At the southeast corner of Franklin Field, Dan Staffieri stands next to his car. Some people drive Porsches, some drive Volvos or Hondas, some drive SUVs. Staffieri, as always, is a little bit different. He doesn't take it out much, but he drives a giant Penn football helmet, and since it's the day before Penn's home opener versus Villanova, he's taking it out today.
While Staffieri looks on, his driver Brian backs the helmet out of the stadium gate and orients it toward Spruce Street. Staffieri, his eyes being what they are, stopped driving long ago. Besides, he'll need both hands to operate the bullhorn.
The gate now closed and the helmet ready to go, Staffieri climbs in. He wears a bright red sports coat, red plaid pants, a matching hat, blue bowtie, heavy-set glasses, two hearing aids and 11 championship rings on his fingers. On his forehead he has stuck a piece of athletic tape with "wack" written across. It's building on his theme for the week, "Wack the (Villanova) Wildcats." Brian turns the ignition and the engine rumbles before settling into a quiet electric whine. They roll slowly forward, as fast as the converted golf cart will take them, the contraption rocking back and forth as they hit the potholed Philadelphia street and then off-road up a curb and onto the sidewalk. Brian looks over at him. "Alright, Coach," he says. "You ready? Another year."
The helmet has been around since the 1980s, but Staffieri, or "Coach Lake," as he's most commonly known, has been around for even longer. Now officially listed as temporary volunteer, this year is Staffieri's 29th at Penn. And while originally hired to help coach the freshman football team, he hasn't been on the payroll for years. The nickname Lake arose when he first began coaching prep football 53 years ago, with Staffieri providing forgetful players a mnemonic rhyme: "Staffieri, like Lake Erie." Since then, the years have accumulated while the name has shrunk.
"Tomorrow night!" he bellows into the bullhorn, the helmet now buzzing up College Green toward Locust Walk, "Seven o'clock! University of Pennsylvania, I-V-Y Champs, will play Villanova! Come out to Franklin Field to welcome our guests from the Main Line!"
The sea of students parts as the helmet rolls on. Some laugh; some suppress a smile. Student activities representatives sit at their Locust Walk booths and look on with knitted eyebrows and mouths slightly open. They have been handing out fliers for weeks, futilely plugging their various organizations, and here they are now, being outdone by an 82-year-old man in a giant football helmet, yelling at them through a bullhorn.
"Here we go Quakers, here we go," Lake cries. He picks out a girl walking alone to class. "How you doing?" he cries to her emphatically. She doesn't respond. Lake keeps yelling. He doesn't care.
It wasn't always like this. Before he shifted primarily to the motivational circuit, Dan Staffieri was first and foremost a football coach. And while he'll tell you that he "helps out with the running backs" during practice, his current role is hardly the one that, way back in 1977, he was hired to fulfill.
That year, then-head coach Harry Gamble hired Staffieri to work with the freshman football program. When the program went belly-up in the early 1990s, Staffieri somehow missed the memo. No one was firing the guy anyhow. By that point, he was practically an institution.
"It started in 1977, my first year here, with the freshman team," he explains. "We're 0-9. No wins. And I'm assistant coach to the freshman coach John Lines. So we started out this way: 'Penn Pride. I-V-Y Champs. Do Better than your Best.' At the end of practice, we'd all say it. No one believed. No one believed in it. I had to get them to believe. To believe, that was the problem, because we're 0-9! We're not Ivy Champs. We've got no pride."
From there, Staffieri molded the identity of a football program. In the early 1980s, he began riding the helmet, conceived by then-coach Jerry Burns, around campus the Friday before home games, stumping for support from a, at best, tepid fan base. Judging from the performance he's putting on today, he hasn't missed a beat.
"Lake is a motivator for the players," says Rich Schepis, Director of Football Operations at Penn. "He's been doing this since the late '70s. A lot of the players on the first Ivy title teams in the early '80s credit Lake for turning around the attitude of the program, which had seen some dismal years prior to our recent success.
"He always has the players chanting 'Ivy Champs.' It makes them believe it," Schepis continues. "It's funny because a lot of people don't get Lake, and it is probably true of the freshmen as well, but I have watched three classes come into Penn and by the time they leave they all love him and what he means to the team."
Maybe the freshmen don't get him because he isn't what they expected. It's an easy trap to fall into with Staffieri. Faced with a lifetime of experience, one tends to expect fireworks. Here is a guru, a man who knows the game of football. Knowledge from the ancestors, the founders and pillars of the game, any game - it's what we all want. So when Staffieri goes heavy on the spirit and light on the game plan, cynicism can set in all too quickly.
The truth is, Staffieri is no genius. He never has been. And with the game growing increasingly complex, he's unlikely to become one anytime soon. He is a volunteer assistant coach at a Division I-AA school, far removed from the glories of Nebraska, Florida State and Michigan. He has devoted nearly his entire adult life to cheering on a mediocre football program. He speaks in truisms. He has no children.
But as silly as it sounds, Staffieri wins with heart. He does. Maybe he can't keep up with football's freshest incarnation, with its Fox NFL Sundays, scheme-crazed coaches and internet-savvy fans. He is not going to track down Michael Vick on a breakaway. But at a marginally significant university, where most of the team's name recognition comes when wrongly associated with Penn State, Dan Staffieri has defined the football program for a quarter century.
"When I think of Penn Football years from now, two things will come to mind," Schepis says, "The Ivy titles and Lake."
Around 36th Street, Staffieri's voice starts to go. Chanting and projecting for nearly half an hour, the excitement of the season opener seems to have gotten the best of him. Every time he lays into a cheer, his voice cracks, until there is little but a raspy wheeze coming out of his ancient throat. The plan is to stump for fans in 1920 Commons, but suddenly it's uncertain whether Stafierri will make it. It's a new year, but all that tradition might just be coming to an end.
The man, after all, is 82 years old. He has been around for nearly as long as the game itself. The first Super Bowl was still 14 years in the making when Staffieri took his first coaching job at St. Joe's Preparatory School in 1952. When he first began to work at Penn in 1977, the NFL was still running on a 12-game schedule.
"I'm transplanted," Stafierri explains. "I've got inserts in my eyes. Cornea transplants. Five times. First time . say '72. Two plugs in my heart, from the heart attack, three years ago. Double hip replacements, two years ago. I've got a breathing aide for sleeping. I passed out 18 times in one test. So it helps me sleep better. Let's see, what else . oh!" And here he leans forward mischievously, "Did I tell you about my ears?"
Yet while he maintains his sense of humor on the subject, longevity has become an increasingly pressing issue.
"He is healthy. He's managed to do pretty well," says James Jiudica, D.O., who played for Staffieri at St. Thomas Moore High School and has known him for over 50 years. "I've advised him on some things, and I think he's taken that advice and changed some things up, but the point is, he loves football.. The reason you still see him is that it's been a lifelong love affair. And that's why Dan is Dan."
Love affair or obsession, football has been the central cog in Staffieri's life since he started playing Pop Warner during the Great Depression. At Maryland, in the midst of Harry Truman's presidency, he won the 1951 Sugar Bowl and a national championship, and following graduation, he immediately began coaching.
Staffieri's one season at St. Thomas Moore coincided with Jiudica's sophomore year, and even when Staffieri left to coach at Hatboro-Horsham High School, he kept up contact. Years later, he helped get Jiudica into medical school - he knew Jiudica's interviewer. Now, Staffieri comes to visit every six weeks.
"He comes to my office. I take care of him," Jiudica explains. "He's literally a charmer. Everybody loves him. He comes walking in, and that's that."
Staffieri does seem to exhibit a remarkably perseverant will. In 2002, when he had a heart attack around midnight in his Blue Bell home, the cardiology department at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital picked him up in an emergency helicopter and flew him down to University City. As Stafierri regained consciousness and a bit of energy, the helicopter passed over Franklin Field. Before the doctors knew what was going on, he was sitting up and yelling down to the field, "Get it up down there!"
"I thought I was going to die. I wanted them to hear for the last time. The doctors were surprised," Staffieri explains. "They didn't know I worked here."
Boyer has his own Staffieri memory. "He had just had both of his hips replaced at the same time maybe a month or two before our annual football banquet. At every banquet he stands up at the end and does a new cheer that has a new theme for the next season.
"At this particular banquet it was assumed that he was not going to be there because of his surgeries, but to everyone's amazement he showed up with a walker to help him out. And like nothing happened he walked up to the front and did his cheer and got everyone pumped for the upcoming year.
"Afterwards I asked him how he was feeling and if he was supposed to even be walking, and he looked at me and just said, 'I love pain, it lets me know I am still alive, and besides you know I wouldn't miss the banquet for anything.'"
"They said, 'you gotta take it easy.' I said, 'I am.' I'll be here. It's called survival," Staffieri says. "People ask me when I'll be done - I can't worry about that. What's important is what I'm doing right now. Coaching these players. I'm not concerned with my career plans, with what I've done or am going to do. I have no handicaps. I've been transplanted. The handicaps are gone."
So go ahead, ask him if he's ever planning to walk away from the game. Staffieri leans back, purses his lips, and slowly shakes his head.
"No way."
29 years in, Staffieri is sticking to his line for at least one more day. A quick break, a couple swigs of water, and a cough drop, and he is inside Commons, at it again. He blows a whistle and cries "Game time!" He gets a table of girls to cheer along with him. A few minutes later, he has the entire dining hall clapping their hands, albeit half-heartedly, along in rhythm. His voice is still thin and rasping, but at least he can be heard.
Brian drives him back down campus and he repeats the routine at Hill College House. As he walks in, a student motions to his friend, "Look. It's Ben Franklin." Standing on the balcony above the dining hall, Lake yells down, "Get excited! It's game time!" The freshmen don't know what hit them.
Afterward, he sits alone at a table eating a turkey sandwich, compliments of the house. Around him, cafeteria life returns to normal. Lake just sits and eats. Quiet, unassuming. It is as if nothing ever happened.
A guy a few tables over sizes him up. "Is that guy crazy or something?"
Maybe. Maybe not. If he is, he's managed to pull it off pretty well.
But who knows. He's really old. It's hard to say.
