John Blanchette: Friends, family embrace legacy Mario Danelo built

When Joe Danelo’s youngest son decided to join the family business – kicking footballs – an already proud father developed a catch in his throat.

“It’s like if you were a bricklayer,” he said. “You’ve been laying bricks your whole life and one day your son comes up and says, ‘Pops, can you show me how you do that?’ So you show him. And all your life, you’ve done nothing but build walls and you turn around and he’s built this mansion.

“Well, that was Mario. I couldn’t touch him. He was that good. He was a joy to watch.”

Come to find out, Mario Danelo was a joy in a lot of ways, most of them only tangential to kicking a football. Built mansions all over, one brick at a time.

Joe and his wife, Emily, live in one now, decorated with Mario’s spirit and all his stuff, occupied by all the strangers he turned into friends and by a football family of uncommon bond – a place full of stories and memories and love.

A place full of Mario, even if he’s no longer there.

Washington State’s football team travels to Los Angeles this weekend to play top-ranked USC, a game that for the last couple of years hasn’t been as fraught with mixed emotions for Joe Danelo as you might think. After all, he was the Cougars’ place-kicker from 1972 to 1974, the school’s career scoring leader when he left to start a 10-year NFL career. Sure, that was his kid kicking for the Trojans, but surely growing up in Spokane (Joe Danelo graduated from Gonzaga Prep) in the heart of Cougar country and enduring beatdown after beatdown from USC those years and all through college must have made for something of a tug-of-war in Joe Danelo’s heart, right?

“I called him on his birthday, Sept. 2,” recalled his brother John, who lives in Otis Orchards, “and he made a comment to me about that. You know, you grow up in this area and you hate USC because they dominate all the time – and my brother did, too. But then Mario joins the program and you gradually get won over – and Joe was a guy who had to be won over. He said (coach) Pete Carroll is so good to the parents and the kids that he was completely sold – especially with all that’s happened now.”

What’s happened? Well, no one knows for certain, even now.

In the early morning of Jan. 6, not a week after USC beat Michigan in the Rose Bowl, Mario Danelo finished partying with friends and decided to take a walk. The next day, his body was found at the bottom of a cliff below Point Fermin Park, just blocks from the family home in San Pedro.

It has never been ascertained how he got there. Because of his relentlessly sunny outlook, suicide seems out of the question. Police are inclined to believe that he stumbled and fell to his death. The Danelos sense something more sinister, as his body didn’t betray the obvious battering a fall of 150 feet onto rocks would inflict.

It is a haunting, horrible detail, and yet the Danelos are determined not to be haunted.

“You have to … accept life,” Joe Danelo said, his voice breaking slightly for the first of many times in a 20-minute phone conversation. “Other people have gone through these things and worse, if you can imagine. You can’t be angry with it.”

Not all of us could be so convincing in our calm resolve. But then, the Danelos have been caught up in a virtual conspiracy in this regard, with a campus and a community that shares their grief but will not allow their son’s memory to be anything but treasured.

And not because he was a football hero. Although he was that.

Maybe not in the same way that Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush have been, of course. They won Heismans. He was, well, a kicker. But in his two years of kicking for the Trojans, Mario Danelo made 26 of 28 field-goal attempts. He set an NCAA record with 83 PATs in one season. He made 15 field goals in a row.

And his teammates carried him off the field once. But not for any of that.

It was in the spring of 2005. Ryan Killeen, USC’s three-year starting kicker and Mario’s roommate and best friend, had graduated. Mario, a nonscholarship walk-on, looked to be in line for the job but a heralded and strong-legged freshman, Troy Van Blarcom, also had been signed.

“He called me up and said, ‘Geez, Pop, they gave a guy a scholarship,’ ” Joe remembered. “I told him, ‘That doesn’t mean anything – you know what to do. You’ve done it before. The job’s wide open.’ And at the end of spring ball, they announced they were putting Mario on scholarship – and after practice, the other players put him on their shoulders and rode him off the field.”

He was, teammates had learned, someone worth celebrating. And the Trojans continue to do so. Since his death, they have set up an endowment fund in his name. His No. 19 jersey is out of service, but the number has been stenciled on the goalposts at the practice field. His pet saying – “I’m living the dream” – graces a banner that hangs in the tunnel.

And when the Trojans scored their first touchdown in the season opener against Idaho, only 10 men trotted on the field for the PAT. There was no kicker – and the Trojans took a delay of game penalty to drive home the point of how much they missed Mario Danelo.

It goes beyond his football family. The Danelos have received cards and calls that have underscored their son’s way with people. The 12-year-old friend with leukemia. The teacher with a son serving in Iraq. Strangers and friends who marveled at his singular caring and happy manner.

“One thing about Mario,” Joe said. “He was never a taker. He was a giver.”

It seems to be catching. Overwhelmed by a tragedy on a January night, the Danelos are now overwhelmed by the embrace of a football program hastily presumed, by those of us who see it from afar, to be cold and corporate. Joe Danelo will not be at the WSU game this weekend – he tore his triceps at his longshoreman’s job, and doesn’t want to deal with the clunky cast in a crowd of 90,000. But he and Emily will be at others because, well, they’re a part of it.

“Life is what it is,” Joe Danelo said. “There are no rules that say you’re going to go through it perfectly healthy or without tragedy. You learn how to cope. And it helps that there are people out there who do care.”

People who are all a part of what Mario Danelo built.