Steve Milton: Hamilton Tiger-Cats ‘meanest man’: There will never be another like big Angelo Mosca
We have lost, all of us, one giant of a man.
Angelo Mosca, more widely and irrevocably linked with Hamilton than any person who ever lived, was a massive presence in, around, and for this city. It started in 1958 when he arrived as an outrageous and singularly talented 21-year-old football player and continued until the moment he died early Saturday morning, just hours after his beloved Hamilton Tiger-Cats had clinched a playoff spot.
It has been 49 years since he played his final football game but when people, anywhere, see his picture they see Hamilton and they see the Tiger-Cats. And for years to come when people, anywhere, think of Hamilton or the Tiger-Cats, they will still see Mosca's face.
Everything about Mosca, including that face, was big: his body, his body, his strength, his hands, his voice, his reputation, his successes, his shortcomings, his appetites, his practical jokes, his stories, his brutalized childhood, his late-in-life introspection, his secrets, his love.
He was a symbol for a community and team which gave him the sense of belonging he'd never had. Long ago, the line where the city stopped and Mosca began became hopelessly blurred. The overused face of the franchise," does not come close to capturing what he means to the Tiger-Cats.
When he came here from the University of Wyoming and before that Notre Dame, the Ticats had been in formal existence for eight years, had won two Grey Cups, and had already forged an image of a tough team from a tough town.
But Mosca amplified that into iconic status, and a reference point for three hard-core generations of local fans.
Weeks before his first training camp, Mosca stepped out of his $125 Oldsmobile - for the rest of his driving life he would gravitate toward Cadillacs - and right into colourful interviews with The Spectator and CHCH-TV, immediately promoting himself and the team he had yet to play for. And, oh, could that man promote.
He and John Barrow, while opposite in almost every way, anchored the CFL's most feared defensive line for more than a decade, although Mosca spent two years in Ottawa, traded there by a Ticat management frustrated by his magnetic-north attraction to Hamilton's then-glamourous and notoriously wild downtown night life.
Mosca played hard on and off the field. No one has ever been in more Grey Cups games than his nine, eight of those with the Ticats, including four championships. No one had ever come to the league with such small-man's speed in such a big-man's body. He was a true 300-pounder with an incongruous 24-inch waist and was among the first pro athletes to adopt a weight-training regimen.
And with his controversial hit on B.C. Lions' Willie Fleming in the 1963 Grey Cup game, he became known as the CFL's meanest man," a descriptive he embraced and cultivated. He made dozens and dozens of commercials revolving around that ominous tell me to my face" image, and built his long and lucrative, pro wrestling career, upon it.
And then there was the famous incident during the 2011 Grey Cup weekend in Vancouver when septuagenarians Mosca and Joe Kapp, who'd been the Lions quarterback in the Fleming game, got into a real punch-up that went ragingly viral.
Mosca was, indeed, larger than life but, as his son Angelo Jr. says, he never wanted to be larger than the Ticats, the CFL or his other sporting love, pro wrestling.
Raised in a hard-scrabble Italian-American neighbourhood just outside Boston, Mosca was a perfect fit in a mid-century Hamilton with similar traits. He was rough around the edges and those edges were thick, often keeping outsiders from noticing his heart which, like everything else, was enormous. He had been forced far too early in life to learn and pump the value of a buck, but if you wanted help, personal appearances or autographs for a good cause, especially if it involved needy kids, it was all yours ... for free. He never turned down a request for a picture or an autograph. He helped raise money to keep the Saskatchewan Roughriders, and the Ticats, alive when both small franchises were struggling.
He is on the Ticats' Wall of Honour, is a member of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame, and the Gridiron Greats Hall of Fame in Detroit, and won numerous championship" belts in pro wrestling. The only jersey numbers the Ticats have ever retired were the 68 of Mosca and the 10 of quarterback Bernie Faloney, who was the best man at Angelo and Helen Mosca's wedding.
Although Mosca didn't fully recognize it until he was in his 70s, sport was his pressure valve from an abusive family situation. He was the eldest of six children of alcoholic parents and his violent father was constantly bragging that he had sent five children from a previous marriage to an orphanage and might to it again with Mosca and his younger siblings. His father ran illegal card games, something Mosca did himself until he was into his 60s, and had his son working the crowd.
By the time he was 16 Mosca was out of the house, and despised his parents so much that when they died years later he refused to attend either of their funerals.
His father, who was white, shamed Mosca and his siblings into keeping secret that their mother was the daughter of an African-American woman, enforcing his racist code of silence with numerous beatings. They were living in what was at the time acknowledged as the most racist area outside the south, so Mosca never told even his closest friends or teammates about his heritage.
But when Ticat owner Bob Young suggested he write a biography for posterity's sake, Helen Mosca encouraged her husband to do so, and to let everything come out, even - and especially - the warts. I helped him with Tell Me to My Face" but it was all Big Ang's words, all his stories, all his graphic language. Although it's full of great and funny anecdotes, it's also raw and sometimes painfully revealing, full of mea culpas. On the first real page he tells the public what he had taken until just a few years earlier to tell to his own kids, Angelo, Jolene and Gino: that he was of mixed race and he'd been too conditioned, too unfairly shamed, to let anyone know.
During our many long conversations, Mosca constantly praised Helen for changing his life, being his compass and bedrock, and for helping him face his own history, the best and worst of it. Despite knowing since his diagnosis six years ago that Alzheimer's was going to claim him, Helen and his children are understandably in the deep grief of reality right now. They have a large, very loving extended family and they know what they have just lost.
Judging by the flood of tributes, many others do too. We know there will never be another Angelo Mosca. Not because times have changed or that they broke his mould but because there was never a mould in the first place.
Couldn't have been. Angelo Mosca was a giant one-of-a-kind.
Steve Milton is a Hamilton-based sports columnist at The Spectator. Reach him via email: smilton@thespec.com