Rick Venturi’s football life has been scarred by some of the worst luck in the history of college and professional football. And yet here is Venturi, walking around his home in the northern suburbs of Indianapolis, and he is talking about his great fortune in life.
Bad luck? Yeah, there’s been plenty. It’s right there on his College and Pro Football Reference entry. Despite that Venturi, the 74-year-old coaching lifer who is currently doing radio analysis for the Colts flagship stations, looks around at his kids, his wife Cheri, his three grandchildren and his 97-year-old mother Norma, and he feels blessed beyond words.
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But that record …
Oof.
He was 1-31-1 at Northwestern, 1-10 as interim head coach of the Colts in 1991, then 1-7 as interim head coach of the Saints in 1996.
A 3-48-1 record as a head coach?
And the man maintained his sanity?
That’s not because Venturi, a native of Pekin, Ill., can’t coach. It’s because he never had a team with a ghost of a chance to win.
He is a survivor of the highest order. He survived 31 losses in 33 games at a school that didn’t support football and nearly ruined Denny Green, of all people. He survived two interim head coaching stints for two hopeless, hapless NFL teams, going a combined 2-17. He survived then-Colts owner Robert Irsay, the man he called “The White Tornado.” He survived a move from Baltimore to Indianapolis, survived a move from Cleveland to Baltimore, survived when the Saints were displaced to San Antonio during the Hurricane Katrina season of 2005. He survived a nervous breakdown, which he suffered while working for Bill Belichick with the Browns. Heck, he came close to joining his friend Jon Gruden when he took the Raiders job. If he had, he would have been part of yet another franchise relocation, this time to Las Vegas.
He’s the Zelig of hopeless football situations.
But he’s walking around his home now, surrounded in his office by computers, photos, all kinds of football memorabilia and books on American history, and he feels as if he’s had the best run of anybody in history. The losing wore on him — his father Joe, a Hall of Fame high school coach in Illinois, was a tough, hard-charging figure who drove his son and created in Venturi an overwhelming fear of failure.
Now, with 41 years of coaching in the rear-view mirror, Rick feels at peace.
Mostly.
“If I have coaching regrets, there’s two,” he said.
“One, I’d have given anything to walk off the field as an NFL champion. We made it to the playoffs but never got there (to the Super Bowl).
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“Two, I regret that I’ve never been a head coach on a level playing field. Every head coaching job I had was a gigantic mountain to climb.”
He took a deep breath, thought for a moment.
“But you know, I have no bitterness, none,” he added. “In some ways, I’m a better person for it, a better human being. The whole Northwestern thing, although it scarred my career record, I grew a lot out of that experience, and all my experiences. My dad always wanted me to be more patient when it came to taking jobs. I don’t know.
“But I’ll tell you this: I love where I’m at today. Absolutely love it.”
Here is where he’s at today: In the radio booth, sitting next to young, up-and-coming play-by-play announcer Matt Taylor, doing something that seems so natural, it’s as if he were born for the job.
Venturi is a naturally garrulous man, and for years, his weekly appearances on various WFNI-AM sports talk shows in Indianapolis were a must-listen. It wasn’t just his list of unique Venturi-isms, notably terming guys as “Ambien players” because they’re so good, they keep opposing coaches up all night.
More importantly, he could explain the game’s subtle nuances and X’s and O’s in a way only a coaching lifer could explain them. If you wanted to know why the Colts defense looked so porous one week and so dominating the next, Venturi could explain why in great detail, using coaching vernacular while keeping his evaluations accessible to fans who don’t know the difference between a Tampa-2 and a 3-4 defense.
He took some of the mystery out of a complicated game, and if you were driving home and pulling into your garage while Venturi was speaking, you sat in your car and listened to the entire segment.
“What I’ve worked hard at is taking a football concept, which can be complex or dry, and figuring out, ‘How can I make that relevant to the average fan and not geeky, all while not trying to dumb it down,’ ” he said. “It’s really no different in coaching and teaching. You could have a guy in the front row of the meeting room with a 28 Wonderlic and a guy in the back with a 4. And as a teacher, you can’t fail that guy with a 4.
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“It’s an extension of my coaching career. And be authentic and fun. How can I paint a picture so that the person listening will understand? I want to stimulate your thinking about something you haven’t thought about. That’s the fine balance. Give a concept and an explanation. Honestly, the NFL fan today is so far ahead of where he was 25 years ago, with all the 24-hour shows where they break down everything. What I’ve heard from fans is, ‘Don’t dumb it down, Coach. I want to hear it like an expert coach sees it.’ ”
For the better part of 10 years, Venturi did exactly that during his various radio hits and podcasts, first in St. Louis and then in Indianapolis, but this year, a surprising thing happened: The Colts let go of Jim Sorgi, the ex-backup quarterback who was working as an analyst, and replaced him with Venturi.
The reason that’s surprising? Venturi rips the team on occasion. Not a lot, but he gets his shots in. They’re never personal or mean-spirited comments, but when the team plays poorly or a player makes a bonehead play, he’ll call them out. He’s like a sports columnist, except that his criticisms come from a place of overwhelming knowledge. Even Darius Leonard, the Colts’ splendid linebacker, has been the subject of his educated ire. The team’s current style of defense, a simple, bend-but-don’t break Tampa-2 (with some wrinkles), makes Venturi crazy and he’s shared those sentiments on the radio.
“I believe in defensive complexity,” he said.
It says something about Colts general manager Chris Ballard, who was willing to sign off on the Venturi hiring, knowing all too well Venturi would not pull punches when things were going south.
“There was an element of surprise that I got the job,” Venturi said. “I’ve been no-holds-barred critical when necessary. I’ve always considered myself the conscience of the Colts, just the way I was the conscience of the Rams when I was doing radio in St Louis. I’ve always prided myself on being unfiltered — not with any vendetta or malice or agenda.
“In my discussions with Chris (Ballard), and I respect him for this, he said to me, ‘Your criticism of the team has always been fair and accurate.’ … They (the Colts) said, ‘If you’ve got to rip, then rip.’ So I’m going to tell the fans how I see the plays, good or bad.”
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Like anybody, Ballard doesn’t enjoy criticism, but he fully accepts it. And if Ballard or his team are going to get taken to task on occasion, it’s best that it comes from someone who has invested as much in the game as Venturi has.
“I remember Jerry Angelo, my old boss, used to tell me what great respect he had for Rick,” Ballard said. “We visited a couple of times and our philosophy on football is similar. Even during the draft, we’ll talk and I’ll ask for his take on certain players. We’re talking about a lot of years of coaching football and a lot of experience. He has great passion for the game and great knowledge of the game.
“I was asked my opinion (about hiring Venturi) and I said, ‘Sure, why not? He knows the game and the fans will like him.’ He’ll be honest and he’ll be fair. He’s been in a ton of games as a coach so he’s watching and he sees it from a coach’s perspective. So he understands when the general fan may think something is wrong, he knows what’s really going on, and that’s one of the things I really appreciate about him. It’s honest commentary.”
Owner Jim Irsay is on the same page.
“It’s a matter of being critical versus being personal,” Irsay said. “Rick isn’t personal.
“He’s a great example of a coach who persevered through some very tough years because he wasn’t given enough to win. … But he’s a tireless workhorse and a fundamentally sound coach, an undeniably excellent coach. It’s tough to keep coaching and working hard and keeping your head up because losing is so tough. He’s had some jobs that were virtually impossible. But he’s meant so much to this franchise…”
Wrong place, wrong time.
It was the story of Venturi’s star-crossed head coaching career, although he did enjoy ample success as an assistant head coach and position coach.
Let’s start with Northwestern, which was a coaches’ graveyard for nearly 30 years. Alex Agase went 32-58-1 from 1964-72. Former Indiana University coach John Pont went 12-43 from 1973-77. Venturi was 1-31-1 from 1978-80. Dennis Green, who would become a highly successful NFL coach, went 10-45 from 1981-85. Francis Peay was 13-51-2 from 1986-91. It wasn’t until Gary Barnett came along in 1992 that the Wildcats became competitive and even reached a Rose Bowl during his tenure. A change in university leadership helped immensely, and rules limiting scholarships gave Northwestern a chance to recruit better players.
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“It was a really bad job at that point; we’d reached low ebb administratively in every possible way,” Venturi said of Northwestern. “And that was a really good era for Big Ten football, seven or eight good teams. But there was a lack of commitment from the president and the administration for years and years.”
It didn’t take long before the prodigy, the man with an almost self–destructive fear of failure, found failure lurking around every corner. Again: 1-31-1. If that doesn’t rip out your insides, it’s likely you don’t care.
But Venturi did care. Deeply.
“I was a rising assistant coach, ambitious beyond belief, hired as the youngest coach in Big Ten history … then the youngest fired,” he said laughing. “I remember my dad (Joe) saying, ‘You know, it’s not a very good job.’ I’m thinking, ‘What the hell does he know? I’ll be at Oklahoma in five years, the Chicago Bears in seven years.’ My ambition was beyond the pale. And then to go there and get beat to death, in three years, I went from boy wonder to complete idiot. And it tore me to the core.
“One of my faults was I drove myself and everybody else to destruction. I was relentless. At 31, I had the football knowledge and ability to deal with the media, but true wisdom comes in time, and for me, it took a while. To have that failure, it was terrible. I was a top-notch high-school player, highly recruited (he attended Northwestern), decent college career, fast track as a coach, and then you’re a complete failure and you’re 34.
“I lost my confidence. I was a complete disaster.”
Venturi was fired in 1980 after a contract dispute and thought hard about leaving football altogether. This would have been no casual decision: His dad was a coach, his two brothers were coaches, and he’d grown up in a home where, he says, “Life was not life. Football was life.”
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After his hard fall at Northwestern, Venturi came perilously close to taking a job at Bloomsburg (Pa.) State (now Bloomsburg University), another renovation project, only to get a last-minute call from Frank Kush, who was coaching with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League in 1981. Kush needed an assistant.
Salvation.
After one season in Canada, Kush got the call before the 1982 season to come to Baltimore and coach the Colts. He brought Venturi with him.
“He was like my father again,” Venturi said of the militaristic, no-nonsense Kush. “He was very misunderstood. He resurrected my career; he got me into pro football, which is where I belong. He was just old school in every way. Tough. I was always amazed at how much (his teams) hit (during practice), but he told me: ‘Players will come to the level you demand.’
“I don’t think a lot of coaches demand very much. I think they’re scared to do that. Somebody gets hurt, I think they get scared of the media. Frank was a wiser man than his reputation as a guy who just drove a team hard. He was very smart.”
Working for Kush wasn’t easy, but it was nothing compared to working for the owner at the time, Robert Irsay. He was a problem drinker, a volatile boor and a hands-on owner. Once, in a Sports Illustrated profile, Irsay’s own mother called him “a devil on Earth, that one. …” His own brother was quoted as saying, “Bob actually worked to destroy his own father. Oh, he’s a real sweetheart all right.”
During Venturi’s time, Robert Irsay was fighting the city of Baltimore and the state of Maryland over the team’s stadium situation. Like every owner, he wanted a new palace, and like most owners, he didn’t want to pay for very much of it. The fans hated him. The media despised him. The coaches and players tried to avoid him.
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“We used to call him ‘The White Tornado,’ ” Venturi said. “It’s amazing now to see the contrast between him and (son) Jim (Irsay). Jim basically learned what not to do from his father. And Jim’s a football guy who grew up in the game; his father was an air conditioning guy. Jim covered for his father constantly … constantly.
“This is not the company line, but I think Jim is the best owner in the league. He may have his demons, some idiosyncrasies, but he’s a football guy. His dad? He was volatile, I mean … volatile. We weren’t any good, the money was really down, we were fighting for a new stadium and he was an absentee owner.
“If he came to town on a Friday, you knew somebody was going to get fired. In the offseason, we’d all make sure we got out of the building by noon. He was a tornado.”
Everybody, the coaches and players, all knew Irsay was shopping the team to another locale. For a while, Jacksonville was in the mix. At one point, it looked as if the Colts might be moving to Arizona. Then on March 28, 1984, at the team’s practice facility in Owings Mills, Md., Venturi’s friend and Colts offensive line coach Hal Hunter sidled over to him and whispered:
“Be really quiet,” he told Venturi. “Something big is happening tonight. You’ve got to stay here in the office; you can’t go home. Frank (Kush) is coming in.
“So we go to this conference room (around 8 p.m.), just the coaching staff, and Jim (Irsay) comes in, he was the CEO and GM at the time, he clears his throat the way he used to every time he talked, and he says, ‘Men, the deal has been done,’ “ Venturi remembered remembers Irsay saying. “ ‘We’re moving to Indy tonight and we will move with the secrecy of an embassy. You will all assist. The moving vans will be here at 11 tonight. You’re not to tell wives, girlfriends, anybody. It’s a secret.’ “
The Colts coaches got to work on emptying the team’s Baltimore offices, including Venturi, whose job it was to take a screwdriver and remove all the blackboards off the walls in the coaches’ rooms. Later, a big van pulled up with a bunch of college kids who were going to help with the move; nobody told them what they were doing or why, but word got out anyway.
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“It was a very crazy time,” Jim Irsay said. “Surreal to say the least. You understood you were standing on the deck of the Titanic, looking for the lifeboats. We all had tasks (like taking down blackboards). We became blue-collar workers. Putting that altogether, remember, we didn’t have cell phones back then … a couple of fights almost broke out, some of the workers, because they knew what was going down.
“Then I remember standing out in the snow, waiting for the trucks to come up, and the first truck is going up the hill in the snow in first gear, and it was so loud, I thought the whole state of Maryland could hear it. My God, a totally crazy 24 hours. And that’s an understatement.”
Added Venturi: “About 3 a.m., Jim says, ‘All we’re going to do now is go home and we will leave from Dulles Airport on Monday.’ “We couldn’t fly out of Baltimore. Basically, I saw that building go from a fully functioning NFL franchise to an empty airport hangar by 4:30 in the morning.”
For Venturi, it was a homecoming back to the Midwest, but the Colts were still mostly awful and Robert Irsay was worse. They moved through coaches rapidly from Kush (1982-84) to Rod Dowhower (1985-86) to Ron Meyer (1986-91) to Venturi (1991) to Ted Marchibroda (1992-95), experiencing minimal success except for an AFC Championship Game appearance in 1995. All the while, the owner was making everybody crazy.
“During the Rod Dowhower era, this was in 1986, just before they fired him for Ron Meyer, we were playing the Bills in Buffalo and we weren’t worth a damn,” Venturi said. “In Buffalo, there was glass between the coaches’ booth and the owner’s booth. So we’re down 10 and I’ve got to go to the bathroom, which is right outside our booth. I’m in there, doing my thing, and next thing I know, the Tornado is right next to me. And he’s hot. ‘What’s wrong with this team??!! What’s wrong with this team??’ I’m like, ‘Well, nothing a touchdown wouldn’t help.’ I’m just trying to avoid this whole scene.
“And he says, ‘Well, I’m going to let Rod have his fun, then I’ll take care of it.’ I knew (Dowhower) was done that day.”
Dowhower was fired at season’s end.
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“I took over (for Meyer) as (interim) head coach (in 1991), and Jimmy (Irsay) tells me, ‘Don’t ever back down to Dad. If he gets after you, you hold your ground because if he thinks you’re weak, he’ll ruin you,’ “ Venturi said. “So we’re at the Jets — it’s the one game we won that year — and it’s a close game at halftime. …
“And (Tom) Zupancic (a Colts executive at the time) calls me, ‘Rick, be ready, the old man is coming down, he’s going to meet you and he’s hot, he’s really hot.’ I’m thinking, ‘Here it goes.’ And he (Irsay) starts yelling at me, ‘What are you doing, dammit!!?? This is the worst fucking football team!! Why can’t we throw the ball!!?? What’s wrong with you!!??’ I told him, ‘Look, dammit, I’m trying to win this game in the fourth quarter.’ Finally, he says to me, ‘Don’t you understand, I want to give you this (full-time) job!!’ He says it right in the middle of this heated argument.
“And I’m thinking, ‘OK, first play of the second half, we’ll throw the ball deep.’ I was a smoker then, so I lit my Winston, he (Irsay) left and I told our offensive coordinator, ‘Let’s humor him (Irsay) for one play. Let’s throw a play-action pass downfield.’ We throw it and our guy catches it for like a 40-yard gain.”
Despite that, Venturi was not named the head coach after his interim season. Marchibroda was hired to become the team’s head coach in 1992 and Venturi lasted in Indy as an assistant coach for two more seasons, but the pair never saw eye to eye.
He was out after the 1993 season.
Venturi thought he knew a lot about football, but he was about to receive his doctorate in coaching. While the Cleveland Browns were not any good at the time, he joined some newcomer named Bill Belichick and a staff that featured a defensive coordinator named Nick Saban.
“I wrote this down,” Venturi said, gazing at a notepad before him. “Not only did we have Belichick and Saban and some other excellent coaches, but here’s who we had as interns: Scott Pioli, Phil Savage, Thomas Dimitroff, Mike Tannenbaum, Eric Mangini, Jim Schwartz. That’s four GMs and two head coaches. The talent we had in the building was incredible. It was the most stimulating and hardest year I’ve ever spent in coaching.”
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Nobody knew much about Belichick and Saban — they were two young up-and-comers who hadn’t accomplished great things just yet — but Venturi knew he was in the presence of special coaches.
“That year (1994) is the best football think tank I’ve ever been part of,” he said. “For 17 weeks, I sat between Bill and Nick, and neither one was an icon then. But with my experience, I knew they were special. When we had those Tuesday game-plan meetings, I wish I would have taped those.
“On the one hand, you’ve got the best pro coach ever, then you’ve got the best college coach ever. … Now, it was a way of life you lived by and it was hard. They held you tremendously accountable; I mean, it was 24/7 accountability. But they’d never ask you to do anything they weren’t willing to do. Two different personalities, but their way of life was the same. Two great detail-oriented guys who pushed everybody beyond what they thought they could accomplish. They shaped the rest of my life in terms of how I view the game.”
The Browns turned things around during Venturi’s first year in Cleveland (1994), going 11-5 and reaching the playoffs. But then Saban left to take the Michigan State job before the next season, opening up the defensive coordinator position for Venturi.
It should have been a perfect situation for him … until it wasn’t.
In the preseason of 1995, he suffered a nervous breakdown.
“Nobody pushed me to it; I just worked myself to a breakdown,” Venturi said. “I had such great respect for Bill, and I felt a lot of pressure because we were coming off a great year, we needed to take that next step and I worked myself into submission.
“In those years, I was smoking and drinking coffee around the clock. We had a training camp game against the Bears in Platteville (Wisconsin), and it’s 4 in the morning, I’m lighting one cigarette with another, drinking gallons of coffee and my hands were trembling. I knew I was in trouble. I knew it.
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“The funny thing is, I didn’t miss a single call during our scrimmage that next day, but I was in a whole other world. So they made me take a leave during that preseason.”
Venturi was told that he and his wife should meet with a sports psychiatrist at the Cleveland Clinic.
“I didn’t want to do it (go to the psychiatrist),” he said. “I thought, ‘I don’t need that shit. All I need is a couple of good nights’ sleep and I’ll be fine.’ So I got away from it (he rode his motorcycle to relax) and after a couple of weeks, I started feeling better, so Bill started giving me projects to do at home. Finally, after 5, 6 weeks, I’m feeling damn good and I told Bill I could come back full time and he said, ‘Fine. I know how much you want to do this.’ “
But that 1995 season turned out to be a disaster. The Browns began that season 3-1 and were 4-4 at midseason, but it became clear Cleveland was in serious jeopardy of losing its beloved franchise. Team owner Art Modell, like Robert Irsay, was fighting with the city and was preparing to move the franchise. From that moment on, the Browns went in the tank, finishing 5-11.
“We get through the whole season, I tell Cheri, ‘He (the psychiatrist) isn’t doing anything for me. I see him every week, tell him this, tell him that and he’s not saying anything,’ ” Venturi said. “So on the last day he looks at us and says, ‘You’re going to be just fine. You have just one problem: your fear of failure and drive. It was driven into you as a kid.’ What you have to do is get away from it sometimes, get out of the tunnel.”
Venturi thought he was heading back to Baltimore with the Browns-turned-Ravens – that’s what GM Ozzie Newsome told him — but Marchibroda, the man who fired him in Indy, was coming on as the Ravens’ new head coach.
Venturi was a free agent. Again.
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But he was saved and resurrected once again, this time by a name familiar to Colts fans: Jim Mora.
At 2:30 p.m., Venturi was informed by Marchibroda that he would not be retained. By 3 p.m., Jim Mora, the Saints head coach since 1986, had called. He had a linebacker coach position open and wanted Venturi.
There was a problem, though: Saints owner Tom Benson wanted this done quickly — like, right away, so Mora told Venturi he had to be on a plane to New Orleans by 4:30 p.m. At that point, Belichick’s assistant, Ernie Adams, drove Venturi by his home for a change of clothes. As Venturi was walking out the door, he left this message for Cheri on the door handle:
The life of a coach, indeed.
Venturi joined the Saints staff in 1996, but midway through that season Mora resigned.
His interim replacement: Venturi, once again.
Remember that just a year earlier, Venturi had suffered a nervous breakdown. Now, he was throwing himself back into the fire, replacing a highly successful coach and jumping headfirst back into the fray, with all the pressure that came to bear.
“It was so important to take what (the Cleveland psychiatrist) gave me to handle and deal with stress,” Venturi said. “It worked out fine, but we didn’t win. I was a candidate the next season, but they brought in Mike Ditka, and I stayed on as an assistant coach.”
In 2001, Venturi, now working on head coach Jim Haslett’s Saints staff, suffered his worst loss. His father, Joe, died at age 78 from several health issues. Joe had been Rick’s guiding light, the reason he went into coaching, gave him his love for the science of football.
“I’ll be honest: It was very hard playing for him when I was younger,” Venturi said. “He was an ex-Marine, had that World War II mentality, son of immigrants, the first in his family to go to college; he was tough, strict and he even looked like (Vince) Lombardi.
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“Dad fought the favoritism game, so he made it so hard on me and in front of the rest of the team. It helped me win the admiration of my teammates but they were like, ‘How do you put up with this?’ Because of him, I was so driven. I still live with it today, both a strength and a weakness, driven by a fear of failure and feeling like I had to produce every day. I loved my father, but we didn’t bond like today, no I-love-you’s. Dad was a driver. We bonded in coaching all the way to the end of his life.”
Their last conversation came a few days after the Saints, who were favored, went to Foxboro, Mass., on Nov. 25, 2001, and got throttled by the Patriots and a quarterback who was starting his second game — a guy named Tom Brady. The score: 34-17. (Brady’s first start, a victory, had come against the Colts one week earlier).
By this time, Joe Venturi was in a nursing home, but he had an entire NFL-style video room set up in his place. Every week, Haslett would send him tapes of the previous game, including the loss against the Saints.
“I called Dad on Wednesday and I’m telling him, ‘Man, that was awful,’ ” Venturi said of the New England game. “And you’ve got to understand, my dad was at his best when you were down. When you were up, he’d kick your ass. He said, ‘Rick, you played better than you think, there were four or five plays that went against you; that team you played is a lot better than you think.’ ”
The Patriots would go on to win the Super Bowl that season then won five more with Belichick and Brady.
Venturi spoke, then stopped and shed some tears.
“He passed away that next day,” he said of his father.
The next week, the Saints beat the Panthers in New Orleans, and Haslett sent the game ball to Rick’s mom, Norma.
“He was buried with that ball,” Venturi said, his voice wavering.
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The hits, both personal and professional, kept coming.
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina arrived.
“It was awful,” Venturi said. “We were in Oakland for a week, then we settled in San Antonio. We were practicing on high school fields. We’d have walkthroughs in downtown San Antonio; I remember tourists walking by, wondering, ‘What’s going on?’ ”
The Saints finished 3-13 during the 2005 Katrina season. Haslett got crosswise with owner Tom Benson. They were all cut adrift.
Venturi thought about retirement but gave it one more shot in St. Louis, where he was an assistant coach from 2006-08. After some lean years for the Rams, he was let go. But that’s the coaching life. Hired to be fired.
Retirement was beckoning, but Venturi, a type-A personality, knew he couldn’t just go to the library every day. In 2009, he established a football think tank at his Tampa condo with Jon Gruden and several other coaches.
Then, in 2010, he crossed paths with St. Louis Post-Dispatch football writer Jim Thomas, who told him about a new ESPN radio station starting in the city.
At that point, he began his media career, and 10 years later, he’s still diving into video, breaking down opponents, sharing his knowledge with the fan base. He will analyze without favor, complimenting good plays, criticizing poor performances — by players, by coaches, even executives.
He brings the same passion to his media career that he brought to his coaching career.
Joe Venturi wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I always say, ‘Aging is a process; getting old is a choice,’ ” he said, smiling. “I’m not going to get old.”
A lucky man.
(Illustration: Stu Ohler / The Athletic. Top photo of Joe Venturi: Courtesy Rick Venturi. Top photos of Rick Venturi: Getty Images)
