by Monte Burke
Joe’s father may have been tough to live with, but his life can be considered a huge success because, among other reasons, he fulfilled the American immigrant dream of giving his children the ability to create lives better than his own.
His oldest son, in particular, outperformed any expectations his parents might have had for him. Joe worked hard at improving himself in all facets of his life. He participated in the athletics program at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs, which, though modest, had its share of successes. (“A lot of the guys I went to school with had been held back a year or two,” says Joe. “That’s why we were pretty good at sports.”) Joe also sought out opportunities outside of school to brush up on his skills. He organized tackle football games in the park and constantly played stickball in the streets to hone his batting eye. He joined youth leagues in both football and baseball, and was on track to become a star in both sports. And despite his tough-guy façade, he studied very hard for school, fulfilling his mother’s wishes. “Joe had, like, a 100 average in seventh grade,” says Johnny. “I got really sick of the nuns asking me, ‘Why can’t you be like Joe?’”
He embraced a leadership role in his family as well, trying to make up for the attention and encouragement his siblings didn’t get from their father. “We would all go to him for advice or if we had any problems,” says Paul. Joe gave Mary a locket on her tenth birthday. He scolded Bernadette when she wore a dress that he thought was too short. He gave his parents a photo album for their fifteenth wedding anniversary that he worked on for months. And as Joe grew older, he especially loved to dote on his mother. Every few months he would give her a small present—a book, some flowers, a piece of jewelry. “It was like a competition,” says Mary. “Like he wanted to show her how he could take care of her and how much he loved her.”
Joe brought intensity to everything he did—including having fun. “I used to love working with him in the store,” says Paul. “He was hilarious. He would keep up the patter with the customers, keep everything light and make jokes. Sometimes he would take me to a local Chinese restaurant for lunch and he would have me laughing through the entire meal.”
As the children all grew into adulthood, Joe continued to take the lead when it came to family matters. He delivered the eulogies at the funerals for both of his parents, and later for Bernadette, his carefree and fun-loving sister who died in 2009 at age fifty-six after a long battle with various health problems.
Going to high school at Fordham Prep in the fall of 1963 was a huge deal for Joe. Academically, it was one of the best Catholic schools in the city. Located in the Bronx, an hour away by bus, it got him out of Inwood, at least during the daytime. And it had very good athletic teams.
Joe’s father, who was quite bright but had never gone to school, was curiously suspicious of education. (Later in life, when his daughter, Mary, graduated from law school, John told her: “I’m proud of you, but don’t go around thinking you’re better than I am.”) Frances, however, insisted that Joe and his siblings get the best schooling they could, even if it pushed the family’s budget to its limits.
Joe earned good marks at Prep. He worked hard at it, as he did at everything. Paul remembers frequently waking up late at night and seeing his brother sitting on his bed with his homework papers in his lap, lost in deep concentration.
But playing sports was what Joe enjoyed the most. It was a release from studying and working at the fruit store. He was a very good outfielder on Prep’s baseball team, with a strong arm and good discipline at the plate. He started as a sophomore and led the team in hitting all three years, batting over .400. He became the captain of the team his senior year.
He stood out even more in football. Joe made the varsity team as a sophomore, and he started on both offense (as a guard) and defense (as a linebacker). At just 180 pounds, Joe was undersized, thirty to forty pounds lighter than some of the other players. But he soon learned that he could use his mind as well as his body to get leverage over the competition. A quick study, he watched the players on the opposing teams, and turned their weaknesses to his advantage. He never missed a play in a game. In his junior year, he was viciously clipped on one of his ankles. That ankle never quite healed fully for the rest of his sports career, but he played through the pain. He wore the number 60, which seemed to be an appropriate one for an undersized, overachieving, two-way football player.
The football coach at Prep was a man named Joseph “Sammy” Ososki. He was famous for having played in the 1942 Sugar Bowl, in which he helped Prep’s parent school—Fordham University—beat the University of Missouri 2–0 in a game that was played in a driving rainstorm. Ososki was the quintessence of old school. He’d grown up in coal mine country in western Pennsylvania and, as a Marine, had survived Iwo Jima. “He was a brutal man and a brutal coach,” says Robert Sior, a high school teammate of Joe’s. “He could have never coached today.”
One of Ososki’s annual traditions in training camp was to have the team practice for six hours straight in ninety-degree heat—with no breaks for water. He screamed and he threatened his players, and slapped them when he thought they needed it. He believed you didn’t mold boys into men—you sandblasted them. Ososki was also famous for his theatrical halftime speeches. If his team was down, he would often shift the pipe in his mouth so that the smoke would waft into his eyes and make them water. He wanted the team to think that their tough old coach wanted to win so badly he was crying.
Joe knew from his experience at home how to deal with a man like Ososki. As a result, Joe thrived on the Prep team. He played hard, even when he was hurt. He was disciplined on the field and rarely made the same mistake twice. “Joe was easily one of the best players we had, a ferocious hitter,” says Sior. “And he was a leader. He really naturally took on the role of getting the team in line.” Ososki liked that.
As Joe entered his senior year at Prep, he started getting some attention for his play. Colleges around the northeast wrote him letters, mentioning athletic scholarships. “I really loved football,” says Joe. “All I wanted to do was play the game in college.” But his parents didn’t want him to leave home.
It was pretty clear where Joe’s father stood on the issue. He thought Joe’s love of sports was childish and frivolous. Like his own father before him, he believed that doing anything but working for a wage and providing for one’s family was a betrayal of masculine responsibility. He refused in any way to encourage Joe in athletics, and he let Joe know that he was angered by the fact that they took him away from the fruit store.
John never saw his son play a baseball game. And he went to exactly one of Joe’s football games, the traditional Thanksgiving Day game that pitted Prep and Xavier High School during Joe’s senior year, which would turn out to be the last football game Joe ever played. It so happened that the fruit store was closed that day.
Despite his father’s resistance Joe was prepared to leave home and go to a college to play football and perhaps even baseball. But then the one person in his life whose wishes he could never ignore stepped in. As Joe was considering offers from different colleges, his mother sat him down one night and told him that his father was unwell and that he needed him in the fruit store. “I just couldn’t say no to her,” Joe says.
It turned out that Joe had one more reason for not enrolling in some college far from home to chase his football dreams: A pretty, five-foot-six, dark-haired girl named Kathe Lutz.
Just like his father, Joe met the first true love of his life at a dance. The circumstances were a bit different, however. “I introduced them, sort of,” says Dave Hunt. Fordham Prep hosted a dance one night during Joe’s sophomore year. The school was—and remains to this day—all male, so female dance partners had to be shipped in from all-girl Catholic schools in the area.
That night Joe and Hunt decided to leave the dance early. “We were probably going to try to find some beer,” says Hunt. As they were walking out of the hall, they passed a group of older boys who had already grad
uated. Because of their ages, they weren’t allowed into the dance. Apparently, they found this circumstance frustrating. “As we walked by them, one of the boys just stepped up and, without saying a thing, punched me in the nose,” says Hunt. “The punch pushed my nose back up into my face and knocked me down.”
Joe went chasing after the boys while Hunt sat on the sidewalk with blood pouring down his face. “Out of nowhere, this very pretty young girl came up and asked if I was all right and gave me some tissues,” says Hunt. It was Kathe. Joe returned to Dave after a few minutes, having been unsuccessful in trying to catch the older boys. Kathe caught his eye immediately.
The two began dating. Kathe lived in Yonkers, an hour-long bus ride away for Joe. Kathe liked Joe’s confidence. “He seemed to be able to achieve whatever he set out to do,” she says. The relationship got very serious right away. With a girlfriend he wanted to stay close to and a mother insisting he was needed at home, Joe decided to forgo his college athletic career. He enrolled at Fordham University. But he would not be playing football there. Fordham—Vince Lombardi’s alma mater—had canceled its football program in 1954.
Instead, Joe buried himself in his studies and work. He majored in economics. He continued to do shifts in the fruit store. He drove a mail truck in Manhattan. He also drove a cab.
Near the end of his freshman year at Fordham, Joe began to seriously think about trying to play football again. He had pretty quickly realized that his father was not ill; his mother had just wanted to have her oldest child close and to preserve family harmony by keeping his father happy. In a rare moment of putting her own desires ahead of those of one of her children, she had misled him.
And things with Kathe, while serious, were also tempestuous. “They argued a lot,” says Johnny. “I remember one time he was on the phone with her and they were yelling at each other. When Joe hung up he started punching the wall. I said, ‘How can you let her make you get so upset?’ Then he turned from the wall and started punching me.”
Joe reached out to the colleges that had contacted him the year before. They all said he’d be welcome, but there would be no scholarships. Unfortunately, Joe couldn’t afford to go without financial support. He was stuck at Fordham.
It hit him then that he would never play football again. So he began to think about coaching. He approached the new football coach at Fordham Prep, Bruce Bott (who had succeeded Ososki when he retired), and asked if he could become an assistant. Bott said yes. Joe started with the junior varsity team, coaching the offensive and defensive lines and making $800 a year. He discovered two things very quickly: He had an aptitude for coaching, and he loved it. The fact that he never got the chance to play sports in college would always gnaw at him. But he would eventually grow to love coaching even more than he did playing.
Then Joe’s world changed. He and Kathe had been dating on and off for five years, alternating between being madly in love and never wanting to see each other again. In one two-week period in the fall of Joe’s sophomore year, they broke up for what looked like the last time; then they got back together again. During that reconciliation—one of the many they’d had over the course of their relationship—they had intercourse for the first time.
Kathe got pregnant. They were both nineteen years old.
Chapter Five
Alternatives
Bill Hambrecht is a seventy-six-year-old Silicon Valley venture capitalist. During his long and lucrative business career, he helped take Apple Computer, Adobe Systems, and Amazon.com public, and pioneered the use of “open” initial public offerings, which make shares available to anyone and everyone who wants to invest. He is currently the chairman of W. R. Hambrecht, which invests in emerging technologies.
Like Joe, Hambrecht first caught the football bug in his teens and never seemed to quite shake it. Back in the mid-1950s, he played one season at Princeton as a blocking wing in the Tigers’ single-wing offense. Then he got hurt and never played another down. But that didn’t stop him from trying to get back into the game—on the ownership side.
Over the years, Hambrecht says, he has taken a look at various NFL franchises, but had never really believed he had a serious shot at owning one. The closest he came was in the mid-1980s, when he became an investor in the United States Football League’s Oakland Invaders.
He eventually decided that if he couldn’t own a team, he’d just start a league. Hambrecht says he first came up with the idea for the United Football League back in 1996. What he envisioned was something akin to an “off-Broadway” version of the NFL’s Broadway. He would put franchises in football-mad cities that did not have an NFL team. Ticket prices would be family friendly, in the range of $20 to $50. The players and coaches would be drawn from the vast pool of professional football talent that wasn’t, for whatever reason, currently employed by the NFL. The new league would have some differences that, in theory, could make it a looser, more fun version of football than the NFL: On defense, at least four defenders would have to be on the line of scrimmage with at least one hand on the ground, and you could blitz no more than six people at a time (the idea being that these defensive restrictions would make the league more passer friendly); there would be no “tuck rule,” that strange, hard-to-call rule that has caused controversy in the NFL (see: Tom Brady, New England Patriots, 2001 NFL playoffs); in overtime each team would get at least one possession; women would be included among the referees.
In rethinking the rules for the UFL, and by placing franchises in non-NFL cities, Hambrecht was looking to subvert an entrenched business model—just as he had done with his plan for open IPOs—and come up with something fresh and original. “No one believes me, but I started the UFL as a business decision,” says Hambrecht.
The timing, he thought, was perfect. In 1996 CBS had just lost its NFL television rights. Hambrecht began talks with the network about airing the UFL. And though he says negotiations initially looked promising, CBS eventually balked. But over the years that followed Hambrecht didn’t let his dream die.
In 2007 Hambrecht finally roped in some monied friends. Tim Armstrong, a former Google executive who is now the CEO of AOL, and Mark Cuban, the tech billionaire and owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, helped with some seed money. Hambrecht’s buddies Paul Pelosi, a California real estate investor (and the husband of Nancy), and William Mayer, a partner at Park Avenue Equity Partners and the former CEO of First Boston, came in later and bought pieces of franchises, to help defray the investment made by Hambrecht, who owned the majority of the league. Pelosi and Mayer each invested tens of millions of dollars.
And they started losing money right away.
The National Football League is a $9 billion behemoth that soaks up all noise that’s not its own. No professional football league has ever truly competed with, or even managed to last very long beside, the NFL, not since the American Football League successfully forced a merger with its older contemporary in 1970. But that fact hasn’t stopped wealthy men from giving it a shot.
The World Football League, backed in part by the Canadian movie producer John F. Bassett, folded partway through its second season in the mid-1970s. The United States Football League, despite procuring an actual television contract ($18 million for two years on ABC) and signing college superstars like Steve Young, Jim Kelly, and Herschel Walker, made it only three seasons. The XFL, a joint venture between the World Wrestling Federation (now known as “World Wrestling Entertainment”) and NBC that featured miked-up players and stripper-like cheerleaders, lasted one season before running out of money.
Even pro football leagues that play a slightly different game have struggled for relevance. The Canadian Football League hasn’t had any buzz since Doug Flutie left in 1997 to play for the NFL’s Buffalo Bills. And the Arena Football League, that fast-paced indoor hybrid of the game, went bankrupt in 2009 before reconstituting itself a year later in stripped-down form.
The NFL has tried its own hand at an alternative league, too, and even it fa
iled. The idea behind the World League of American Football, which eventually became known as NFL Europe, was to broaden the game’s reach by playing in Europe, and to develop players for the American game. NFL Europe ceased operations in 2007 after fifteen money-losing seasons when NFL owners tired of putting up the dough to keep funding it.
Yet despite the decades of failures, there is still a fairly strong argument for an alternative league to the NFL, particularly one that’s set up to serve a developmental purpose. Good rookie football players slip through the NFL draft and free agency cracks every year. NFL veterans often actually do have something left in the tank. What these players need is a place to attempt to prove themselves.
There’s also the issue of injuries that occur during an NFL season. In 2010, 352 NFL players went on the season-ending injured reserve list, missing an average of nine and a half games, which is more than half the season. NFL teams have what’s known as practice squads of up to eight players apiece. But that’s not nearly enough to replace the injured. A developmental league would certainly help.
The list of marquee players who have played in developmental leagues—especially NFL Europe—and then gone on to become stars in the NFL is fairly impressive. Kurt Warner, a two-time NFL Most Valuable Player, played in both NFL Europe and the Arena Football League. James Harrison, the Steelers’ All-Pro linebacker and the 2008 NFL Defensive Player of the Year, is an NFL Europe veteran. Fred Jackson, the star running back for the Bills, toiled in an indoor league and NFL Europe for years. Quarterbacks Jake Delhomme and Brad Johnson, offensive lineman Brian Waters, defensive lineman La’Roi Glover, and kickers Adam Viniateri and David Akers were just a few of the other 250-plus players who made NFL teams after playing in NFL Europe. It’s very possible that these players would eventually have found homes in the NFL. But it’s inarguable that the time they spent in NFL Europe gave them the time and place to further develop their skills.