CHAPTER 9
High School to Prep School
SO IT WAS THAT DAD opened the door for me to live and breathe sports. In fact, I couldn’t get enough of them. I played baseball, basketball, and football when I got to Monsignor Edward Pace High School, a Catholic school in Opa-locka.
Baseball probably was my best sport, even though I didn’t make the team my freshman year. I’ve always had an “alpha male” personality, which made playing catcher on the baseball team, quarterback on the football team, and point guard on the basketball teams perfect matches.
I’m particularly thankful that I played basketball, which allowed me to get to know John Stack, who had transferred to Pace High and would become my best friend. In addition to a big heart, John had a pretty good jump shot that later earned him a scholarship to Biscayne College.
Though we met through basketball, mostly I think John and I clicked due to of our love of music.
We enjoyed the same bands, like Styx—“Come Sail Away”—and Boston. And we were late bloomers. We talked about girls a lot. My parents loved John, and he quickly became the brother who I never had and helped me through the chaos that is high school (though my friendship with Stu didn’t go away; we were still very close, because of football). Despite my prowess when it came to baseball and the social lessons gained on the basketball court, it was my experience as a football player that would come to define my athletic career. I’ll never forget my junior year, when we first ran the wishbone.
I liked running that offense. I found it fun, and different. Air Force, Navy, and Georgia Tech run similar offenses today. We didn’t have the same type of athletes that some of the schools we played did. That offense helped even the playing field a little bit, since there weren’t a lot of teams running the offense. Defenses would have to be strict on their assignments to stop the wishbone. Some of the teams we played didn’t have the discipline to stick to their assignments. That’s not an easy task.
We went 3–7 my junior season. Of course, I got blown up in the middle of that season against Pompano Ely. A guy hit me on my shoulder when I went to make a pitch on the option. That hit knocked me out of the game and broke my collarbone, which kept me from playing basketball indefinitely, though I did manage to recover from the injury quickly enough to play baseball my junior season, when we won the state championship.
In the spring of 1979 prior to the start of my senior season, our head football coach, Dennis Hartnett, must have gotten some help from Howard Schnellenberger in changing our offense. We went from the wishbone to a passing attack. Talk about 180 degrees difference, as those offenses were the polar opposites of each other.
Coach Schnellenberger had been the Dolphins’ offensive coordinator since the 1975 season. The 1978 season would be Howard’s last with the Dolphins before he moved on to make his mark as the head coach at the University of Miami in the fall of 1979.
I never asked Howard if he got involved in our offense. I figured he met with Coach Hartnett, and he helped him formulate the pass patterns and the formations. Think about how lucky we were to have a guy who coached for a professional football team offering advice to our coach about how to run our offense!
As the quarterback, I went from reading defenses, and either keeping the ball and turning up the field or handing off to a back, like I did while running the option, to where I found myself on most plays dropping back and throwing the football.
Earl Morrall, my old friend from the days working around the Dolphins, had taught me how to better throw a football. How lucky could a kid get? Morrall had won the NFL’s Most Valuable Player Award for the 1968 season after stepping in for an injured Johnny Unitas and leading the Baltimore Colts to the Super Bowl. In the Dolphins’ undefeated season in 1972, Bob Griese broke his ankle in the fifth game of the year. Earl came in and led them to twelve of the seventeen straight wins. And this guy would be the guy giving me some direction and a better idea about what I was doing when I wanted to throw the ball? Wow.
Earl had a unique throwing motion. He didn’t throw like most quarterbacks, who throw like baseball catchers. You wouldn’t see him just put the ball into position at his shoulder and snap off a throw like a catcher trying to throw out a base stealer. Everything with him was more of an above-the-shoulder throw. Earl guided me through everything, working on my footwork, my peripheral vision, and how to read defenses. Those little tips here and there helped more than anything.
That year, thanks in part to Earl, things seemed to be shaping up for me. On the football field, the coaches had us switch to a full pro-style offense. I figured I could play my way to a football scholarship somewhere. After all, I loved playing football, and the new offense appeared to be the ticket that would make me more attractive to colleges scouting for talent. By the end of my senior season, I’d thrown for 1,500 yards and earned All-State honors.
Due to these positive results, I thought that my future would include going to college on a football scholarship. Unfortunately, what I hoped for and reality produced different outcomes.
I couldn’t understand why the colleges weren’t looking my way—frustrating for a kid who had dedicated so much time to the pursuit of sports, and thus the thought never occurred to me that my sports career had run its course. I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, acknowledge such a possibility. You could say I had a blind spot about the subject. My mind refused to go in that direction, at least initially.
Ultimately, I first recognized it after we played Belle Glade High School. They had a good team, and I had completed 10 of 12 passes for 154 yards in the first half alone. Miami and Duke coaches had been at the game. I thought they’d at least come up and talk to me afterward. I mean, I was the kid who worked out with the Dolphins. Earl Morrall had been my private quarterback coach and was now the UM QB coach. Yet the college coaches weren’t interested. Nobody was. That took the wind out of my sails. I thought I’d done well and that my body of work would count for something. On top of that, schools were all over Stu trying to recruit him.
One part of me felt happy for Stu, who signed a football scholarship at Duke University. Another part of me felt jealous, even though I knew that Stu was everything college coaches wanted. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought I could ride the coattails of Stu’s success, like colleges would want to include me in a package with him. I didn’t know what I’d later know when I became a coach: I wouldn’t have recruited a player like me, either.
Yet my parents made sure I never quit, even though everything suggested I should. Aside from that, though, Dad seemed to feel that I needed to wear this one myself. Though I’m not sure that I made the right decision in the short term, I’m glad that Dad had encouraged me to figure out my options.
Coach Schnellenberger just started his tenure as the head coach at Miami, so I went to him looking for some perspective on my situation. He suggested I go to either a prep school or a junior college, because I needed an extra year of preparation.
Playing football at a prep school didn’t count against your college eligibility. Having no scholarship offers forced my hand, and I decided to attend prep school at Fork Union Military Academy in Fork Union, Virginia, starting in the fall of 1979, to continue pursuing my football dream.
In hindsight, I probably should have thought more about playing baseball. I had more talent as a baseball player, and my size wasn’t an issue on the diamond. Football just ranked higher with me. Baseball simply wasn’t as fun.
Fork Union would have some athletes from time to time. Basketball star Melvin Turpin attended Fork Union when I went there. He would become one of the University of Kentucky’s “Twin Towers” along with Sam Bowie, and he later played in the NBA. Future Heisman Trophy winner and No. 1 pick of the NFL draft, Vinny Testaverde, attended Fork Union after I left. Also, Eddie George attended Fork Union before winning the Heisman at Ohio State.
Colonel Red Pulliam served as the commandant and head football coach at Fork Union. I’m telling you, Dad and Red were brothers from different mothers.
Coach Pulliam was a man of few words and led through discipline. But just like Dad offered some tough love at times, once you peeled back the hard surface of Coach Pulliam, you found a compassionate man with a big heart. He cared about his players and wanted to see them succeed. The players’ success was the lifeblood of the school, but he genuinely cared for all of us.
Prep schools could schedule games against college JV teams back then.
We played against freshmen teams from Navy, North Carolina, North Carolina State, William & Mary, and Richmond.
Fork Union proved to be the perfect destination for me, giving me another year of football. Coach Schnellenberger had been spot on, as that’s exactly what I needed. While I worked hard at Fork Union to play well enough to reach my goal of playing college football, I experienced one of the saddest periods of my life.
Several weeks before I was about to leave for school during the summer of 1979, I got the news that John Stack got diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia and would be heading to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.
We’d trained together all that summer, lifting weights, running, getting our bodies and minds ready for our next phase of life, a phase we all take for granted. Like many other teenagers, we thought we were bulletproof—only John wasn’t wearing a bulletproof vest that summer.
John went to Memphis the second or third week of August. I would have gone there with him, but I’d already left for Fork Union. His family sent me a picture of him. He wore a black Grateful Dead t-shirt with the skull and crossbones. The irony of the shirt hit me when I saw it.
Back then, the mortality rate for leukemia stood at around 98 percent, meaning only 2 percent diagnosed with leukemia lived. They didn’t have the treatments then that they have now.
When John first began getting treatment, I don’t think he thought he was going to die. He did know he had a grave disease, though. John fought like a warrior through the torture, pain, and devastation of his physical body. In between my football and classwork at Fork Union, I tried to visit him on two occasions. Each time I tried, he’d gotten sick and couldn’t be around others. His condition made him very susceptible to other complications.
John remained positive through the first couple of months. Then he started making jokes about the girls, like, “Hey if I don’t make it, make up for it.” He tried to maintain a great attitude, but his condition worsened.
In a letter to my parents that fall, I wrote the following about John:
He is going to make it I know. He has too many people behind him. He needs us and we need him.
In that same letter, I updated my parents on my prospects to catch on with a college for a football scholarship, or at least the prospects of becoming a walk-on where I might have the opportunity to earn a scholarship. Here’s how that pursuit was going according to the letter:
Well, I just got out of Pulliam’s office. He said that William & Mary would be a good choice for me. He said Notre Dame I would have a tough time. He mentioned Lafayette. He said that Dan Henning is probably going to get the William & Mary job. Hope so. He said that no one is there to look at the film at William & Mary. He was going to send it to Georgia Tech first. He said that I can take the Virginia film at Christmas break to Tulane.
While I worried about the prospects of a football scholarship, John battled for his life. They pumped him with huge doses of chemo. They figured his big body could take it. Instead, that treatment demoralized him while whittling down his body to nothing. I set up another visit to see him, but the night before I was scheduled to leave, I received a note during study hall to report to the Commandant’s office. It was there that I learned that John had died on December 7, 1979, Pearl Harbor Day. Though it’s been almost forty years, I remember that night like it was yesterday.
It snowed, leaving several inches on the ground. The barracks were settling in for the night. Sitting on a bench at our parade ground, I couldn’t understand how God could let this happen to somebody so good, so vibrant, so full of life, and so faithful in our shared Catholic faith. The loss hurt so badly, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I just sat there reliving all of our days of fun and what we shared over the previous three years. We had a bond that would never be broken. We often compared our bond to the 1971 movie Brian’s Song. I never could have guessed that we would have lived out the story of Brian Piccolo.
The final words that John Stack wrote to me were as follows: “Joe, remember all the good times we had. I finally have someone who I can be myself with. I love you brother. And get that scholarship.”
Of course, Dad was there for me through a truly harrowing time. Harold Kushner wrote a book in 1981 titled When Bad Things Happen to Good People. He dedicated the book to the memory of his young son, Aaron, who died from an incurable disease at the age of fourteen. Later Dad gave me that book while I still struggled to make sense out of the death of the brother I never had.
Prior to John’s death, I never felt such pain and loss. I prayed often that I may never experience that again in my life. But that’s not how life is. Life is precious, because it is fleeting. Looking back at having gone through something that painful at an early age, I’m not sure how many people have that happen to them. It did give me a sense of “I got through the first one, I can get through the next one, too.”
John’s family gave a viewing to a few close friends. I’ll never forget how emaciated he was. He’d been a strapping 225 pounds. When he died, he weighed 160.
Dad had visited John when he had business in Memphis. He came back with a dog he found somewhere and decided to name him Memphis. We had that dog for many years, and he served as a great companion and a great reminder of John’s struggles at St. Jude’s.
As far as offering soothing words of comfort to his only son, my father’s way back then was short and meaningful. He wasn’t about to let me wallow in pity. Grieving was okay, but we have to move on. “Life is full of sadness,” he told me. He also encouraged me to take John’s remembrance with me in everything I did. I embraced that thought. I can’t tell you how many times working out or running that I wanted to stop or quit. Then the memory of John would kick in, and I would think he would love to have the opportunity I have. Doing what I was doing at that moment. Keep going!
Gerry Sandusky (not to be confused with the now-notorious Jerry Sandusky, formerly of Penn State), who played basketball at Cooper City High School and went on to play basketball at Towson State, was friends with me and John, as well. His father worked as the offensive line coach for the Dolphins, and their family had already seen tragedy when Gerry lost his brother, who played football at Tulsa. We would we see each other on school breaks, and we used to have deep talks about John and Gerry’s brother, too, how their deaths left such an empty hole in our lives. Why did they die and not us? I think those conversations helped me navigate the grieving process to some degree. But there’s another part of me that never really recovered from John’s death.
Gerry ended up playing tight end on the football team his last two years at Towson.
There are few friends in life that you come across and with whom you may not talk on a daily or weekly basis. Yet when you do, you just pick up where you left off the last time you spoke with them. Gerry Sandusky is that type of friend. Our relationship has always been one of mutual admiration, and we always seemed to confide in each other. I think from day one we just connected. We had mutual interests, we saw each other for who we were, we both lost a person dear to us to tragic illness, and we both had goals in our life both on the field of play and off. He also is the best Howard Cosell impersonator you will ever hear and has maintained his sense of humor through the peaks and valleys of his life. Gerry and I speak once or twice a year still. He has been the sports director for WBAL in Baltimore for the last 20-plus years and is the play-by-play announcer for the Baltimore Ravens.
Thanks to friends like Gerry, I was able to take Dad’s advice and keep going through it all. Not that it was easy. During my only football season at Fork Union, I injured my throwing hand in the fifth game. Our defensive coordinator came over to me while I was stretching and asked if I’d ever played defense. I told him no, and he said, “You can’t throw. You want to play defense?”
I wanted to be on the field, and defense looked like my only choice. Next thing I knew, I was playing defensive back, against the North Carolina freshman team.
In time, defense suited me, and I thought that might be my ticket to continue playing football, since I played it well. Only there were no scholarship offers at the end of the season. Nobody even gave me a look other than William and Mary, then they didn’t want to take me, because I needed another ten points on my SAT. VMI and The Citadel were possibilities, but I didn’t want to stay in the military academies. After high school, I’d counted on Duke and Miami showing some interest in me. The prospect of one, or both, wanting me had played a part in my decision to attend Fork Union. Their minimal interest motivated me, but they never called. I had no interest from any schools other than the University of Virginia, which flirted with me about the possibility of walking on. They never got back to me.
If John’s death hadn’t been enough, the scholarship thing, or lack thereof, began to really demoralize me, and I voiced my anger on both fronts to Dad.
In a letter dated February 28, 1980, I wrote:
Dear Dad,
I really can’t wait to get home. This place is really for the birds. I have a lot of things that we have to talk about and I’m not going to even try to write about them all, I’ll just wait till I get home and we’ll talk. There are a couple of things that are important now and are on my mind. First is the scholarship bullcrap. Dad, I’m getting so disgusted with the whole situation. I know you and Mom keep telling me something is going to turn up. Well, as the days go by and the weeks go by, they turn into months and still not a damn word. What really surprises me is that I haven’t even been approached by the likes of schools like Randolph-Macon, VMI, Citadel. I mean everyone has at least heard something from them. But not me. I know I came up here to grow, get stronger, mature and get my SAT’s up, but you know and I know the real reason why I came up here and that was to get a scholarship. I know Mom tries to look at the bright sides of things and I should, too, but it’s hard to look at the bright side when the dark side is so dark.
Second of all, if you’re not a blue chip, you’re worthless. I’ll tell you a story that really turns me off. I can’t believe people can be such big liars. I was with Ronnie at North Carolina and one of the coaches asked me what I played. I told him. He said that they had their fill of DB’s and QB’s, and that they used up their 30 scholarships. One week later they signed a QB/DB that was no bigger than I was. Today I found out that one of our linemen that played for us signed with LSU. LSU told me four weeks ago that they used up all their scholarships. LSU contacted the kid three weeks after I got the letter from them. You know what else surprises me is that I haven’t heard a word from Richmond, and William & Mary. I thought for sure I should of heard from them. At least an interest letter. Dad, I’ve really been thinking about my future. I say to myself one-hundred times a day, “Maybe you’re just not good enough.” Maybe I’m not but I just can’t end like this. I’ll have a sour taste in my mouth for as long as I live. Tell me what you think about this? …
Dad responded with his direct approach that I should stay the course, and that good things were destined to come my way.
Despite the disappointment of not having any football offers, and the uncertainty about my future, I continued to participate in athletics at Fork Union. I competed in diving. I ran indoor track. And I played baseball, which allowed me to get to know the volunteer baseball coach, Jackie Jensen. Initially, I had no clue who he was.
Turns out Jackie had played in the major leagues from 1950 to 1961, and he’d earned American League Most Valuable Player honors in 1958 while playing for the Boston Red Sox. He hit thirty-five home runs during that MVP season, and he led the league with 122 runs batted in. Jackie would have played longer, but he retired in his early thirties due to an intense fear of flying.
In college, Jackie played for the University of California and became the first to play in the Rose Bowl, the World Series, and the baseball All-Star Game.
He’d been an All-American running back in 1948, his junior season at Cal, becoming the school’s first player to rush for 1,000 yards in a season. Jackie placed fourth in the Heisman Trophy voting the year Doak Walker won the award.
Jackie was such a genuine individual. He would drive the vans with us to games. I’d sit up front, and we’d talk about baseball. His first wife had been his high school girlfriend, Zoe Ann Olsen, who won the silver medal in diving at the 1948 Summer Olympics. Since I competed in diving, that triggered a couple of conversations. Jackie had a soft-spoken way. What he said about the baseball swing made sense. Of course, you bought in given the weight of his background. He had a pretty impressive backside of his baseball card. Jackie encouraged me to switch-hit, and I started hitting home runs from both sides of the plate, which I’d never done before. I played well enough to garner three or four offers from small colleges in Virginia to play baseball. Of course, baseball offers are never worth much. They only cover a portion of the tuition.
I learned a great lesson from Jackie that I employ every day in my business life. He didn’t try to change my swing; rather, he took the ability I had and continued to give me tips. Then he let me decide the course of direction. Similarly, throughout my business career, I have hired different people who bring their unique talents with them every day. My job is to help them develop those talents, give them tips or thoughts on how to succeed, give them empowerment, and then get out of the way so they can do what they do.
Jackie Jensen certainly enriched my baseball experience at Fork Union.
He taught me so much about baseball and a lot of other things. I stayed in touch with him for a little bit after Fork Union, prior to his sudden death in 1982.
Despite being surrounded by great mentors like Jackie, I was still in search of an opportunity to play college football. During Fork Union’s spring break, my Dad and I took my sister Margie back to FSU, where she starred in volleyball. During that visit, I managed to arrange a visit with Bobby Bowden. A family friend, Bill Dawkins, who had been an All-American linebacker at FSU, had already put in a call for me. Dawkins and my mom were classmates at FSU, and he was the head coach at Miami Norland Senior High School, where my mother was the assistant principal.
When Dad and I visited Coach Bowden, we sat across from him, both of us seemingly awestruck. Coach Bowden immediately asked me in his big Southern drawl, “Were you number eighteen in that film versus North Carolina?” I told him I was. At that minute, the sale was over. I was bought and delivered.
Coach explained that he had five questions when evaluating recruits:
At the time, FSU and Nebraska were doing a lot to strengthen their programs by building up their walk-ons with “culture people.” Several walk-ons had done well at FSU—Monk Bonasorte, the starting free safety, being one of them. All I wanted was a chance. So, like my mother and sister, I elected to become a Nole.
You could say Dad was pleased with the situation. For him, it was a win-win, especially with Margie already being there. Little did either of us know that it was the prospect of being a walk-on for the FSU football team and the ensuing decision to take the plunge that would one day lead to the most memorable of days that Dad and I had ever experienced together.