The Man I Never Met

by Adam Schefter

  During some Junes, I’ve taken part in this Best Buddies football event that Tom Brady hosts in Massachusetts. I’ve participated a few years. I play on a team. Devon comes along and is right there with all the Patriots and celebrities in attendance, though he still most remembers eating multiple lobsters at the function’s clambake one year.

  In 2018, I took Devon and two of his high school buddies to their first-ever Super Bowl, letting them experience some of what I had for the past twenty-five years.

  There are kids who would be so excited to be there that they would start shaking. Not Devon. I think Devon thinks this is all cool—but not as cool as I would have thought when I was his age. I was a sports-obsessed kid. Devon just isn’t like that. He’s a quiet kid. He isn’t into the show. He isn’t one of those kids who dreams of meeting his sports idols. They’re just people to him. He doesn’t play fantasy football, doesn’t care much about it, and barely watches the NFL when it’s on TV. He did play high school football—with the rule that if he suffered one concussion, he would be done playing. He made it to the end of his senior year without getting a concussion.

  He went about his job on the football field in a tough, quiet way—never showboating, never celebrating, just quietly going about his business.

  He is, in other words, a lot like his father.

  Joe loved sports but did not spend hours at a time watching them, and he certainly didn’t obsess over them. People in the New York area have so many local teams that even being loyal to your hometown means making a choice: Giants or Jets; Yankees or Mets; Knicks or Nets; Rangers, Islanders, or Devils. If you ask one of Joe’s friends today to name Joe’s favorite teams, they might be stuck. His identity was not tied to being a fan.

  Despite our personality differences, Devon and I have a very good relationship. I’ve tried to teach him not so much by words but by example. He can watch the hours and time I put in, the commitment that a job can take, the effort it commands, and hopefully one day that will stay with him when he’s in the working world. Most of all, he knows I love him, and I know he loves me.

  Devon is still too young to really have a full perspective on his family—he needs to move out, be out in the world, and see how other families are. It’s hard to see what your family life was like when you are still in the middle of it. But Sharri thinks in a few years, he will be thankful that he had me in his life. I hope she’s right.

  Devon does not call me Dad. He calls me Ad, short for Adam; it’s like I’m missing a D. To me, he is my son. It’s how I introduce him to people, and how I think of him. But once in a while, he will say something about “my dad,” meaning Joe, and it stops me. I am reminded then that, while I seem like his dad and feel like his dad and do everything I can to be his dad, I’m not actually his dad. I think Devon sees me as a father figure, but there is a difference between a father figure and a father. Joe was Devon’s father. He still is.

  * * *

  The dynamics with Dylan are different. There are a few reasons for that: me being there from the moment she was born; me having some experience raising Devon before Dylan came along; her being a girl; and the fact that her personality is very different from Devon’s. Dylan is talkative, loud, outgoing, and out-front. Devon prefers remaining in the background.

  But we have all come to accept that those differences are OK. You don’t have to have the exact same relationship with each of your kids. That’s not natural. What matters is having a great relationship with each of them in their own way, and I believe I do. I don’t think Devon views me as the guy who married his mom. We’re beyond that. I’m part of his family, I’m the dad he knows, and we love each other.

  Devon and Sharri share a sarcastic sense of humor. Sometimes they laugh at me because they think I don’t get it. Meanwhile, I’m so consumed by whatever I have to do next that sometimes I miss things.

  Dylan has a sarcastic side, too, but she is more of an extrovert than Devon and more intense—like me. As I mentioned earlier, I never missed a day of school growing up. Not one. Sharri thinks that’s crazy. She asks me, “Didn’t you ever get sick? You never threw up?” I took pride in being there every day. I’m still proud of it. Dylan knows I never missed a day of school, and she is determined to match me. She is competitive like that.

  Dylan has always had an active imagination and natural charisma. She is such an extrovert that sometimes Sharri thinks, Is this actually my child? When we visit Dylan’s school, it’s pretty clear that everybody there knows her. She’s saying hello to older kids, younger kids, every kid.

  Dylan seems like she was born for show business. I’m sure my job makes it seem normal to her, but she is just drawn to the stage. In the summer of 2017, she was ESPN’s kid correspondent on the red carpet at the ESPY Awards; she interviewed Steph Curry, Joel Embiid, Odell Beckham Jr., and others. It went so well that, a month later, ESPN assigned her to do more interviews after a Patriots-Lions preseason game in Detroit.

  There are some veteran reporters who are intimidated by New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. But there was Dylan, sticking a microphone in his face and saying, “You’re known for rocking sweatshirts. What’s your wardrobe this season?”

  She arm-wrestled the Patriots’ Rob Gronkowski. (“I don’t think you’re even trying,” she told him.) She asked Tom Brady, “Who wears the football pants in your family, you or Giselle?”

  Brady asked her where she would go to college, and she said, “Probably where my dad went: Michigan.” Brady said, “I went there, too!” and gave her a high five.

  She told Belichick that I’m no help around the house and can’t screw in a light bulb. (I wonder where she got that idea!) Belichick said, “I bet your dad’s better than you think he is. I bet he can do a lot of stuff around the house.” Dylan shook her head with perfect comic timing and said, “I don’t think so.” Who thinks on their feet that fast, especially while talking to an NFL coaching legend?

  She asked several players, “What advice do you have for an eight-year-old?” I think Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford probably had the best answer:

  “You seem like you’ve got it all figured out at the moment, so I don’t know. Maybe I should be taking advice from you.”

  A lot of kids might say they want to do red carpet interviews or talk to famous athletes, but then they would get a microphone in their hands and freeze. Not Dylan. She was completely in her element. I don’t think she fully understands that these people are celebrities or a lot of people might be watching. She just loves it. We did some interviews with NFL players and were supposed to go to Dallas for the Cowboys-Raiders game, but we had to cut off the Texas portion of the trip because Hurricane Harvey was coming, and she was actually very upset. She didn’t want to miss a thing and wanted to complete the job.

  She was so good that we brought her in the studio, where she talked about the experience. She called Brady “the most generous, kind person that I met—and you can’t fake that.”

  Did she like interviewing people?

  “I love it,” Dylan said on NFL Live. “I get to work with my dad.”

  18

  As Dylan grew up, we told her bits and pieces about Joe. She knew her mom was married to Joe before she married me. She knew Joe was Devon’s father. She knew he was beloved. But for a long time, she didn’t know too much more than that. It’s just not a story you can share with a little kid.

  In the summer of 2016, she started to learn. The fifteen-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks fell on an NFL Sunday, so ESPN asked if it could do a video story about our family’s connection to that date. We shot some of it in our backyard over the course of a few days. I wrote and narrated the piece, while the great ESPN producer Dominique Collins put it together.

  I remember sitting on the SportsCenter set the Thursday before the piece ran for the first time on Sunday NFL Countdown. I received a text from the head of ESPN’s NFL features department, Greg Jewell, who initially pushed the idea of this story through. He had
just seen the piece, and he texted me: Leaving edit … Cried several times … One thing to realize: your kids will watch this when they are 50 and cry … your grandkids will watch this … This piece will live forever.

  Even my NFL boss, Seth Markman, the man primarily responsible for bringing me to ESPN, texted: This piece … Wow. Unreal.

  I was anxious to see what they were talking about, but more for Sharri and the Maios than for myself. I wanted the piece to honor Joe and his memory in the most dignified way. I wanted to make sure the piece was more about him than about me.

  On that Friday night, September 9, Sharri finally agreed to sit down to watch it. It took her time to build up to be ready; it was not something she was looking forward to. In the hallway of our home, in almost the exact spot where I proposed to her, we sat on the floor and watched it. She sat silently. It was hard to know exactly what she was thinking or feeling, but fortunately, she liked it and approved of it.

  It just so happened that Dylan happened to have a playdate that night at our house with Maelyn.

  Dylan is an exuberant kid; when she heard that we were watching the story that the ESPN crew had been filming at our house earlier that summer, she grabbed Maelyn, all excited, and invited her to come watch her and our family on TV. We were thinking, Dylan, this isn’t the type of thing you get excited about. But she was seven years old. She wasn’t capable of processing these things like an adult would. She had heard a lot about Joe, but he was still an idea to her as much as a real person. She didn’t really understand how he had died. In fact, Dylan never had been told about 9/11, and I don’t even think she had heard that phrase until that night, when she sat down to watch the story about Joe’s life.

  Dylan and Maelyn sat down to watch.

  And with each passing second, Dylan’s excitement turned to sadness. They heard Sharri talk about Joe: “I just knew I wanted to have children with him, grow old with him…”

  They saw the footage of the planes hitting the towers.

  With every passing second, Dylan’s smile disappeared a little more and a little more.

  They heard Sharri say, “It took a part of me, and that part can’t be replaced. It’s just gone.”

  By the time the story ended, Dylan and Maelyn were bawling and hugging each other.

  Dylan was overwhelmed by it. She couldn’t understand. All of a sudden, she was filled with questions for us. She thought about the kind of person who would hijack a plane and fly it into a building, and she said, “He had to be drunk. He was drunk, right?” She had heard of drunk drivers. That was where her mind went, to a poor decision instead of calculated intent to murder.

  We tried to explain. “Sometimes bad people do bad things.”

  It’s hard to know exactly how much to tell a seven-year-old. It’s hard to explain the unexplainable.

  And then, as we talked, we started to explain how this all connected to her family. We told her that sometimes people do bad things, but good can come out of it, too. We told her what she would have figured out herself, eventually. “If 9/11 hadn’t happened, you wouldn’t be here.”

  To which Dylan replied, “Why couldn’t Mom just have had me with Joe?”

  * * *

  Every year on September 11, Cantor Fitzgerald holds two events. One is a 9/11 service. My mother goes every year, to support the Esposito family. She listens to them read the names of the people who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald.

  The other event is called Charity Day. Essentially, all the company’s salaries and commissions from the day goes to charities. Celebrities come in, take calls, and execute trades. Then the money goes to the charity they are representing. Edie Lutnick, who lost her brother Gary in the attacks, runs Charity Day. Edie’s other brother, Howard, is now the chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald.

  In 2014, I was one of the people asked to attend. I was there on behalf of A Caring Hand: The Billy Esposito Foundation and Tuesday’s Children, which provides personalized support to traumatized, grief-stricken children and families who are reeling from terrorism or traumatic loss.

  I brought Devon with me.

  Cantor Fitzgerald had moved its offices to midtown, on Fifty-ninth Street between Park and Lexington Avenues. We bumped into Craig Esposito on our way in.

  I really didn’t know what to expect, but when the whole Esposito family had arrived, we went in, and I realized it was a huge event. The celebrities included Julianne Moore, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Rudy Giuliani, Billie Jean King, and David Blaine. Cantor Fitzgerald would raise $12 million for charities that day. On the way out, as we were leaving, we even got to meet Jamie Foxx, which Devon thought was pretty cool, and so did I. He told us how big a fan he was of the Dallas Cowboys.

  While we were on the trading floor, I walked around introducing Devon to as many people as I could. “This is Joe Maio’s son.” One of the people he got to meet was Cantor Fitzgerald’s CEO, Howard Lutnick. The two stood off to the side for a few minutes, Lutnick talking to another Maio. I stared at them and wondered how often Joe got to speak to Lutnick. I overheard a part of the conversation.

  Howard told Devon, “Your father was a great man.”

  I got worked up hearing that. My eyes were welling up. Teardrops dripped down my face, but when I looked over at Devon, he wasn’t crying. He didn’t show much emotion at all. But I was happy he got a chance to see where his dad would have worked—even though it was a different office, it was still Cantor Fitzgerald, and Howard Lutnick was still the boss, and it gave us a small window into Joe’s everyday life. Devon didn’t talk about any of this. He sat mostly silent on the car ride home. When we got home, the flowers I had ordered for his mom had been delivered. I buy her flowers every year on September 11.

  * * *

  The anniversary of 9/11 is, of course, a very solemn day for our country. It’s a national day of remembrance. All these years later, and it’s still hard to comprehend such massive, senseless violence.

  But for Sharri, it’s very personal. I think whenever you lose a loved one, especially at a young age, the date is engraved in your mind forever.

  And generally, if you lost a family member on 9/11, your friends and even a lot of acquaintances are conscious of it. If someone dies from cancer, only a few people will remember the date it happened. If you lost a loved one on 9/11, then a lot of people in your social circle will think of you on September 11 every year.

  In some ways, this can be comforting—you don’t get the sense that the rest of the world has forgotten your family member—which can happen if, for example, your lost somebody to cancer—but it creates a weird dynamic.

  One year, on 9/11, I went to the gym in the morning, then walked back into the house. Sharri was sitting in the living room, just there staring at the TV as they scrolled through the names of everybody who died. And as I walked in, the name JOE MAIO scrolled onto the screen. I mean, almost immediately. It was like somebody timed it for me to walk in as soon as his name came up, like a scene in a movie.

  It’s hard to imagine being reminded about the worst day of your life every single year so publicly.

  I understand why we do it. I’ve been a member of the media for most of my adult life. I get it. I understand part of our job is to commemorate things—to look back at anniversaries of important moments. D-day. When JFK was shot. 9/11. If a major media outlet ignored the anniversary, people would go crazy.

  But it’s difficult. Every year this comes up, and it’s like the whole country is asking Sharri to relive this. She can’t just do it privately in whatever way feels right for her.

  And really, when people say, “9/11,” I say, “Really, it’s the whole week and month leading up to it.” Once you get past Labor Day, it just sets in on you. It’s the end of summer, the start of school, and the start of football season, which is a bigger deal to me than to most people. Everything is a reminder of what time of year it is.

  September days in New York are so great—the weather is just perfect. September 11,
2001, was such a beautiful day. It was a spectacular late-summer day in New York—there is really no better match of weather and location than September in New York City.

  The sun was out, and the sky was clear. It was sixty-eight degrees in Central Park when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. I mean, if you were in a climate-controlled room, that’s the temperature you would choose.

  I think that’s one small reason the tragedy was so jarring for people—it was one of those peaceful, perfect September days when you just feel so happy to be alive, and then somebody chose to commit these unspeakable acts. It’s obviously not the main reason why it resonated with the whole country, but it’s somewhere down on the list. You see it in novels, when writers use the weather to give you a sense of how people feel that day. Even today, when there is perfect autumn weather in New York, you will hear New Yorkers call them “9/11 days.” That’s how we think of them. 9/11 days.

  So it creeps up on us, inexorably. The calendar flips to September, and we think, Here it comes. There’s no recipe or formula for navigating that. You just have to do it. I’m no better at it than anybody else. I just try to be a kind, sympathetic, understanding person. That’s all it is. I just have to be conscious of it and sensitive to it. However Sharri feels is OK. Whatever she needs to do, she should do. It’s a painful time of year, and I try to treat it that way. The right thing to do is just to try to do the right thing. Sometimes Sharri still thinks of the day itself, and it’s so suffocating that she has to force herself to breathe.

  * * *

  Grief can make you a casualty, and fear can make you a prisoner. Sharri’s strength helped her build a new life for herself and for Devon after Joe died, but she still had her fear of flying. I understood it and worked around it. When I decided to take Dylan on a Disney cruise, I asked my mother to come with me because I knew Sharri would not.