on 181st Street in Washington Heights, the neighborhood just south of Inwood, called Cabrini Market. He worked six days a week, rising at 5:00 a.m. to go to the store to receive deliveries of fruit, and not returning home until 9:00 p.m. after closing up. Work was his life. Joe remembers only one family vacation during his childhood, when the Moglias went to Newburgh, New York. They were supposed to stay for a week on a lake and go horseback riding and boating. It turned out there were no horses, the only boat was a rickety rowboat, and the “lake” was really a pond that was, at best, thirty feet in diameter. After only three days Joe’s father got restless and took his family home, while he went back to work at the store.

  As soon as they were old enough to communicate with customers, all of the children worked shifts at the store. (“For my tenth birthday, my present was to work at the store from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.,” says Paul.) Occasionally a city inspector would visit the store and fine John for using child labor, even though they were his own kids. Sunday was the only day the store was closed. After 9:00 a.m. Mass, the Moglias would either visit John’s relatives in the Bronx and sit through protracted, three- to four-hour lunches, or they would pack a lunch and picnic at nearby Dyckman Street Park on the Hudson River. And every Sunday John would take an extended afternoon nap that was not to be disturbed under any circumstances.

  John Moglia had dark black hair. He
was a hard, wiry man, nearly six feet tall and weighing two hundred pounds. His shoulders bulged with muscles developed from lifting crates of fruit every day. His hands were huge, knotty, and scarred—like a stonemason’s—from yanking open boxes of fruit and trimming heads of lettuce. Joe’s father was in every way the Italian Il Padrone, the unquestioned ruler of the family. He was the provider, and that alone commanded his family’s respect. “When I was four, my mother would make us sing this song: ‘Clap your hands, clap your hands until daddy comes home. Daddy has money and mommy has none,’” says Joe’s brother Johnny.

  “Once in my life I want to come home and be treated the way Mr. Moglia was treated when he walked into the apartment from work,” says Dave Hunt, a childhood friend of Joe’s from Inwood. “Everything in the house just stopped and everyone snapped to attention.” Frances and the children would all greet John at the door. One of the children would take the shopping bag—filled with fruit from the store—from his hands. Another would draw a hot bath. When John was done bathing, he would sit at the table—​alone, since everyone else had already had their dinner—​and eat the hot meal that Frances had prepared just for him. “They all appreciated how hard he worked,” says Hunt.

  Despite all the appreciation and attention, John was not particularly warm in return. While he was having his dinner, Joe would often grab his homework and come join his father at the table, but John would usually just continue to sit there in a sullen silence. “He wasn’t exactly the kind of guy who asked you how school was that day,” says Joe. He was also frequently ill-​tempered. “When he got into one of his moods at the fruit store and started yelling, the guys who worked for him would just turn to each other and say, ‘Uh-oh, it’s gonna be one of those days,’” says Johnny. There were days like that at home, too. One freezing winter Sunday Joe and Johnny were in the apartment playing with toy guns they’d received for Christmas. The noise woke their father from one of his sacred naps. “He just walked out of the bedroom and took our guns and broke them in his hands,” says Johnny. “It was terrible.”