BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Perched on a barstool outside Cahaba Brewing Company in the Pepper Place/Lakeview district of Birmingham, Mississippi State football coach Joe Moorhead peered into his phone.
“Sorry, checking Little League scores,” Moorhead muttered as he quickly locked his iPhone and adjusted his seat.
Back home his youngest son, Donovan, a member of the 12-and-under Starkville Little League team, was in the midst of a game.
“(Baseball) is my second favorite sport,” Moorhead said. “It’s like 1B.”
Just inside the 8,000 square foot taproom, more than 100 Bulldog fans sat scattered throughout a side room, listening to remarks from MSU athletic director John Cohen.
The night marked the second stop on the Road Dawgs Tour — a five-state trek that sent Moorhead across Mississippi, up to Tennessee, over to Alabama, down to Louisiana and out to Texas to drum up support for the athletic department.
Having already regaled a crowd in Starkville earlier that morning, Moorhead’s remarks were set.
He would of course discuss the upcoming season and where the team stood through spring camp. Yet, there was a deeper message Moorhead wanted to address as he enters year two at the helm.
Though he’s an east coaster at heart, the parallels between working class Penn Hills, Pennsylvania where he grew up and rural Mississippi are more numerable than one might think.
More prescient, the blue-collared nature and laid back personality that Moorhead boasts have made Mississippi as much a part of him as he has it.
“In the state of Mississippi head football coaches are kind of like the governor — a role model figure in the state,” Allan Smith, Donovan’s Little League coach, told The Dispatch. “I always tell folks, I don’t know how he’s going to do as a football coach, but as people he and his wife are as down to earth and genuine as they come.”
‘Nothing was ever handed to us’
Merv Moorhead Jr. heard a scream.
“What the hell is wrong?” he exclaimed internally.
Racing through the door of the family’s Pittsburgh-area home, Merv Jr.’s brother Joe — a fifth or sixth-grader at the time — was writhing in pain.
Having crashed his bicycle, the handlebar break pierced the younger Moorhead’s skin — creating a deep gash in his thigh.
Joe was quickly treated for the wound.
But more pressing, he was scheduled to pitch in a youth baseball game later that day.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Merv Sr. said. “Get your clothes on. You’re going to pitch.”
With a handful of stitches and a massive patch around his leg, Joe meandered to the bump.
“That’s sort of him,” Merv Jr. said of Joe. “He was like ‘Oh ok, I’ll go out and play.’ He limped around and did whatever he had to do and he ended up winning the game.”
The determination and desire to compete was instilled early in the lower-middle class Moorhead household.
Merv Sr. worked long hours in the steel mill to put his kids through school. When that didn’t suffice, he picked up jobs as a janitor and a bartender.
Back home, their mother, Rosemarie, handled the children. A former army man, Merv Sr. was the disciplinarian. Rosemarie provided comfort.
“Nothing was ever handed to us,” Merv Jr. told The Dispatch. “We had tough times — times when my dad may have been on strike, sometimes we had to use food stamps to get through.”
Sports were an easy outlet for the Moorhead’s inner angst. While Joe’s football ability landed him at Fordham, Merv Jr. — who was eight years his senior — played Division III basketball at Allegheny College.
Sister, Tina, played high school basketball before attending St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.
“Whether it was playing baseball, basketball, football — if it were cards it didn’t matter,” Merv Jr. said. “We were competing to win. And that meant something.”
Merv Sr. also added to his family’s athletic inclinations — coaching his kids in between shifts at the factory, at the bar, or at the building he helped clean.
Rising well before dawn, his first shift of the day began at 3 a.m. — ensuring he could make 4 p.m. practices. When practice concluded, it was back to work again.
Arriving home deep into the night for the minimal sleep he could muster, Merv was out the door almost as soon as he walked in.
Rinse and repeat.
“His whole thing was I do this so you guys don’t have to,” Joe said of his father. “… and I certainly owe a lot to my mom and my dad making the sacrifices they did to make sure my brother and sister and I were all college educated and prepared for life.”
From the diamond with love
State College Little League coach Larry Walker motioned to the bench.
Hoping to avoid elimination in the District Tournament, Walker turned to Donovan Moorhead in relief.
Down the line, Joe looked on anxiously.
Serving as the team’s pitching coach that season, the then-Penn State offensive coordinator preferred being outside the dugout. Often the center of attention on the gridiron, there was something liberating in avoiding the spotlight.
“I think sometimes you do these things you’re kind of the center of attraction and that’s great and that’s part of being the head coach and what you sign up for in this conference,” Joe said. “But there’s also the part of you that just wants to melt into the background and just be one of the guys.”
As Donovan inched closer to Little League’s mandatory pitch cutoff, his final batter worked deep into the count.
With the bases loaded, two outs and two strikes to the hitter, he set and delivered. Strike three.
Soon after closing out the victory, players and parents gathered at Champ’s Sports Bar and Grill — the team’s traditional postgame dinner spot.
Still shaken from the late-inning transgression, the elder Moorhead removed his cap, shook his head and looked toward Walker.
“I’ve coached in the (Los Angeles) Coliseum against USC and I was never more nervous than that,” he said of Donovan’s outing.
Recognizing the sentiment in his voice, Walker briefly reflected on the exchange.
“That was just real,” he said.
The pit stop
Moorhead needed his fix.
Pulling his tank-sized truck into a gas station just over the Alabama border en route to Birmingham, he hopped from the car and headed for the mini mart.
The pit stop made a few in the car uneasy. The gas station was run down. Rust enveloped spots where prime white paint previously resided. Prison-like bars lined the windows of the shanty-like shop.
Moorhead didn’t care.
Striding through the door, he snatched his patented Diet Mountain Dew and a bag of chips from the shelves before heading back to the vehicle.
There’s almost a naivety to Moorhead’s personality. Despite being the head football coach in the SEC, he maintains a low-key, easy-going persona — one his superiors take note of.
“At certain levels of football sometimes the leader can be standoffish, authoritarian, who doesn’t really want to be part of a university,” Cohen told The Dispatch. “And Joe is nothing like that.”
An adopted Mississippian
As the interview concluded, Moorhead again whipped out his iPhone.
His eyes race around the screen.
“We won!” he says referencing Donovan’s Little League game.
It’s this refreshing sense of normalcy that has endeared Moorhead to the MSU fan base time and time again.
It’s the same bliss that galvanized him to stop at a run down mini mart on his way to Birmingham; it’s the same sentiment he feels sitting in the stands at his kid’s baseball game; and it’s the same conviction he inherited from a father who toiled in the hell-fires of a Pittsburgh steel mill to make ends meet.
On the field, Moorhead is aptly cognizant his supporters expect a winning product on Saturdays in the fall. But off it, he feels right at home.
Though he may have been born and bred in middle-America’s Rust Belt, it’s the cotton fields and river deltas of Mississippi that presently define the latest chapter of his life.
“I think people in Mississippi see through B.S.,” Moorhead said. “…They can tell when you’re genuine and when you’re not and I think when they see a coach that is representative of the values and philosophy of the town then it makes it a lot easier.”
Ben Portnoy reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @bportnoy15.
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