4th and Goal

by Monte Burke

  Colburn drops back to pass again. Dennis Green is looking for the dagger, the one play that will put his team in range of a game-winning field goal. But Claude Herriott, a native Jamaican who has been signed and cut by four NFL teams, brushes by a lineman and sacks Colburn again. This time there is no flag.

  Omaha gets the ball back at its own 35 with two minutes to play. The dark blue California sky is streaked with ribbons of pink clouds. Masoli does his best Colburn impersonation, stepping out of trouble and finding Chad Jackson for a thirty-five-yard pass play. Three consecutive runs position the Nighthawks at the Sacramento 21. The clock winds down.

  Wolfert is on the sideline, warming up his eight-iron with kicks into a net. He jogs out onto the field, then coolly hits the game-winning thirty-nine-yard field goal as time expires. Nighthawks players jump on Wolfert’s shoulders and slap the back of his helmet. It is the best game he’s ever had, with four field goals converted, two of which were well over fifty yards. Tonight he is accurate and long. Tonight, he looks like an NFL All-Pro.

  Denzel sits over on the sideline, his arms now crossed over his chest. His son has played a hell of a game, rushing for 114 yards. But his team has lost. The players dump a bucket of Gatorade on Joe’s head. It’s his first win as a head coach of a football team in thirty-four years.

  Even better, the former CEO has beaten an NFL lifer.

  Chapter Ten

  Who the %#*! Is This Guy?

  To an outsider lacking any context, the fixed-income trading floor at Merrill Lynch on any given day in the spring of 1984 would have seemed like an insane asylum.

  The scene:

  A few adults, trying to get someone’s—anyone’s—attention, bounced up and down like school kids, frantically waving their arms above their heads while somehow managing to keep phone receivers pinched between their necks and shoulders.

  Others sat, still as statues, staring fixedly at one of the hundreds of computers on the floor, trying to decipher the meanings of the constantly blinking, ever-updating numbers and symbols on their screens, the 32,000-year update of Paleolithic cave paintings.

  Traders yelled into “hoot-n-hollers,” open lines connected with unseen faces on the other side of town or, perhaps, the world.

  Phones pealed ceaselessly for attention.

  And over the hive hum, distinct fragments of dialogue occasionally surfaced:

  Salesman, with client on the phone, yelling to his trader: “Offer me $20 million long bonds.”

  Trader shouting back to salesman: “At 17!”

  Salesman to client on phone: “How’s 17?” Pause. “No? Sixteen, you say?”

  Salesman, now with hand over phone receiver, back to trader: “He wants 16.”

  Trader to salesman: “Tell him to go screw himself!”

  Salesman to client on phone, hand now off receiver: “We’re staying at 17.”

  This entire exchange would have taken maybe fifteen seconds. The floor was not a place for the timid, the weak, or anyone susceptible to seizures.

  Mike Quinn, the head of the New York fixed-income desk, loved being on the floor. It provided a peek under the hood at the engine that made Wall Street purr, the high-rolling casino where both the house and the players won the majority of the time. Its manic energy was infectious.

  One of Quinn’s favorite rituals was taking a new hire on a tour of the floor. The point of this “perp walk” was, ostensibly, to introduce the new hire to his or her future colleagues. But Quinn’s real intent was to give these raw recruits a taste of what, in a matter of months, lay in store for them.

  After all, the floor would be very different from anything these new hires had ever experienced in their working lives. In fact, most of them had very little experience actually “working.” They’d gone to the country’s best undergraduate institutions, then continued their education in MBA programs at prestigious schools like Harvard, Stanford, Northwestern, Virginia, and Dartmouth. They were the best and the brightest.

  In the early 1980s Wall Street firms like Merrill Lynch, Salomon Brothers, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley had begun to funnel their young new hires into training programs. These three- to seven-month finishing schools were the Wall Street equivalent of basic training in the military. There the recruits honed their skills and zeroed in on their expected specialties (equities, fixed income, etc.), after which, upon graduation, they joined a desk and a team.

  Most of the recruiting for Merrill’s young hires was done by the firm’s human resources department. HR had all of the proper contacts within the top universities’ MBA programs, and had developed a tried-and-true formula for hiring, using metrics like class rank and grades, as well as less scientific measurables like pedigree.

  On occasion, however, Mike Quinn, as the head of his division, used his clout to circumvent the HR department and would hire someone who didn’t necessarily fit the mold. “Sometimes you just had a gut feeling about a person,” says Quinn.

  And sometimes that gut feeling was dead-on.

  On a sunny day in the spring of 1984, Quinn walked on to Merrill’s fixed-income trading floor. At his hip was his latest hire. The perp walk was on.

  The traders and salesmen on the floor paid as little attention as they could to these walks. After all, in just a few short months these newbies would be the competition, and they didn’t want to be bothered worrying about what was to come. When Quinn approached with a new hire, the traders and salesmen were generally cold, croaking out a hello, then quickly turning back to the flow of the floor and forgetting the encounter ever took place, like river water quickly repairing itself after the splash of a tossed pebble.

  But on that day in 1984, something about this particular new guy made the normally remote folks on the floor pause for just a bit longer than usual, giving the new hire the once-over, nodding their heads in head-to-toe glances. When Quinn and the new guy moved on, they left a sea of sardonic smiles and smirks in their wake. This recruit was different. And not in a good way as far as anyone could tell.

  Joe Petri was a trader who had been on the floor for three years. He’d seen Quinn’s dog-and-pony show countless times, and like the others, he generally ignored it. All of the recruits looked pretty much the same anyway—midtwenties, precise haircuts, gray Brooks Brothers suits (for men) and conservative white blouses (for women) that their parents had bought for them. The ripest fruit plucked from the nation’s best business schools.

  But this guy…this guy made Petri lose his train of thought. He looked up from his computer screen, standing to get a better view as Quinn and the man came closer.

  The new guy was nothing like the other recruits. First off, he appeared to be at least a decade older than the others. He was big. He held his chest out and walked in a slow swagger. He smiled, but with a look of utter confidence and not a trace of nervousness. He shook hands with force, like he was trying to pull elbows out of sockets.

  But it was his clothes that really made him stick out. That wasn’t a Brooks Brothers suit he was wearing. That wasn’t even a suit.

  That was a plaid jacket. And, yes, those were black pants with loud white stripes.

  Petri said—out loud but only to himself—the very first words that popped into his head:

  “Who the fuck is this guy?”

  That guy was a football coach who had just given up on his dream, who had failed in his marriage, who had moved back into his parents’ house at the age of thirty-four, who no longer lived with his four children, who was now financially supporting six people. He was a man more desperate and more determined to succeed than anyone on the floor.

  Quinn and the man walked over.

  “Petri, this is Joe Moglia. He starts today.”

  In 1984 the United States was running at full sprint. After the malaise of the 1970s and the misery of the recession that started the decade, there was an almost hyperactive optimism and eagerness in the country, a general feeling that Ronald Reagan captured brilliantly with his “Morni
ng in America” campaign reelection slogan.

  That optimism was felt with special force at Merrill Lynch, which was in the throes of a swift and dramatic transformation. In the 1950s and ’60s, the firm became the one of the biggest and best brokerage houses in the world, powered by its legions of stockbrokers, who signed up and shepherded the investment accounts of individuals (what’s known as “retail investing”). Those stockbrokers were known, collectively, as “the thundering herd.” They didn’t necessarily outsmart the rest of Wall Street, but by damn, they did overwhelm it through the sheer force of numbers.

  But sometime in the mid-1970s, Merrill Lynch realized that in order to keep up with its competitors on the Street (Goldman Sachs, Salomon Brothers), it had to change its tactics. Investment banking—in which a financial institution could originate stock offerings and sell and distribute them through its own bank—was the best way to do that. The big money wasn’t with the individual stock investor. It was with the institutional investors—the massive companies—and the pension funds that had billions of dollars in assets.

  Merrill began its transformation by acquiring White Weld, a Boston investment bank, in 1978. But the firm couldn’t just buy its way into the game; it also had to grow its investment bank from within. One of the primary architects of that strategy was a man named Roger Vasey. Under his guidance, the firm began to focus on the highly lucrative world of fixed income—that is, gathering interest on government, municipal, and corporate debt that was paid to the lender on a fixed, or regular, schedule. By 1984, that year of optimism, Merrill was rising fast, well on its way to catching up to Goldman and Salomon.

  Oddly enough, the unlikely hiring of a thirty-four-year-old former football coach would help them get there.

  But the journey to Wall Street was in no way easy for Joe, even though the move made perfect sense to him on a number of counts. It gave him the possibility of making big money, which would allow him to provide handsomely for his kids, and perhaps assuage some of the pain that leaving football would cause him. New York was close enough to his family that he would still be able to visit them fairly often. And while he was getting started on his new career, he could move back in with his parents in Yonkers, which would solve the problem of not having enough money for rent. (His mother was ecstatic to have him home; his father was proud of his attempt to get a “real” job.) It helped, too, that the financial world did actually interest him. He’d been an economics major at Fordham. So what little he knew about the Street seemed to jibe with his needs, his personality—and even his professional background.

  Contrary to what others might have thought, Joe really did believe that being a football coach was actually a pretty good way to prepare for life on Wall Street. The problem, he knew, would be convincing others that that was the case. He realized that he wasn’t the typical candidate for a Wall Street job. His only degrees were a bachelor’s from Fordham and a master’s in education from Delaware. He didn’t have an MBA and had neither the time nor the money to get one. At thirty-four he was nearly a decade older than the typical recruit. Plus he lacked the pedigree: He was a poor kid from the inner city. He didn’t always speak the King’s English. He had a family of six. He didn’t know a soul on the Street.

  But none of that would matter.

  Joe had gone after a Wall Street job with everything he had. After studying up on it, he decided that he would focus on the institutional side rather than the retail one. The retail guys were part of the old-boy network that had been entrenched in their jobs forever. They had the family summer homes in the Hamptons. But the real money was now on the institutional side, in the selling and trading of bonds to corporations and governments. The institutional guys got dirt under their fingernails. Sure, they were still predominantly Ivy Leaguers, but Joe believed he had his best shot at breaking in there.

  He started with a simple but typically well-thought-out game plan. He got all of the alumni books from the four colleges he’d been associated with, as either a student or a coach: Fordham, Delaware, Lafayette, and Dartmouth. He circled the names of anyone who worked on Wall Street who’d had anything to do with the individual school’s football program. Then he called every one of them.

  He gave them all what he called his “one-minute pitch,” which he rehearsed endlessly in front of his bathroom mirror. The pitch went something like this:

  “I grew up in a rough neighborhood in New York City. I got out. A lot of my peers didn’t. I’ve been coaching football for sixteen years. I started when I was nineteen years old. I won two Ivy League championships as the defensive coordinator at Dartmouth. I’ve written a book about coaching. I am now looking to change careers. I believe that the skill sets needed for coaching football are the same ones needed for Wall Street: You need to be intensely competitive, mentally tough, and exhaustively prepared. You need to perform well under pressure. You need to be able to sell yourself and your program. And the end goal is to win. Period.”

  Joe was relentless. If a person took his call, he wouldn’t let him off the phone until he coughed up a contact. Joe believed that if could just get a face-to-face meeting with a decision maker, he could sell himself and his story. He told no one about his divorce, at least not on the phone. “That seemed like a weak card to play,” he says.

  But, a few months in, his strategy just wasn’t working. Though he turned up a few Wall Street contacts on the phone, he couldn’t manage to land any crucial meetings.

  And so, in the spring of 1984, Joe decided to take the matter into his own hands. One morning he took the train into the city from his parents’ house in Yonkers. He walked through the doors of Merrill Lynch at One Liberty Plaza unannounced (this was back in the day before corporate buildings had much in the way of strict security procedures). He was looking for Brian Barefoot, who was a bigwig in the fixed-income division.

  Joe rode the elevator to the seventh floor and, after twenty minutes of searching and sweating, he finally found a door with Barefoot’s name on it. He walked in and was greeted by a secretary in the anteroom.

  “I’m here to see Mr. Barefoot,” he told her.

  “Your name?”

  “Joe Moglia.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. He’s in a meeting.”

  Joe looked past her and saw Barefoot sitting at his desk.

  “Isn’t that him right there?” Joe asked, pointing.

  “I’m sorry, sir. He’s in a meeting.”

  Joe didn’t want to make a scene. He took out his résumé and put it on her desk. “Please do me a favor and make sure he sees this. Please.”

  She promised she would. As he was leaving, Joe glanced once more into Barefoot’s office. He hadn’t budged.

  Joe followed up the next week with three phone calls to Barefoot’s office. They were never returned.

  A month later, Joe finally caught a break. A Dartmouth alum put him in touch with a Merrill Lynch branch manager in Florida who happened to be friends with a man named Bill O’Connor, who ran the national sales desk in New York. Joe called O’Connor, but never got past his secretary. But she, out of pity it seemed, passed Joe on to the head of New York fixed income: Mike Quinn.

  Quinn showed up for work one morning and saw Joe’s résumé on his desk. “It certainly stood out,” says Quinn. There was no MBA and no experience in finance. There really wasn’t much at all. Quinn agreed to see him anyway. “He walks in wearing this wine-colored shirt that has a white collar and these white striped pants. It was not the usual outfit. But I could tell immediately that he was very comfortable in his own skin, that he didn’t care a whit what he dressed like. To be honest, I was just impressed that he’d gotten himself in the door.” (For the record, Joe says he would never wear pants with white stripes. “They were yellow,” he says.)

  Joe told Quinn his life story, this time including the divorce. Quinn was fascinated. “He was really a rough stone. It wasn’t just the way he dressed. He was from the streets. He had this street accent,” says Quinn.
“And he really had no understanding of how the fixed-income business worked. At all.”

  Joe wrapped up his story with one last thing:

  “I am going to be the number one salesman at Merrill Lynch,” he said.

  “That’s good,” replied Quinn. “We want people to aspire to that.”

  “I don’t think you understand me,” said Joe. “I’m not going to try to do it. I am going to do it.”

  Quinn smiled. “There was a point during the interview when I thought to myself, This guy is a complete lunatic. But his intensity was incredible. He wanted it so badly. And he couldn’t really afford to fail. I’m a big believer in appetite. He’d been through a lot. Sales was a business where you got beat up every day. You had to be a Weeble Wobble. And it was pretty clear that this guy could take a punch.”

  Quinn hired him. He wanted to put Joe in the MBA training program to get him up to speed. The problem was that Merrill’s human resources department was in charge of filling those spots, and Joe didn’t have the MBA usually required for the program. But Quinn, as a division head, went around HR and placed Joe in the program. “They were like, ‘Are you sure?’ Those folks wanted to show well. They wanted people who looked good on paper, the well scrubbed, well-polished, well-schooled Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia guys. Then they got this thirty-four-year-old father of four with an inner-city accent and a Men’s Wearhouse closet.

  “Joe had a lot of things to overcome here. Internal resistance was a serious one. But I had a lot of confidence in him,” says Quinn.