4th and Goal

by Monte Burke

  Joe moved into the cold and dusty loft, his only company a flight of noisy, fidgety pigeons that occupied the windowsill. He still saw his children regularly. They came to the games. He spent holidays with them. But the life they had shared as a family was over.

  In Joe’s second year at Dartmouth, the team traveled to Williamsburg, Virginia, for an out-of-conference game against William & Mary. The night before the game, after meetings had wrapped up, Joe and some of his fellow assistant coaches went to the hotel lounge for a beer. Yukica, a coach firmly out of the old school, never mixed with his assistants in casual situations. “He wouldn’t have liked that we were getting a beer, but he was probably already asleep by then,” says Joe.

  It happened that the lounge was holding a dance contest that night. Joe, like his father before him, fancied himself as quite the dancer. He decided, on a whim, to enter the contest. He suddenly leapt up from his chair and grabbed a young woman who was sitting next to him and his fellow coaches. The songs in the contest were right in Joe’s sweet spot—classics like “Mustang Sally” and “Wipeout.” Joe swiveled his hips and worked himself into a great sweat. His coaching companions robustly cheered him on. “Joe always put a lot of energy into whatever he did,” says George Landis, Dartmouth’s defensive backs coach. “And he always wanted to win.”

  And he did. The MC of the contest called Joe and the woman back up to the stage. He asked their names. The woman said, “Sally.”

  Then he turned to Joe. “It hit me right then that it might not be a great idea to give him my real name,” says Joe. So he came up with a new one on the spot: Sandy McFadden. The MC assumed they were married. Sally and “Sandy” won a free weekend at a hotel in the Florida. Joe gave the trip to Sally.

  The next morning, the entire team, led by Yukica, walked out of the hotel together to get on the buses for the game. They walked right by the lounge. A huge sign hanging over the door screamed: “Congratulations to Sandy and Sally McFadden, our dance contest winners!”

  “You couldn’t miss it,” says Joe. The other coaches snickered as they walked by. “Yukica would have blown his lid if my name had been on there.”

  “We called him ‘Disco Joe’ from that point on,” says Landis.

  That year, Dartmouth tied for another Ivy League title, propelled again by Joe’s defensive unit, which once again was one of the best in the East. But after that season, Joe started to have uneasy thoughts about his future. By then he had been living in the storage room for close to a year. “You could just tell that he wasn’t happy,” says Maloney. “In quiet moments, this miserable look would spread across his face.” He still dreamed of becoming a head coach one day. And why not? With two Ivy League championships to his credit and a top-notch defense, he was well on his way. But the closer he got to achieving his dream, the more it seemed like an impossibility because of what was going on with his family life.

  Joe’s main desires no longer matched up: He wanted to be a head coach. And he wanted to provide for his family and live close enough to them that he could see them often. Becoming the head coach at Dartmouth was perhaps the one college job that would reconcile the two wishes. But Yukica was happy in the job and successful. He wasn’t going anywhere.

  The other problem was that Kathe and the kids weren’t going anywhere, either. If Joe applied for head coaching jobs, he was at the mercy of the inherent geographic uncertainty of the job. He could literally land anywhere—California, Montana, Florida, maybe even Massachusetts if he was lucky. But he didn’t want to leave it up to chance, then find himself a thousand miles away from his kids.

  In Joe’s third season, Dartmouth came within a season-ending loss to Penn of winning a third-straight Ivy League championship. But Joe was stuck in a bind. Even after a raise, he was still making only $33,000. He and his family were still living on a shoestring budget. When Kim fell off her bike and got some gravel stuck in her knee, Joe took her to the football trainer because he couldn’t afford to go to a doctor. When Kathe called and told Joe that the food money was getting low, Joe started shuttling over doggy bags full of leftovers from the team’s training meals. In effect, Joe had the worst of two worlds: he couldn’t be with this family and he could no longer support them. He gradually realized that he had to make a choice about his career.

  And on that ice-cold early morning in the storage room, Joe made the decision to leave the job that he felt born to do. “It absolutely killed me because I would have chewed my own leg off to keep coaching,” he says. Like his father before him, he had determined that providing for his family was his primary responsibility in life. He needed to be a man.

  He was done with football for what looked like forever.

  When Joe told Yukica that he was leaving the team to try to get a job on Wall Street, the older man peered at him over his bifocals that were perched on the tip of his nose and scoffed: “You’re not going to get one of those jobs.”

  As implausible as it seemed to others, getting a job on Wall Street made total sense to Joe. He had an interest in economics. And the jobs on Wall Street sounded similar in many ways to coaching: The trading floor was an adrenaline-packed place; success was predicated on preparation; making sales resembled the pitches involved in recruiting; and you made your hay on wins. One other thing appealed to him about the street: “I decided that if I was going to leave coaching, I was going to make a lot of money.”

  In retrospect, Joe admits he had no earthly idea what he was doing at the time. But the lack of knowledge didn’t matter. Force of will and desperation would carry him.

  Joe would eventually find remarkable success in the business world. But it would come at a high cost, starting when he left New Hampshire for New York in early 1984.

  Joe and Kathe were officially divorced that year. As in all divorces, the main narrative is filled with various subplots that ultimately all end up in cul-de-sacs. But the overriding reason for their divorce was that they just grew to become incompatible. They had married at a very young age. As they grew older, they became unable to fulfill each other’s needs. “My parents were exact opposites,” says Kim. “Every strength my mother has is his weakness, and vice versa.”

  Joe and Kathe still maintain an amicable relationship. “He is the father of my children, so I’ve always wished him the best,” says Kathe. She has kept up with his career and even listened to all of the Nighthawks games through a website. “I believe coaching is what he was meant to do and I am very proud that he is getting back to where his heart belongs,” she says. Joe still supports her financially, for which she says she is “eternally grateful.”

  For the first few years after Joe left coaching, money was still an issue. He wasn’t making much more when he started out at Merrill Lynch than he had as a coach. The lack of funds was hard on his family. Kathe took on three jobs: She was a receptionist at a local inn, a bank teller, and a cashier at Dunkin’ Donuts, from which she often brought home leftovers. “To this day, when I see a Dunkin’ Donuts, I feel sick,” says Kevin. “We used to chow down on those doughnuts.”

  The kids paid an emotional price, too. In focusing all his energy on making a new career in finance, Joe sacrificed key time with his children. And as lonely as Joe was and as much as he missed seeing his kids during his first few years at Merrill, the children felt those longings even more intensely. His kids missed having him around when they were growing up.

  Says Kelly: “He is so driven. If he hadn’t been, he never would have accomplished what he has. I can respect that now, at age forty-two. But that wasn’t so fantastic at age fifteen. He gets so focused. But when that focus is elsewhere, it’s not on you. But that never meant he didn’t love us. It just took a while for us to realize that.”

  “I think he chose to lead by example instead of being the dad who was always around, driving his kids to games and the prom,” says Kara. “I don’t think he was being selfish. It’s just a trade-off.”

  The subject is a sensitive one for Joe, but he
offers no excuses. “The beginning of my career at Merrill was pretty perilous. It could have all been over just like that. Guys were getting fired left and right. I had to get my career right. Otherwise, I would have been back in that fruit store.”

  No excuses does not mean no regrets. “I regret the hell out of it. It pains me. It saddens me. We all paid a price, and that’s my fault. I really started to become aware of it as my career went on. But I never loved my career more than my children,” he says. “I just did what I believed I had to do.”

  During his childhood, Joe had witnessed firsthand what it’s like to be stuck doing work that makes you miserable, the negative effects it can have on both the person and his family, how it can twist a man and harden him beyond recognition, to himself and others. So part of him was always running away from his father’s fruit store, even as another part of him was reenacting what he always believed to be his father’s most honorable trait—the ironclad commitment to providing for his family. “My father took that responsibility very seriously, and I always respected that,” says Joe.

  Like Joe, his father paid a price for his choice—a higher price, to be sure; but also like Joe he managed in later life to recoup part of what he paid.

  At Dartmouth, Joe was in charge of recruiting the New York/New Jersey area. On one trip, he decided to drop by Yonkers to say hello to his father. John wasn’t at home, so Joe went to the Bronx, to Plato’s Cave, the topless bar that his brother Johnny owned at the time, to see if Johnny knew where their father was. It was the middle of the afternoon. Johnny wasn’t there. The only person in the entire place besides the bartender was an old man, slumped over in a booth.

  Joe left. But he turned around almost as soon as he walked out of the door. There had been something familiar about that old guy. Joe walked back into the bar. He gently lifted the old man’s head up. It was his father, passed out drunk.

  John, always a drinker, had developed into a full-fledged alcoholic by the 1980s. He basically drank his fruit store away and eventually fell into bankruptcy. He was too proud to ask any of his children for money. To his credit, though, after a little over a year in the abyss, John pulled his life together and found another job. He worked for an hourly wage in the produce department of a grocery store called Turco’s, stacking boxes and helping to bag groceries in the checkout lines. He was in his seventies. He joined a gym and began to work out. He ran the one and a half miles from his house to church every day, in his suit. He became very generous with gifts at Christmas and birthdays, signing cards, for the first time, “Love, Daddy.” He worked and was active and fit until his mideighties, when the onset of Alzheimer’s disease forced him to retire and remain homebound. The coda to John Moglia’s life was surprisingly warm and pleasant, like an Indian summer day. He died in 2005 at age eighty-nine.

  Joe learned much from his father’s virtues as well as his failings, and the choices he made in life reflected that legacy.

  Chapter Nine

  California Dreamin’

  Joe starts the Nighthawks’ bye week reviewing his own performance in the game against the Virginia Destroyers. He knows he has to do a better job managing his coaches to help cut down on mistakes. But he also has to be more assertive on the field. Schottenheimer had outfoxed him when it came to the referees. He had worked them over the entire game, using his leverage as a coaching legend. Joe decides he will make it a point to meet with the officials before the upcoming game against the Sacramento Mountain Lions, and stay on top of them throughout it. He might not have Schottenheimer’s football gravitas, “but I can be a pretty persuasive guy,” he says.

  He also spends time analyzing what he will be up against next.

  Dennis Green’s Mountain Lions had lost their first game, too, against Fassel’s Las Vegas Locomotives. But it had been a tight contest (23–17), and Sacramento’s quarterback—rookie Ryan Colburn from Fresno State—had looked good, throwing for two touchdowns in the game. He was sort of a Ben Roethlisberger lite: tall (six foot three) and big (235 pounds), yet nimble on his feet and able to extend passing plays by shedding would-be tacklers or sidestepping his way out of trouble. He was the type of quarterback who drove defensive coordinators like Olivadotti crazy. You could play nearly perfect pass defense against him, but if he made a tackler or two miss in the backfield and gained just a little more time, the defense would break down and the receivers were almost sure to get open. On film, Sacramento looked better than Virginia.

  Then Joe turns his attention to his two major areas of concern on his own team: the offense and the special teams. He trusts that Olivadotti has the defense on the right track. His task is to get the other two coordinators headed the same way.

  First he meets with Kent and his special teams staff. Kent is a stickler for the small stuff, but Joe believes he may be going overboard, still taking on too much. “We should have dynamite special teams. We have a great scheme and we practice the hell out of it,” Joe tells them. “This should be our differentiator. We can do something really special.”

  But what about Colclough’s field goal block in the first game, Kent wants to know, trying to put a positive spin on things. Good, but not good enough. The special teams had been a cauldron of mistakes, all of them mental. Those outweighed the positive of the block. “Let’s get the mental part right,” he tells Kent.

  Offense is a bit of a different story. Joe meets with Andrus and his coaches in the Nighthawks’ main classroom. A new banner has been put up on the wall. It reads: “All things are possible to him that believeth.” It’s a quote from the Bible, from the Gospel of Mark. Though Joe is not necessarily a religious man, the quote is fitting because he believes the problem with the offense might be a lack of belief…in him.

  Because he’s been out of the game for so long, Joe worries about his credibility. He’s not worried about Olivadotti believing in him. Their long friendship and their shared philosophy of coaching outweigh anything else. Besides, Olivadotti would just tell Joe if he thought he was doing something wrong. Joe doesn’t have that comfort level with Andrus. And, anyway, offensive and defensive coordinators are entirely different beasts, who need to be handled accordingly.

  Generally speaking, defensive coordinators are similar to engineers. They must figure out the problem (in simple terms, how to keep the offense out of the end zone). They draw up plans and stick with those plans until something goes awry. And when something (inevitably) goes awry, they adapt, adjust, tweak. While a defensive scheme can be creative, that side of the ball, by its very nature, is inherently reactive.

  Offensive coordinators, on the other hand, tend to be more proactive, even artistic. They have to create every play and think a few steps ahead. They attack a defense. They are the protagonists in the narrative of each game, initiating the action. Hence coordinators on this side of the ball are generally stubborn, accustomed to thinking for themselves and not always very open to hearing other points of view. This is usually a good thing. You don’t want a shrinking violet for an offensive coordinator.

  Joe realizes this with Andrus. Joe loves the offense Andrus has designed on paper and he believes it can work if executed properly, if everything is actually put in that’s supposed to be in, and if the skills of the players are taken into account. But already, just one game into the season, Joe is worried that Andrus may be too stubborn about his scheme and a bit unwilling to make—and really embrace—what Joe sees as some obviously needed changes. First and foremost, Joe wants powerball fully installed. It’s not. Joe sees powerball as the absolutely necessary changeup to the Nighthawks fastball offense.

  And this is where the credibility issue comes to a head. “Schottenheimer has been coaching for thirty-plus years straight,” says Joe, reflecting on how different his own position is. “He’s one of the winningest coaches of all time. If he asks his offensive coordinator to do something, the guy will just do it. I don’t necessarily have that credibility, and I didn’t have time to establish it. My challenge is to g
et Bart to embrace what I want on offense. He has to internalize it, has to buy it, and actually want to do it. And I have to get him do that without making him feel scolded or penalized.”

  A patient approach is what Joe needs now. But with almost no training camp, an abridged season, and the instability of the league, he is currently running short on that virtue. “My patience is gonzo right now,” he says. “I have to get it back.” And over the ten-day break, he does. He meets with the offensive staff every day, never yelling, always nudging.

  Bye week is also a time when the Nighthawks make some personnel moves. Injuries from the last game prompt two of the changes. The promising rookie linebacker, Matt Wenger, is brought back in to replace Pat Thomas. D. J. Shockley takes Crouch’s roster spot; he will be the third-string quarterback. Garrett Wolfe, a former Bears running back, is signed. So is Kyle Nelson, an original draftee of the Nighthawks who had been on the Chiefs practice squad. But this last move creates a tough cut.

  Matt Overton, the Nighthawks long snapper, is one of the more vocal leaders on the team. He stayed in Omaha during the league’s thirty-day delay. He promotes the team relentlessly through social media, and has always been available for the voluntary, team-​​related activities in the Omaha community. “He is the face of our team,” running back Shaud Williams had declared during training camp. “Which is pretty weird, because he’s a long snapper. I bet we’re the only football team in America that can say that.”

  But now, with the addition of Nelson, Overton is gone. The Nelson signing makes perfect football sense: He is a long snapper who also happens to be a very good tight end, a true two-for-one player. But the cut is difficult on the personal side. “I was shocked,” says Overton. “But I know how it goes.”