Monte Burke - 4th and Goal: One Mans Quest to Recapture His Dream

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To Harper and Dylan,

team players

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up/Like a raisin in the sun?

Langston Hughes

Dont do it. Dont go into coaching unless you absolutely cant live without it.

Paul Bear Bryant

I ts a frigid early Sunday morning in the late fall of 1983. Joe Moglia, the thirty-three-year-old defensive coordinator of the two-time defending Ivy League champion Dartmouth Big Green football team, lies awake in his bed in an unheated storage room located on the top floor of the Davis Varsity House, an old, red brick building on the schools Hanover, New Hampshire, campus. During daylight hours, from the rooms huge circular window, one can see the green grass of the football field, encircled by a vermilion running track thats pinstriped with white lane lines. But it is now 4:00 a.m., that dark, unsettling hour when the racing minds of the sleepless become easy prey for creeping anxieties.

Joes back nearly touches the icy cement floor, the springs on his single bed having long since surrendered to the fatigue of three decades of use. He watches his vaporized breaths blow into a thin slice of streetlamp light pouring in through the uncurtained window. His shirts hang from the rooms exposed water pipes like laundered ghosts. A half-dozen pigeons, sleepless themselves, are perched on the ledge outside his window, trilling softly.

To stave off the cold, Joe is wearing a gray sweat suit, the hood pulled over the ski hat on his head. Hes also wrapped four old Army blanketsproviding all the suppleness of steel woolaround his body. Joe is fighting the urge to urinate. He doesnt want to break the seal of warmth that his body has taken hours to createthe bathroom is down two flights of stairs, in the football teams locker room.

The previous afternoon, Dartmouth had tied Columbia to remain undefeated in the Ivy League. They are very much in contention for their third straight league championship. For the past three seasons Dartmouth has been led by Joes defense, one of the best in college football. Though they are an undersized, slow-footed group, he has somehow managed to convince them that a football game is won as much with their heads and hearts as it is with their bodies.

Its not unusual for a football coach to be awake at this hour. Sleeplessness is a common malady among this particular fraternity of men, who are judged, fairly or unfairly, by a single metric: whether they win or lose on Saturday afternoons. Nights after games are the worst. Brains hum, exulting in a victory or stewing over a loss or, perhaps, already fretting about next weeks opponents.

But Joe has something bigger than a football game on his mind. Since he was a teenager, he has worked toward his one abiding dream, his lifelong obsession: He wants to become the head coach of a college football team.

But he has decided on this early morning in Hanoverwell into the second year of his ascetic, solo existence in this musty storage roomthat his dream must die.

Technically, Joe is still married, though that will not be the case in a few months. His separation and subsequent divorce from the woman he married at age nineteen will be, always, what he counts as his greatest failure. Together, he and Kathe have four children: three elementary schoolaged girls and a five-year-old boy. But Joes current salary is $33,000. He has decided that he can no longer patiently work his way up the football-coaching ladder and still provide for his family.

His main objective now will be taking care of his family. Making this choice will require an almost unbearable sacrifice. He will have to lose his dream. But he will also lose something much more important. In order to take care of his family, Joe has decided, he must leave them. He will regret the consequences of this decision for the rest of his life. But he will always believe he made the right choice.

Two months later Joe will be offered a job on the defensive staff of the defending national champion University of Miami Hurricanes, with a promise that he will soon become the teams defensive coordinator. It is exactly the right job for this point in his career, a high-profile chance to position himself, eventually, for a head-coaching gig.

But Joe will decline the offer. Instead, he will follow through on his new life plan. Joe has his sights set on Wall Street. He has decided that if he is going to lose both his career and everyday contact with his family, he is going to make a lot of money doing so. Somehow, he hopes, it could ease the pain.

But neither a Wall Street job nor the money that comes with it is guaranteed. He is fantastically unqualified for employment in one of the most competitive industries in the world. In his professional life, he has known only the world of football. He is rolling the dice, betting on himself.

On that cold morning in that storage room in New Hampshire, Joe believes his coaching careerthe sole ambition of his professional lifeis now over, forever. The Yogi Berralike maxim tossed around by the salty old-timers in the profession, Joe knows, is true: the only way to get back into coaching is to never leave it.

Unless

Twenty-eight years later, now sixty-two, Joe Moglia is standing on the sidelines of a football field in Nebraska, wearing a headset and a white polo shirt with the words Omaha Nighthawks stenciled over the left breast. It is a Thursday night in the fall of 2011, chilly and sprinkling with rain. The stadium lights are aureoled in the mist. Joe can see the vapor from his breath.

Joe has become the head coach of the Nighthawks, one of four franchises that constitute the United Football League, a professional minor league in only its third year of existence. Constantly teetering on the brink of obsolescence because of financial troubles, this is a league made up of football players and coaches who, for one reason or another, are currently either National Football League castoffs or wannabes. The UFL provides them with a chance to get back into the biggest, most powerful sports league in the world, or to make it there for the first time.

The league provided Joe an opportunity, too. In a life filled with overcoming challenges, he has sought out yet another in his quest to become a coach again. He had been born and raised in a rough-and-tumble inner city New York neighborhood from which half of its kids never made it out. He was an audacious young football coach who scratched and clawed his way up the profession for sixteen years. After leaving coaching in 1984, he embarked on one of the most remarkableand unlikelybusiness careers of the last half century, one that was completely self-made. With no experience or pedigree, he somehow willed his way into a new career on Wall Street. In his seventeen years at Merrill Lynch, he rose quickly to a top management position and, along the way, actually changed the way Wall Street does business.