Theathletic

How Ravens offensive line coach Joe D’Alessandris coped with a crushing loss

M.Davis3 months ago

Joe D’Alessandris did what he’s done for the past 45 years. He put his head down and worked. The Baltimore Ravens veteran offensive line coach knew no other way.

Teaching and molding young offensive linemen is his passion. During the 2022 season, it was also his escape. He poured over game film, digested game plans, led meetings and worked tirelessly with his “boys,” often staying on the field to drill young linemen long after other Ravens players and coaches had gone inside. There was comfort in spending so much time with his players and seeing them develop.

Grief, though, was a constant companion. There were reminders on his phone in the form of pictures and Bible verses. There was a quiet downtown Baltimore condo to return to after a long day’s work and the reality that the person who always listened and dispensed the best advice wasn’t going to be there.

“I don’t have that person to just talk to,” D’Alessandris said. “I miss that.”

Toni Mayfield D’Alessandris may not have been the reason her husband got into coaching, but she is one of the main reasons he’s stuck with it for parts of five decades, a journey that has taken his family to football hotbeds like College Station, Texas, and Buffalo, N.Y., and non-traditional outposts like Homewood, Ala., and Ottawa, Canada.

Toni loved being the wife of a football coach and everything that entailed, from packing up the car and selling a home at a moment’s notice to cheering on her husband’s team from the stands. When she died on May 4, 2022, due to a rare form of Parkinson’s disease, D’Alessandris lost his wife of 42 years, his most trusted confidant and biggest fan.

Ravens coach John Harbaugh, who hired D’Alessandris in 2017, likes to use the phrase, “The days are long, but the years are short.” For D’Alessandris and his three adult-aged daughters, Anna, Kelly and Emily, it felt like time had stopped altogether.

“Getting through that first year, if you’ve ever lost somebody close to you, they are on your mind all of the time,” said Anna Thomas, 39, the oldest of Joe and Toni’s three daughters. “You replay everything in your head.”

D’Alessandris and his daughters braced themselves for the one-year anniversary of Toni’s death. When that day came, the overwhelming feeling of loss was joined by the exhilaration of familial gain.

“We went from being so anxious about the anniversary to elation that my daughter is having a little baby,” D’Alessandris said. “Maybe the good Lord shined his light on us that way. That’s how I look at it. We lost a life and he provided one exactly a year later, right back in our hands.”

On May 4, Kelly Olsen, Joe and Toni’s middle daughter, gave birth to a baby girl: Charlotte Lynn Olsen, Joe and Toni’s fifth grandchild. Lynn was her late grandmother’s middle name.

After a year of questioning why certain things happen, this was one thing that made sense.

“It was like, ‘(Mom) did this,’” said Emily, the youngest of the D’Alessandris sisters. “She gave us that blessing.”

Joe D’Alessandris and his five grandchildren. (Courtesy: D’Alessandris family)

They met in sociology class at Western Carolina University. He was a football star. She was an accomplished athlete in her own right. Toni skied, played tennis and danced, once participating in the opening act of a Rockettes performance at Radio City Music Hall.

She was from the suburbs, having grown up in Hickory, N.C., a furniture town 60 miles northwest of Charlotte. He grew up in a Plan-11 neighborhood outside Pittsburgh in Aliquippa, Penn., once a steel industry hub. D’Alessandris’ parents, like most of their neighbors, were descendants from Italy. They still spoke the language and lived the culture.

“I did talk like a city kid. I acted like a city kid,” D’Alessandris said. “(Toni) polished me up a little bit. I needed that. I was a little tarnished.”

D’Alessandris’ father, Giuseppe, worked long days and sometimes nights at the steel mill, providing all he could for his young family. D’Alessandris worked at the mill during the summer with his father, but Giuseppe made clear that would not be his son’s future. Giuseppe had a sharp mind and the hands of a surgeon. He could fix and build just about anything. Yet, he only had a seventh-grade education. His son needed to strive for better.

Growing up in a football-crazed area, D’Alessandris heard stories about kids who avoided factory or mill jobs by getting college scholarships. One such kid, a future NFL Hall of Famer by the name of Mike Ditka, was an altar boy at the church D’Alessandris attended.

D’Alessandris played football in the street or on a little patch of grass/dirt in the neighborhood that was known as “The Polo Grounds.” As he got older, he went up to the high school and worked out with his cousin Willie Costanza, a linebacker on one of the University of Minnesota Rose Bowl teams. When he didn’t feel like training one afternoon, D’Alessandris asked his mother, Mirella, to tell Costanza that he wasn’t coming. Costanza dragged D’Alessandris out of his parents’ house and into their car.

“That was a lasting lesson,” D’Alessandris said. “They were trying to teach me that you don’t have a quitter attitude. You start something, you finish it and you learn how to do it.”

He played guard at Western Carolina University and was a team MVP and captain. When his college football career ended, D’Alessandris sought opportunities to play more. He tried out for Marv Levy’s Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League (CFL). When he didn’t make the second cut, his college coach, Bob Waters, offered him a spot on his staff at Western Carolina . D’Alessandris was lukewarm about coaching. Within a few years, he was hooked.

So much so that D’Alessandris left his and Toni’s wedding reception to find a pay phone. At a nearby gas station, he interviewed with Livingston University head coach Frank North for an offensive line coaching position. He got the job and the girl, but he had some explaining to do.

“I left for a little too long,” D’Alessandris said sheepishly. “I came back in time for the cutting of the cake. I can just see it in Toni’s eyes. She gets the cake in my mouth and she’s trying to stuff it down my throat.”

Affectionately known as Joe D., D’Alessandris has coached in high school, NCAA Division I and II, the CFL, the World League of American Football (WLAF) and, for 15 of the last 16 years, the NFL. The 69-year-old is a football lifer at his core.

He and his family moved so often that his daughters started pondering their next stop the second their father’s team was assured of a losing season. Once while D’Alessandris was coaching at Samford University, Anna picked up the phone and a coach from Texas A&M was on the other end. Knowing what that meant, the D’Alessandris girls ran upstairs to their bedroom closets and immediately pulled out cowboy boots, overjoyed about moving to Texas.

“We didn’t know any different,” said Emily. “We loved that we moved around a lot. We got to live in so many different areas and understand different cultures. Living in College Station, Texas, and seeing the oil rigs and being next to cattle was different from our upbringing in Birmingham or Pittsburgh. We enjoyed it. He would take the job and months later, we would show up.”

From 1992 to 1997, D’Alessandris went from the Birmingham Fire (WLAF) to Samford to Texas A&M to the Memphis Mad Dogs (CFL) to the University of Pittsburgh to Duke University. To D’Alessandris, it was the cost of establishing himself as a coach.

“I tried to get him everywhere I could. There was nobody I’d rather go to war with than Joe. D,” said former NFL and college coach Chan Gailey, who worked with D’Alessandris at five stops. “There was no fluff. He’s not a politician in any way. He’s not a glad-hander. He’s not a backstabber. What you see is what you get. He’s a great football coach — fair, but tough. He worked their butts off, but these young men loved him.”

“There was nobody I’d rather go to war with than Joe. D,” said former NFL coach Chan Gailey. (Scott Taetsch / )

ESPN NFL analyst Field Yates worked with D’Alessandris for two years in the Kansas City Chiefs’ organization. D’Alessandris was the assistant offensive line coach and Yates was a scout and assistant to the head coach. Rarely does Yates remember a Chiefs practice where D’Alessandris wasn’t the last coach on the field working with players.

“You could tell that in a game that has innumerable complexities you could draw up on a whiteboard, Joe D. knew that football players got better by playing football on a field,” Yates said. “His passion for teaching was hard to match.”

North, his boss at Livingston, sold D’Alessandris on the idea that the best way to build a winning program was to stockpile as many big linemen as possible and work hard to develop them. D’Alessandris loved teaching the fundamentals and was determined to not be outworked.

Albert DeFilippi, D’Alessandris’ youth baseball coach, was an Italian man who spoke broken English. But he had a way of getting his point across. He ran two-hour practices and drilled the fundamentals over and over. D’Alessandris quickly realized just how much better his teams were than their opponents. Just about every year, DeFilippi’s team of Italian kids was playing for a championship.

That’s something D’Alessandris has never forgotten. He believes in repetition and attention to detail. If you don’t do something right, you do it again.

“It took me a while to kind of figure him out as a person,” said former Bills Pro Bowl center Eric Wood, who played three seasons under D’Alessandris in Buffalo. “He was grinding us into the ground. Nobody works a guy harder pre and post-practice in the developmental stage. But he was so smart and meticulous in how he approached every day. You give Joe a big body and somebody who wants to work and he’s going to ingrain some technique in him.”

Wood acknowledged that most of the “old-school” offensive line coaches have “washed out” of the NFL, but not D’Alessandris. He’s as hard-driving as ever. He’s constantly coaching, congratulating or cajoling his linemen. He doesn’t let much go, either.

Whether it’s the middle of training camp during a sultry Baltimore summer or a December regular-season practice, D’Alessandris is a hard guy to miss. He’s the one in a short-sleeved black shirt, black shorts and black Nikes. He’s the guy in a lineman’s stance, observing and correcting.

“He’s as old school as it gets,” Ravens center Tyler Linderbaum said. “He’s always telling stories about working in the steel mills and stuff like that. I don’t know if there’s any other offensive line coach in the country that can talk about working the night shift at the steel mill.”

The picture is saved on D’Alessandris’ cellphone. There is Toni, 61 years young, her shoulder nearly touching the ground as she skis on a slalom course. She is graceful and fearless. Yet, during the fall of 2016, she no longer felt like herself. It wasn’t one thing that was bothering her. It was more a general malaise, a sense that something wasn’t quite right.

She saw neurologists, cardiologists and ear and nose doctors. There were no definitive answers until Toni went to a neurologist at Emory University Hospital in March 2016. It took 20 minutes for the specialist to examine Toni and say, “You have Parkinson’s.”

“We looked at everything,” D’Alessandris said. “Was it caused by a head injury? Was it living under electrical lines? Did she drink well water with the minerals and lead? All these things that the neurologists ask you, she didn’t have any of that. And the doctor said, ‘Toni, I hate to tell you this, sometimes it’s just called s— luck.’”

Toni lost some dexterity in her fingers, but she otherwise felt OK. The way to combat the disease was through exercise, and she never needed an excuse to be active. She did boxing workouts at a club that had a program for Parkinson’s patients. Sparring with objects helped from an exercise standpoint, but knowing how many combinations to throw and where to throw them kept the mind engaged, too. Doctors marveled at the progress she was making.

A few months before Toni’s diagnosis, D’Alessandris was let go by the San Diego Chargers after two seasons coaching their offensive line. When 2017 arrived, he was itching to get back in the game. He, too, needed to stay sharp and keep his mind occupied. Truth be told, a job with good benefits was necessary at a time like this.

The Ravens had an opening after offensive line coach Juan Castillo left for Buffalo. On D’Alessandris’ behalf, Wood put in a call to Greg Roman, his former Bills offensive coordinator who had just joined Harbaugh’s staff in Baltimore. Roman helped D’Alessandris get an interview — D’Alessandris did the rest. He felt the job was a great fit, working for a coach like Harbaugh and a blue-collar organization that emphasized winning in the trenches.

Joe D’Alessandris has been the Ravens’ offensive line coach since 2017. (Scott Taetsch / )

He didn’t yet realize how fortunate he and his family were that the job came open when it did.

Two months after he started in Baltimore, Toni visited another specialist at Emory. She wanted to have as much information about her condition as possible.

“The doctor looked at her, looked at some of her testing and he said, ‘I hate to tell you this, but you have something worse than Parkinson’s. You have MSA-P, and that’s multiple system atrophy Parkinson’s,’” D’Alessandris said. “Multiple system atrophy means that different parts of this disease are attacking your brain, and wherever the protein doesn’t go into your brain, those neurons begin to die and parts of your body begin to fail.”

The harsh reality of MSA-P is the life expectancy of a patient is just six to 10 years from when the symptoms first begin.

“The doctors were like, ‘There’s nothing that can be done.’ I just said, ‘I can’t accept that answer,’” Anna said. “Once we did some research, we found that Johns Hopkins (Hospital) had specialists. That’s when we were like, ‘OK, this is much more than football. We were put here for a reason.’ It really was the stars aligning.”

The D’Alessandris family learned about Johns Hopkins’ Dr. Alexander Pantelyat, who cares for patients with movement disorders. The only problem was that it was many months before Pantelyat had an open appointment. A chance meeting at a local Whole Foods with a neighbor, Victor Warren, whose wife worked at Hopkins, resulted in Toni getting seen by Pantelyat within two weeks. That led to Toni being enrolled in a clinical trial for MSA-P patients. While in the trial, Toni was examined every eight weeks, which helped from a recognition standpoint.

“It gave us a chance,” D’Alessandris said. “It probably bought us two, two and a half years.”

Dr. Andrew Tucker, the Ravens’ head team physician, opened up other doors for Toni. Whenever she had an issue come up, he made sure she got in to see the appropriate doctor. When D’Alessandris got COVID-19 as part of a teamwide outbreak during the 2020 season, Tucker had Toni, who was immunocompromised, hospitalized immediately for monitoring. She was released after five days.

Toni continued to train through a Rock Steady boxing program for Parkinson’s patients. She did speech and physical therapy. She stayed extremely active.

“With all the athletes I’ve worked with, I’ve never seen someone so determined, driven to succeed,” D’Alessandris said. “She would not give up. She never looked over her shoulder.”

Toni knew the repercussions of the disease, yet she decided to fight it on her terms. In the early stages, she and D’Alessandris traveled to Banff and Lake Louise to see the Canadian Rockies. It was a 10-day trip and Toni was well enough to hike anywhere from four to six hours a day. They visited some friends in Seattle and walked part of the way up Mount Hood.

“I think her competitiveness, her drive, all of that really came through,” said Emily, 36. “She handled it with such grace.”

Joe D’Alessandris (center), his wife Toni (second from right) and their family before a Ravens game. (Courtesy: D’Alessandris family)

The awful disease, though, was taking a toll on her independence. At first, Toni used a walker to get around. Then, she moved to a regular wheelchair and ultimately an electric one.

A team of caregivers from Second Family helped Toni during the day. When his workday was over, D’Alessandris returned home to help feed Toni and get her ready for bed. Harbaugh urged D’Alessandris to take whatever time he needed. Anna, Kelly and Emily pitched in whenever they could.

Toni wouldn’t have let her husband quit his job even if that’s what he planned. She knew how much he loved coaching. At that point, he needed it for his health, too.

“It’s hard to think back at my dad’s success and not automatically think of my mom,” said Kelly, 38. “They were a team and they were the best team. Anything that was difficult, complicated, going through adversity, they did it together.”

The downturn in Toni came when she broke her hip late in 2019. Even when the hip ultimately healed, Toni was reluctant to move around as much as she used to, because of a fear of falling again. The progressive disease started to take over more and more.

“I don’t know if you call it denial or not giving up,” D’Alessandris said, pausing several times to collect himself and dab away tears. “I just didn’t want to give up on hope. “Whatever stage it was going to carry us to, I used to always tell her that I was going to be there for her, no matter what. She would be there that way for me. She followed me everywhere.”

D’Alessandris was home with his wife on Day 1 of the 2022 NFL Draft. He normally helped her get in bed at 9 o’clock, but she asked if she could stay up to see who the Ravens picked. Baltimore selected safety Kyle Hamilton No. 14 overall. After learning the Ravens acquired another first-round pick by trading wide receiver Marquise Brown , Toni asked to stay up for that one, too. With the 25th pick, the Ravens selected Linderbaum.

“She looked at me and smiled,” D’Alessandris said. “She said, ‘You finally got your first-round draft pick. I’m ready to go to bed now.’”

The day after the draft ended, Toni was admitted to the hospital because her oxygen levels were low. The doctor gave a dire prognosis. D’Alessandris notified his daughters, giving them enough time to get into town to say their goodbyes.

“They say you never know when it’s going to happen,” D’Alessandris said. “You just know in a blink of an eye. She was coherent the whole time. She knew what was taking place and she didn’t bat an eye. She was as sweet and loving as can be.”

A week and a half later, a memorial service was held for Toni in Georgia. People that the D’Alessandris family met throughout their football journey came to pay their respects. Stories were told about Toni’s selflessness, community involvement and devotion to her family.

When D’Alessandris returned to the team, he didn’t talk much about the situation. That was not his way. His players, who had filmed a video for Toni as she battled the disease, obviously knew what he was going through.

“An unbelievable example of how to go through that period with grace and take care of responsibilities, both on and off the field,” said Ravens veteran guard Kevin Zeitler . “It was absolutely heartbreaking, but he just got after it every day.”

In many ways, D’Alessandris needed football. That’s the way his daughters saw it. He needed something to occupy his mind and time. He needed something to rally behind, and football always served that purpose. All these years later, he still feels a “spark” whenever he takes the practice field or stands in front of a meeting room.

“This Ravens organization, these players, it’s family to me,” D’Alessandris said. “Those boys in that room, they’re my boys. I’ve got my children, my biological family, and I’ve got my family that I love here. I give them the best every day because I know they’re going to try to give me their best. That’s all I can ask for.”

D’Alessandris acknowledges that his wife’s death has forced him to “readjust” his life. He now leans on his daughters. When they tell him something, he can almost hear his wife talking to him. The arrival of his granddaughter, Charlotte, has helped in that way, too. He spent part of this past offseason helping Kelly and her husband Eric, who live in Wilmington, Del., with the newborn.

When Kelly learned the due date for her first child fell right around the one-year anniversary of her mom’s passing, she broke down in tears when informing family members of the news. “That’s just not going to work,” she said.

Now, she realizes that May 4 of this year was the day it was supposed to happen. It was a day that the D’Alessandris family needed it to happen.

“It just brought us a little bit of light on a day that could be so dark,” Kelly said. “I’ll always think that my mom had a hand in this.”

(Top illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photos: Scott Taetsch / , Gail Burton / Associated Press)

“The Football 100,” the definitive ranking of the NFL’s best 100 players of all time, is on sale now. Order it here .

0 Comments
0