Joe started his coaching career at age nineteen, the same year he married Kathe and became the father of a green-eyed little girl named Kelly. He was a sophomore at Fordham University. Joe was only a few years older than some of the players he coached on Fordham Prep’s JV squad.
After a season with the JV, Prep’s head coach, Bruce Bott, elevated Joe to the varsity to coach the offensive line and linebackers. “He just had this intensity about him,” says Bott. “He would go through things instead of around them.” Bott was also impressed with how well he related to his players. “He could be street-wise with the tougher kids, but he was also smart enough to reach the valedictorian.”
Joe could yell with the best of them, and he had no problem grabbing a face mask to get a player’s attention. But he connected with the kids because he was first and foremost a teacher. He immersed his defense in the proper techniques, training his cornerbacks to swivel their hips at just the right time as they ran with a receiver, and showing his linebackers how to hold their lanes on running plays. But, more than anything, he taught his players to love football, the game that had helped saved him from the fate of those in his neighborhood who weren’t fortunate enough to have something like football to love.
Joe had one fairly serious problem to overcome in his early coaching days. The single most important trait a good coach must have is the ability to communicate—directly, succinctly, and quickly—during both games and practices. But just as Joe started to coach, his stuttering problem, which he’d for the most part managed to hide, resurfaced, in a bad way. “He would drive me nuts on the sideline,” says Bott. “He’d start to tell me something was happening and it would be the end of the first quarter before I understood him.”
But Joe worked on it. He practiced play calls at night in front of the mirror. He wrote down all of the words that he had particular trouble getting out and, beside them, wrote down easier-to-pronounce synonyms. He even changed the pronunciation of his last name—dropping the proper silent “G” in “Moglia” in favor of a hard one—to make it easier on himself and his players. At the end of the 1970 season, Joe told Bott that he wanted to be the keynote speaker at the team banquet. Bott was wary, but he agreed to let him do it. Joe spent twenty hours rehearsing his five-minute speech. “To his credit, he went right through it,” says Bott. “Knocked it right out of the park.”
By the time Joe graduated from Fordham, he knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life: he wanted to be a college football head coach. But he knew he had to start at a lower level. He was audacious enough to believe that he could jump from being a twenty-one-year-old high school position coach to a twenty-two-year-old high school head coach. He sent out 180 applications to schools around the country. Only one of the schools responded. And that one hired him.
That place was Archmere Academy, a private Catholic school of four hundred kids in Claymont, Delaware, a suburb of Wilmington. In 1971 Joe was hired by Archmere to coach the football, wrestling, and freshman baseball teams, and to teach economics, political science, and European history. At age twenty-two, he became the youngest head coach in Delaware high school history. He had a Herculean task ahead. The school had a terrible football program, and it was populated by fairly well-off kids who were, to put it in blunt football terms, soft. They’d had a decade of losing seasons. “The program had been adrift for a while,” says Paul Pomeroy, who was working at Archmere when Joe arrived and who eventually became his assistant coach. Joe had to break it down completely and build it back up from scratch.
Joe arrived in the summer, in his mustard-yellow Plymouth Belvedere, with Kathe and Kelly in tow. He called a team meeting the day before training camp, and as he was doing the roll call, “kids were just sort of trickling in late the entire time,” says Pomeroy. Whenever a kid came in late, Joe would simply stop what he was doing and say “that’s ten.” No one had any idea what he meant.
At the end of the meeting, Joe told the team that thirteen kids had been late, which meant that the next day—during their first practice—the team would do 130 wind sprints, ten for each late arrival. His message was clear: this is a team, not a group of individuals. “In previous years, we seemed to have an annual rash of flat tires, traffic jams, and broken alarm clocks,” says Pomeroy. “But strangely, all of that cleared up when Joe showed up.”
Joe issued each member of the team a thick playbook. Half of it was taken up with things unrelated to football plays. There was a section on “being a man.” There was another on how the players should carry themselves off the field that included the proper ways to address young women in the school hallways. “When Joe showed up, it was like someone had just stepped off a spaceship,” says Larry Cylc, an offensive and defensive lineman on the team. (Cylc, now a high school football coach himself, still uses Joe’s playbook.)
Practice started eleven days before school opened. Joe made everyone—players and coaches—sleep in the gym. The first of sometimes four daily practices started at 6:00 a.m. Every day the players ran thirty-yard sprints up a steep hill by the football field. “If some kid was having trouble, others would grab him and drag him up the hill,” says Pomeroy. “Everyone had to finish, or they’d all do additional sprints.”
During one particularly long day in camp, a player came up to Joe and told him he was quitting the team. “You can’t quit in the middle of my practice!” Joe replied. “Get back out there!” The kid finished the day.
The players nicknamed the summer practices “the death camp.” Some thrived. Others wilted. “There were people there who deified him and would have followed him to the gates of hell,” says Pomeroy. “There were others who wouldn’t have followed him out of hell.” Says Cylc: “He really challenged your inner workings as a man.”
Joe admits that he probably went overboard in his earliest days as a coach, almost as if he was trying to compensate for his young age. “I was a bit like my father,” he says. “I yelled a lot.” But as his four years at Archmere progressed, Joe became less of a screamer and more of a nurturer. He learned from the styles of the older, more established coaches in the state whom he met at coaching conferences, particularly Tom Olivadotti, who was then the head coach at the one of the state’s best programs at the Salesianum School. “He got better as a coach, in his tactics and in the way he handled the kids,” says Pomeroy. “He was always tough, but he added other essential elements as he went on.”
Archmere went through two more losing seasons before turning the corner. It was pretty clear to his players and coaches that Joe had bigger things awaiting him in the future. “I knew he was going to be a college head coach some day,” says Cylc.
Joe and Kathe were living on the tightest of budgets in Delaware. By Joe’s third year at Archmere, they had three children. Joe was coaching and teaching and getting his master’s degree in education from the University of Delaware. He was making only $10,000 a year. Their house was in the low-income area of Claymont known locally as “Fort Apache.” (It has since been torn down.) Joe wore clothes he picked out of the school’s lost and found. “We would go scouting in his yellow car and we’d empty our pockets for change to buy some ice cream,” says Pomeroy. “We’d have enough for the ice cream, but not for sprinkles.”
When Joe’s brother Johnny first visited him in Delaware, he says he brought bottles of booze and wine from his bar, “because I wanted to drink them.” But he quickly realized that money was so tight for his brother’s family that they were eating pasta every night. “I started bringing steaks when I came,” says Johnny. “It was cheap meat, but I figured the kids needed some protein.”
At the end of the 1974 season (in which the team posted an 8-1 record), Joe took the head job at Penncrest High School in Media, Pennsylvania. He left the Archmere program in excellent shape, having completely turned around a formerly moribund football team. The year after Joe departed, the team went 9-1. They would go to the state finals for the next eight straight years. He left an impression on his players, too. “There aren’t too many other men who have made a bigger positive effect on my life,” says Cylc.
Penncrest was a bigger school than Archmere, and they played in Pennsylvania’s prestigious Central League. But like Archmere before Joe showed up, Penncrest had a downtrodden football program and had been getting routinely crushed in the league. In fact, it was in even worse shape than Archmere had been. Taking a job there was the high school equivalent of taking the Vanderbilt job in the Southeastern Conference. But it was another rung on the ladder Joe was trying to climb.
“The school had an absolutely terrible football legacy,” says Dennis Roccia, who was an assistant offensive coach there under Joe. For the Penncrest players, who were mostly from an affluent suburb of Philadelphia, losing had become a habit. Joe set out to change that.
As he had at Archmere, Joe first focused on the players’ off-the-field lives. “Be a man” and “treat others with respect” became daily mantras. He wanted to reshape and mold the kids. “He instilled in them these fundamental beliefs that football was more than a game. It was this manifestation, really, of a way of life,” says Roccia.
He adds: “It’s funny. I’ve since seen Joe on CNBC twenty times. He gives the exact same speech now, almost forty years later, as he did then.”
Joe taught the Penncrest players a sense of aggression, coupled with a care and concern for their teammates. He made them greet each other with Roman Centurion handshakes. “He just changed everything we did, our entire outlook on life. And he was fired up about it,” says Pete Alyanakian, a slotback and linebacker on the team. Joe didn’t put on any airs. “He was what he was. He was a coach,” says John Thomas, a lineman and kicker. “I remember him on the practice field, wearing baggy shorts, his hair uncombed, the elastic in his socks all shot.”
Penncrest is where Joe first employed his somewhat radical ideas on offense. He came to them out of necessity. His team had smaller kids than the other teams in the Central League. His offensive linemen averaged around 150 pounds. So Joe figured, on offense at least, he needed to emphasize speed and quickness as opposed to bulk and brute force.
Joe installed a quick-read, spread option offense at Penncrest, similar to the one he would later run with the Nighthawks. His offensive linemen set up on the line of scrimmage one yard apart from each other. The quarterbacks made their reads at the line, deciding whether to run or pass. They threw a lot of short, safe passes in lieu of running plays that would have required bigger and stronger offensive linemen to be successful. The scheme was similar to what Bill Walsh—at the time an assistant coach with the Cincinnati Bengals—was running, which would later become known as the West Coast offense. “No one in the league had ever seen anything like it before. It completely baffled them,” says Roccia.
But Penncrest had a ways to go before it would become a winning program. In Joe’s first two years, the team went a combined 4-15-1. But things began to jell in Joe’s last year, when the team went 6-4-1, its first winning season in a decade.
As much as Joe loved high school football and cherished his time at both Archmere and Penncrest, he had his sights set on the next level: college. The problem was that Joe had no idea how to get there. His coaching career had been basically self-made. He had no real coaching mentors, no one to show him the ropes and to give him advice. Bott had helped a bit initially. Olivadotti provided some guidance in Delaware. But, otherwise, Joe had figured things out pretty much on his own.
In the spring of 1977 Joe befriended Walt Buechele and John Furlow, the defensive coordinator and head coach, respectively, at West Chester University, a Pennsylvania school fifteen miles from Penncrest. They both told Joe that he needed to start networking if he wanted to crack the college game. “I thought I could just get there by proving myself as a high school coach,” says Joe. But he found out that in the college ranks, a lot of it was whom you knew.
So Joe decided to take their advice about making and cultivating contacts—starting with them. That spring, he helped out with West Chester’s practices, coaching the secondary. While there he made an impression. Buechele and Furlow recommended Joe for the secondary coach position at Lafayette College that same spring. Joe got the job and packed up Kathe and their now four kids (Kelly, Kim, Kara, and a new baby—their son, Kevin) and moved to Easton, Pennsylvania.
A Catholic priest who was a friend of the family had married Joe and Kathe in a quiet ceremony on a Wednesday night. The only people in attendance were their immediate families. “In those days it wasn’t the thing to do to get pregnant before you were married,” says Kathe. “So everything was hush-hush.” To save money, the two nineteen-year-olds decided to move into the basement of Kathe’s parents’ house in Yonkers. Kathe was very attached to her own family, but she immediately loved Joe’s mother, too (“She was a very special lady”) and at least understood his father (“I always felt sorry for him because in my eyes he was never able to show his family any love”). Kathe would have preferred to stay in Yonkers (or move to Inwood) to raise their children, because roots and family were more important to her than anything else.
But roots were hard to establish when married to an ambitious football coach like Joe, who was constantly on the lookout for new opportunities to advance his career. That, of course, meant lots of moves. Kathe always supported Joe’s coaching career. “I was so proud of him. He was an amazing coach and had such great influence on his players,” she says. But the constant uprooting took a toll on her. “She would be just settling in to a new place, then, poof, Joe would get a job somewhere else,” says Paul Pomeroy, who remained friends with the Moglias after they left Archmere. “I think she would have preferred that Joe stay in one place, that he would sort of install himself somewhere like Archmere and coach there for the rest of his life. But that wasn’t Joe.”
That said, the first few years in Easton turned out to be the time the kids look back on as their favorite part of their childhood. The family was together, a unit. The Moglias lived in a small house on the Lafayette campus, right next to the president’s mansion. “It was a really nice neighborhood that had kids all over the place,” remembers Kelly. “Mom had a good support group. We were happy there.”
Kathe was naturally shy, the opposite of her outgoing husband. “She was never comfortable at big parties,” says Kelly. “She preferred hosting small dinners.” Her tight-knit group of friends in Easton allowed for plenty of that.
In Easton, the Moglia children roller-skated, swam in the college pool, and played on the nearby statue of a leopard, the Lafayette mascot. At home, Joe settled disputes among his girls by making them wrestle each other (Kevin was a toddler at the time). “If we had a disagreement, it was ding-ding-ding,” says Kim. They also put on dancing parties, where Joe and his girls would sing. “Proud Mary” was a particular favorite. “Dad was always Tina Turner and we were the backup singers,” says Kara. “We were a big singing family even though Grandma [Joe’s mother] was the only one who could actually sing. But Dad had no problem trying.”
Their lives revolved mostly around football. “We felt like we were part of the team there,” says Kim, who would sometimes curl up in her father’s lap and watch game films at home. The family went to nearly every game, home and away. “For the first twelve years of my life, I never knew Saturday cartoons existed,” says Kelly. “Mom would just put us in the car and we’d go to football games. It was so cool to see our dad down there on the sidelines.”
“If we won, we would all run down on the field,” says Kim. “But if we lost, everything was somber. Mom would say, ‘Dad needs some time.’”
Financially, things were still very tight. Johnny remembers visiting his brother in Easton one winter. “Their house was really drafty. Jim [Joe] had the heat set at fifty-five degrees. It was freezing. I asked him to turn it up and told him I’d pay for it. He said no, that it would set a bad example if they only turned up the heat when I was there.”
Still, the Moglias did find the time and money to go on one-week vacations during the summer. Unlike his father, Joe would actually stick the week out. They usually went to visit Joe’s childhood friend, John O’Leary, at his beach house on the New Jersey shore. “Dad was never really relaxed on vacations, but he was a lot of fun. He rode bikes with us and told us tons of stories,” says Kelly.
Joe coached the secondary and the special teams at Lafayette, which turned out to be the Leopards’ only strengths. “Our offense was pretty miserable,” says Joe. In the 1978 season the team went 5-3-2 despite having serious trouble scoring points. The defense and special teams carried the squad. In the team’s two ties that year, the scores were 0–0 and 7–7. They won one game by the score of 9–7. Joe’s special teams set an NCAA record with thirteen blocked kicks that year. (One of Lafayette’s kick-blocking specialists was an All-American linebacker named Joe Skladany, who later became an assistant coach for the linebackers and special teams for the Nighthawks.)
At the beginning of what would be Joe’s last year at Lafayette, things between him and Kathe began to sour. Fights became more frequent, though they were careful not to argue in front of the kids. The fights mostly centered on the amount of time Joe spent on his work. Part of his job at Lafayette was to coordinate recruiting, which, combined with his coaching duties, meant he was totally focused on football for all but a month or two during the year. He was also busy writing a football book. “I wanted some family time, but Joe was too busy making his career,” says Kathe. They tried counseling but it didn’t work. In the winter of 1980 Kathe filed for divorce and took the kids to live with her parents back in New York. But with Christmas around the corner, she and Joe decided to reconcile for the kids’ sake. She returned to Easton after two weeks.
At the end of the 1980 season, when Lafayette went 3-7, head coach Neil Putnam was fired. A new coach named Bill Russo was brought in. Russo asked Joe to stay on the staff as the offensive coordinator. But Joe had been offered a job at Dartmouth to lead the defense. Though the talent difference between the players at Lafayette and Dartmouth was negligible, Joe believed the Dartmouth job carried greater prestige.
Joe was now thirty-one years old. He had already been coaching for thirteen years. It was his obsession. He loved the game planning, the repetition of the practices, the molding of dozens of eager-eyed boys into one unified whole. He loved recruiting, the identification of talent, the sales pitch to the player and his family, and the sealing of the deal with the commitment letter. Since age nineteen, he’d had his sights set on one thing: running his own college program. And the Dartmouth job, he believed, was exactly the right step in that direction. Head-coaching aspirants took their licks as assistants for years. If he found success as the defensive coordinator at Dartmouth, he was sure that doors would open in a big way.
But Kathe put her foot down. The move to Hanover would have been the family’s fourth uprooting in a decade. She liked Easton. She told Joe that she and the kids were staying put.
Joe went anyway, believing—hoping—that she would follow. He signed a contract to become Dartmouth’s new defensive coordinator for a starting salary of $30,000 a year. He found a place to live on his own, a little green house on Prospect Street in Lebanon, a neighboring—and cheaper—town.
Kathe and the kids did eventually move up in the summer. But Joe and Kathe’s relationship continued to deteriorate. Dick Maloney, then the offensive line coach at Dartmouth and now the head coach at the University of Chicago, says one night in October of that year, just a few games into Joe’s first season, all of the coaches were in a meeting, going over the game plan for their next opponent, when Hanover’s sheriff walked in and asked to see Coach Moglia.
“We thought there was a death in the family,” says Maloney.
Instead, the sheriff served Joe his divorce papers. “Joe just took them, then quietly returned to the table and put them under his seat and we continued the meeting,” says Maloney. Joe was deeply embarrassed but he tried not to show it. “He was very private and he never talked about any trouble at home, but we all knew what was going on,” says Maloney. “But he never brought it to the field.”
Indeed, on the field, Joe was working near miracles. Joe Yukica, Dartmouth’s head coach, gave Joe freedom on his side of the ball. Joe ran a base 3-4 defense, meaning he usually started with three linemen at the line of scrimmage. But his defense was based on flexibility. They could easily jump into a 4-3 (with four down linemen). They had as many as fifteen different coverages. “What he did so well was adapt the defense to the skills of the players he had,” says Ed Simpson, a linebacker on the team. “We weren’t big at all, but we were fairly smart and coachable. He taught us discipline and responsibility.”
Although Joe had toned down his yelling, he worked everyone very hard. “He had this uncanny ability to grind the kids and, at the same time, convince them that he had their best interests at heart,” says Don Brown, a graduate assistant on that Dartmouth staff and the current defensive coordinator at the University of Connecticut. And “he had great positive energy. If we lost, he never dragged his tail, and that rubbed off on the players. He made them feel good about themselves.” This was a critical part of his coaching strategy, because he knew he had to get his defensive players to believe that they were good, to believe that if they played together as a true unit, they would succeed, despite their lack of size and speed.
And it worked. Led by Joe’s defense, which was the top-ranked one in the East, the Big Green tied for the Ivy League Championship in 1981. That same year, Joe published his first book, The Perimeter Attack Offense. The book was based on the thesis that the key to a great offensive attack is the ability to create an exploitable moment of doubt, a hesitation, in the minds of the linebackers, cornerbacks, and safeties—those players responsible for stopping both the run and the pass. Basically, it was the type of offense that had given his defenses trouble over the years.
In December 1981 Joe and Kathe decided to separate. Kathe hadn’t pushed the divorce proceedings along, but they both realized that they could no longer live under the same roof. Joe made plans to move into the unheated storage room at the Davis Varsity House, over his team’s locker room, when he returned from his Christmas break recruiting trip. They decided Kathe would tell the kids while he was away.
Joe says the day he left for that trip—knowing that he wasn’t coming back to his family—was “the hardest single day of my life.” He kissed his kids good-bye, walked out into the freezing New Hampshire winter day, and got into his car. “I remember looking back at the house as I pulled out of the driveway,” he says. “And there was my little girl, Kara, with her face pressed up to the window, watching her daddy leave.”
“We had no idea he wasn’t coming back,” says Kelly.
A day after he left, Kathe gathered the children together in the kitchen. Kara and Kevin were too young to recall much about that day. But the older two children remember it well.
“We were all in the kitchen,” says Kim. “I was sitting in a chair. I remember how my feet barely touched the ground as I swung them under the chair.” Kathe told them that she and Joe were separating because they didn’t want to fight so much anymore, and that Joe would no longer be living with them. “I had this sense of panic,” says Kim. “The room went white. I thought then that he was never coming back.”
Kelly remembers walking upstairs and seeing her mother packing up her father’s clothes. When she asked her mother what she was doing, Kathe replied, “I told you he’s not coming back.”
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.