Sunseri envisions a spicy meatball of a playbook

UCLA coordinator hopes to revive the offense through lessons he learned in the family restaurant business and on the gridiron

- By Ben Bolch

TINO SUNSERI would engage with patrons while working as a busboy and waiter during summers in college.

That thick, wavy black hair once had no place atop Tino Sunseri’s head.

Long before he arrived in Westwood as UCLA's offensive coordinator and a GQ cover candidate, his father made him shave that glorious mane, the better to protect his head so that it would fit snugly inside his helmet as a young quarterback.

"I always had an emphasis of, 'Hey, I don’t care how your frickin' hair looks or what women think,'" Sal Sunseri said. "The bottom line is, I wanted him to be secure."

This is how the Sunseris operate. Success means sacrifice. It's why Anthony Sunseri, Tino’s grandfather and the family patriarch, would rise at 5 each morning to prepare for another day of running the family’s Italian deli and grocery store in Pittsburgh. The man who called himself Tony Macaroni wouldn't come home until after 5 in the evening, only to tackle a stack of bills and other obligations just so that he could get to bed and rise to do it all over again.

"The bottom line," Sal said of his father, "he would say, 'If you can’t get up in the morning, you ain’t worth a s—.'"

Tino was on the move practically from birth. The son of a college and NFL coach who schlepped him from Pittsburgh to Iowa Wesleyan to Illinois State to Louisville to Alabama A&M to Louisiana State to Michigan State to the Carolina Panthers by the time he was in middle school, Tino grew up with a sporting goods store’s worth of gear and a deep appreciation for the players who wore all those helmets and jerseys.

Perhaps the first coaching adage Tino learned was that if you win, you stay. If you lose, you move.