TCNJ

32 FALL 2016 A UGUST 2001, the first day of TCNJ's pre-season football camp. Bryan Mulholland '05 is a freshman defensive lineman, 6-feet-2 and 270 pounds. Jogging to the sidelines after a drill, he hears a teammate—six inches shorter, 100 pounds lighter—taunting him with insults, demeaning his skills as a football player, casting doubt on his very manhood. You ain't got nothin'! I'll be on you all day! In the parlance of the game, Al Guido '03 is talking smack. BY HIS COUNT, Al Guido moved nine times in his first 18 years. He was nine years old when his parents split. He and his older sister, Nicole, and younger brother, Michael, lived with their mother, Maggie, in Washington Township, about 50 miles south of Ewing. Their father, also named Al, a truck driver, was forced to go on disability when the kids were still teens. Yet he instilled in his eldest son his own love of sports, and, then as now, he provided much-needed support and direction. Maggie sometimes held down two jobs to help pay the bills. During Al's senior year, she took a job with her brother's business in Pennsylvania, and for the next two years Al and Nicole shared a condominium on the outskirts of town. Nicole, just 18 months older than Al, had just graduated high school. Both waited tables at the local Pizza Hut. After school Al would finish football or basketball practice, work until 10 p.m., sometimes midnight, go home to sleep, then do it again the next day. The divorce took its toll. Guido was a headstrong kid who sometimes acted out. He missed a lot of school during his sophomore year and his grades suffered. In his junior year he was declared ineligible to play football. For a 16-year-old boy who had played the "He's just barking at me," Mulholland recalls. "I had no idea who this dude was. I never had a little guy like that talk a lot of smack. He's yelling at me that I couldn't get anything done. It was a little hard to take him seriously. But I'm also thinking, What does this guy know that I don't?" Mulholland's story will surprise no one who knew Guido then, as a peren- nial second-teamer who brought everything he had to every practice during the three years he played for former head coach Eric Hamilton. His teammates knew Guido for his tenacity, his unrelenting self-confidence, his willingness to stand up to any challenge. But Mulholland's tale also speaks to the loyalty and the love Guido inspired in his teammates, many of whom remain among his closest friends. Maybe that's because they saw in Guido the consum- mate underdog, a brash kid from the South Jersey suburbs with a dogged work ethic and a passion to succeed. What they could not have foreseen was Guido's rapid ascent through the ranks of professional sports management to become, at age 35, president of one of the National Football League's signature franchises. "I pinch myself pretty much every day," Guido says from his office inside Levi's Stadium, home of the San Francisco 49ers. "It's been a whirlwind couple of years out here." Getting schooled Guido, the unsigned 50-pounder, and TCNJ wide receiver.

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