Hamilton Tiger-Cats football player Angelo Mosca takes a flying leap in November, 1963.Ed. Bermingham Inc.
A vicious tackle in the 1963 Grey Cup game cemented Angelo Mosca’s reputation as a villain.
The championship game in Vancouver turned on a play midway through the second quarter. Willie Fleming, the quicksilver running back of the B.C. Lions, took the ball to his left in a sweep around the end. Known as Willie the Wisp for his elusive dashes, he dodged three Hamilton Tiger-Cat tacklers before a fourth latched onto his right ankle with both hands to bring him down like an anchor.
A second later, all 270 pounds (122.5 kilograms) of Mr. Mosca bowled over the prone runner, an elbow catching him in the back of the head.
Mr. Fleming rolled over, his arms outstretched, a supplicant in pain. Mr. Mosca stepped over him to return to the field of play.
The wobbly-legged runner was eventually helped off the field by the trainer. Unable to return, Mr. Fleming watched the second half from the Vancouver bench “wearing street clothes,” wrote sports columnist Jim Coleman, “a fedora hat, a parka and a sullen expression.” With the hometown’s star player concussed and out of action, the visiting Tiger-Cats romped to a 21-10 victory.
In film of the game, the play occurs so quickly it is hard to be certain a foul had been committed. The officials did not call a penalty.
Photographs told a different story. The Vancouver Sun ran a five-column image across the top of the front page showing a looming Mr. Mosca about to impale the defenceless runner. “‘Dirtiest’ player sidelines star,” read the banner headline in the Victoria Daily Colonist. “Fleming left because of a play that should never have happened,” reporter Jim Taylor wrote, “cut down by a player an angry bunch of Lions later labelled, ‘the dirtiest in the league.’”
“I was coming across the field,” Mr. Mosca said after the game. “I saw that [Joe] Zuger and [Gene] Ceppetelli had a piece of Fleming, but that he was getting away. He was still running, so I hit him helmet to helmet. I was ready for the hit. I guess he wasn’t.”
After the game, Lions quarterback Joe Kapp snubbed Mr. Mosca by refusing to shake his hand.
Mr. Mosca, who has died at 84, revelled in the notoriety, which led to bigger paydays on the gridiron in the fall and in the wrestling ring the rest of the year.
A year later, the CBC television program This Hour Has Seven Days aired a documentary on the player, describing him as “the meanest man in the game” and “the man you love to hate.”
“In this game, it’s kill or be killed,” he once said. “I try to hit first and hit hardest.”
Mr. Nasty and Mean Man Mosca, as he was known, was Public Enemy No. 1 in eight of nine cities with a Canadian Football League franchise. “Mosca eats bananas,” read a huge banner unfurled on the south side of Lansdowne Park in Ottawa in 1968.
In Hamilton, he came to be celebrated as the personification not only of the black-and-gold Ticats but of the city itself.
A gritty player in a gritty city whose skyline was marked by belching smokestacks, Mr. Mosca had a fearsome reputation and uncommon toughness, which endeared him to the denizens of Steeltown, many who laboured in steel mills, as he did in the off-season as a young athlete armed with a shovel. Other cities might have had more money and flash, but Hamilton had Mr. Mosca and with him, the Grey Cup.
Mr. Mosca played in nine Grey Cup games, as many as any man, and won five, one with Ottawa in 1960 and four with Hamilton in 1963, 1965, 1967 and 1972. The final victory came before 33,993 ecstatic hometown fans at Ivor Wynne Stadium. After the game, the 35-year-old veteran, bleeding openly from a welt on his forehead, guzzled champagne from the Cup. That day, he hung up his cleats to become a full-time professional wrestler. He fought as the Mighty Hercules and King Kong Mosca. To no one’s surprise, he usually grappled as a heel, his bad-boy reputation on grass transferring to the canvas to the benefit of the cash box.
For decades, he was one of Canada’s best-known characters, appearing in an estimated 300 television commercials and print advertisements for Chevy trucks, Kraft foods and Miller Lite beer.
Tiger-Cats co-captain Angelo Mosca drapes his helmet around shoulder of Governor-General Roland Michener after the Ticats' last-second victory over the Saskatchewan Roughriders in the Grey Cup game at Hamilton's Civic Stadium on Dec. 3, 1972.James Fish/The Globe and Mail
The pitchman’s most enduring product promotion was himself.
“I’ve worked very hard at being Angelo Mosca,” he once told Lynn McAuley. “I’m what I’m good at.”
Big Angie was a beetle-browed hulk with dark features and a five o’clock shadow. Blessed with wide, muscular shoulders, massive arms, a 51-inch chest, and a 19-inch neck, Mr. Mosca was surprisingly nimble on his feet. As a young man, he could run the 40-yard dash in a respectable 4.7 seconds.
On arrival in Hamilton, he soon discovered a nightlife, as well as the accompanying illicit pastimes, much to his liking.
“I knew every bootlegger in town,” he said. “Every craps game. Every poker game. It reminded me of the North End of Boston. Very homey to me.”
Born on Feb. 13, 1937, the day before Valentine’s Day, Angelo Valentino Mosca was the son of Agnes and Angelo Mosca. His father was an immigrant from Panni in southern Italy. His mother’s mother was African-American, a secret the family kept hidden from neighbours in their segregated working-class neighbourhood in Waltham, west of Boston. Angelo, who weighed nine pounds and 12 ounces at birth, was the second-oldest son of 11 children born to his father in two marriages.
The boy grew up in a grey clapboard house at 93½ Francis Street, a dead-end street abutting train tracks.
“I lived in a rough neighbourhood where there was prostitution and gambling,” he said.
His father, whom he described as an abusive, alcoholic man, worked as an iceman, a labourer and truck driver while supplementing a meagre income by handling bets as a bookmaker.
By age 16, young Mr. Mosca stood a full 10 inches taller than his father to tower over classmates at 6 foot 4. (When he joined the 2nd Infantry Battalion, U.S. Marine Reserves, the Boston Globe published a photograph of a supply officer scratching his head in trying to find a boot to fit the teenager’s size 15½ feet.) His high school coach described him as “very agile and well-coordinated for his size” and he starred at football and basketball at Waltham High. He was selected team captain when he played in the 1955 All-American high school all-star game in Memphis, Tenn.
Dozens of colleges were eager to enlist the two-way lineman, who chose to play for the Fighting Irish at Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind. He played tackle and guard for the varsity team in his sophomore year, only to lose his scholarship when the school discovered he had been running book for students gambling on professional football games.
The University of Wyoming then offered financial aid to visit the campus in Laramie. (The school would be put on probation a year later when it was revealed Mr. Mosca had brought along his wife, a violation of rules prohibiting the financial enticement of recruits.) As a transfer student, he was ineligible to play for one year. He would never get the chance.
Mr. Mosca and another student were arrested and charged with stealing a typewriter, an electric razor and clothing from a parked truck. The athlete pleaded guilty to grand larceny and was given a one-year suspended sentence and put on probation for two years. His athletic scholarship was rescinded. Ten weeks later, Mr. Mosca headed north to sign with Hamilton.
A year later, he was selected 350th overall in the 30th (and final) round of the 1959 National Football League draft by the Philadelphia Eagles. He stayed in Canada.
Squabbles with coaches and teammates resulted in trades to the Ottawa Rough Riders and Montreal Alouettes before Hamilton took a second chance on him. One of the more notorious incidents occurred when he drove his car through the front window of a Hamilton nightclub. When the manager approached the driver’s window, it was said Mr. Mosca asked for a beer – to go.
To cope with the pain of the game and whatever interior anguish he nursed, Mr. Mosca took to drugs, as he told sportswriter Earl McRae in 1978.
“At one time, I was gobbling them like candy,” he said. “Uppers, downers. They were always available. But in my last few years I quit. I was getting headaches and stomach cramps. They were making me gag and vomit. One moment I’d be talking a mile a minute, the next I’d be totally depressed.”
Angelo Mosca takes a liberty with his namesake, Angie, a 1,325 pound steer presented to the Hamilton club, on Nov. 29, 1972.The Globe and Mail
Mr. Mosca hoped to become a league publicist or television commentator after his playing days, only to be disappointed by disinterest from league and broadcast executives.
He traded his football jersey for a wrestler’s leotard. His pro debut came at the Forum in Montreal on Dec. 28, 1960, when he used a series of body blocks and a body press to defeat Angelo Savoldi. Over the years, Mr. Mosca developed a dreaded finishing move known as the Sleeper. For a time, his namesake son was a tag-team partner. He retired from the ring in his mid-40s before organizing a successful wrestling promotion called Moscamania in 1986.
Mr. Mosca has been inducted into the Canadian Football Hall of Fame (1987), the Hamilton Sports Hall of Fame (2012), and the Ontario Sports Hall of Fame (2013). In 2012, he became the first former CFL player to be named to the Gridiron Greats Hall of Fame for his work supporting the CFL Alumni Fund.
Six years ago, the Ticats retired his No. 68 sweater, making him only the second player after his friend, the quarterback Bernie Faloney, to be so honoured by the football club, which traces its origins to 1869.
Mr. Mosca, a resident at Macassa Lodge, a long-term care facility in Hamilton, died there of complications from Alzheimer’s disease on Nov. 6. He leaves Helen, his wife of 23 years, as well as daughter Jolene Mosca and sons Angelo Mosca Jr. and Gino Mosca, from his 1957 marriage to the former Darlene Adree Wodrich, which ended in divorce. He also leaves four grandchildren. He was predeceased by his second wife, Gwendolyne Marie, a former flight attendant who died in 1993, age 55.
In 2011, his autobiography, Tell Me To My Face, written with Steve Milton of the Hamilton Spectator, was released. The title came from the tagline of a commercial for razor blades in which he touts the close shave the product provided. “And if you don’t believe me,” he snarled, “tell me to my face!”
That same year, he appeared on stage at a charity event with Mr. Kapp, the former nemesis who refused to shake his hand after the 1963 Grey Cup game. Mr. Kapp pushed a tired bouquet of flowers in his face. Mr. Mosca objected, swatting at Mr. Kapp with his cane. The quarterback then decked the rival with a punch in a video that went viral and led to Mr. Mosca appearing on the Dr. Phil television show.
Such was Mr. Mosca’s reputation, many wondered whether the brawl between septuagenarians was intended to draw attention to his recent memoir or was the culmination of a grudge nursed for nearly a half-century.
In any case, Mr. Mosca offered the cane for auction. A Ticat fan purchased it for $7,700, the money going to a fund for destitute former football players.