Tino Sunseri's upbringing emphasized sacrifice, discipline and practicality. His father made him shave his hair to ensure helmet safety during youth football. Anthony Sunseri, the family patriarch called Tony Macaroni, rose at 5 each morning to run the family's Italian deli and grocery and worked long evenings managing bills and obligations. The family regularly relocated because of his father's college and NFL coaching stops, exposing Tino to many programs and instilling adaptability. Early coaching lessons taught that winning preserves position while losing prompts relocation. Family rituals, like Roxann's postwin meatballs, reinforced bonds amid coaching demands.
Long before he arrived in Westwood as UCLA's offensive coordinator and a GQ cover candidate, his father made him shave that glorious mane, the better to protect his head so that it would fit snugly inside his helmet as a young quarterback. "I always had an emphasis of, 'Hey, I don't care how your frickin' hair looks or what women think,' Sal Sunseri said. "The bottom line is, I wanted him to be secure."
The man who called himself Tony Macaroni wouldn't come home until after 5 in the evening, only to tackle a stack of bills and other obligations just so that he could get to bed and rise to do it all over again. "The bottom line," Sal said of his father, "he would say, 'If you can't get up in the morning, you ain't worth a s-'."
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