How Notre Dame QB Jack Coan’s uncle upholds values of those he lost on 9/11
Leadership, levity and an absence of the fear of failure.
Those are three values by which Dan Coan, Notre Dame starting quarterback Jack Coan’s uncle, lives by. They derived from something that occurred 20 years ago on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
Coan was a member of the New York Police Department’s Emergency Service Unit at the time. His day started around 4 a.m. He had already helped his team execute three search warrants in Brooklyn.
“We were just finishing up the fourth and were on our way to Queens when the first plane struck,” Coan told Blue & Gold Illustrated. “We turned around and headed straight toward Lower Manhattan.”
The first hijacked airplane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 were underway. Coan’s life, his future children’s lives, his family’s lives and the lives of thousands of other Americans would soon be altered forever.
‘It Was Surreal’
Coan traveled through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel in an unmarked police vehicle. When it emerged in Manhattan, another hijacked airplane crashed into the South Tower. Debris hit the ground from all over. Coan’s car swerved to avoid it, constantly coming within a few feet of calamity.
Many NYPD officers were already inside the North Tower trying to help people evacuate. They called to Coan and company for extra equipment and manpower. The officers outside couldn’t approach the burning building because there were too many bodies falling from dozens of stories above.
Coan and his coworkers finally found a path to approach the towers, but that’s when the South Tower started to fall at 9:59 a.m. He will never forget that moment.
“I specifically remember looking up, seeing the smoke starting to move and hearing the loudest freight train sound I’ve ever heard in my life,” Coan said. “I just remember seeing the tower start to fall, and I was saying to myself, ‘I can’t believe this tower is about to fall on top of me.’
“It was like a cartoon where your feet are going but it doesn’t feel like you’re moving anywhere. It was surreal. I take that with me every day.”
Coan was amazed at how much his brain processed in that scurry. He thought about his parents. He thought about his brothers, one of which was a sergeant in aviation for the NYPD. He was in a helicopter surveilling the situation all day. He thought about his nephews. Namely his godson, Jack.
Dan Coan wasn’t a father yet in 2001. He was 29. Throwing the ball in the yard with Jack was enough for him to know he yearned to have kids of his own.
“I always remember him being around and coming to all of my sporting events,” Jack said. “Even when he had a day off, he’d hang out with me or have a sleepover at his house. Playing whiffle ball in the backyard. All things like that, those are some of the best memories I have.”
One of his best friends in the police department, detective Joe Vigiano, was a father himself as well.
Vigiano’s son was 8. He’d never see his dad alive again.
Coan would have been working with Vigiano that day if not for a 90-day change in ESU vehicle assignments. Vigiano and two of Coan’s other best friends and usual coworkers — Sergeant Michael Curtin and officer John D’Allara — perished in the collapse of the North Tower, which came crashing down 29 minutes after the South Tower.
Three friends. Three legacies. Three values. Leadership, levity, no fear of failure.
Memorializing The Fallen
Leadership is in honor of Curtin, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran of Operation Desert Storm. Curtin also helped rescue a former Marine from the wreckage site of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Curtin was Coan’s direct supervisor at the NYPD.
“I try to teach my kids to be leaders, to make good decisions, don’t be a follower, stand on your own two feet, own up when you do wrong but always try to do right,” Coan said. “Mike always did all of those things. He never wavered.”
Levity, or “humor” as Coan more conversationally calls it, comes from D’Allara.
“He found humor in everything,” Coan said. “In police work, especially in emergency service police work, you see a lot of death. You see a lot of injuries. You see a lot of bad accidents. You see a lot of the worst. You get to rescue people, which is the good of it, but you get a lot of the bad also. People jumping from buildings, people shooting themselves — all that stuff. We have a front row seat to it because we’re the ones that handle it.
“John D’Allara was always able to find a punch line in something to bring levity to it. To keep it on the bright side so it didn’t eat you up. I try to teach my kids to be fun and just have fun with things and try to block out the dark side and stay on the light side of things.”
“The humor characteristic, he definitely has that,” Jack added. “He always had me laughing. He still does today.”
Then there’s Vigiano and his bravery. Dan Coan called him a “superhero.”
“The guy would try anything,” Coan said. “He was out of his league with some of the stuff he would try to attempt training-wise. He was a little heavy, but he’d try to go run a marathon. He was not afraid to fail.
“Myself and my children, I try to teach them the same thing. Be valiant. Go out there and try something. You may not get it done, but there’s nothing wrong with trying. You’ve got to work toward a goal.”
Adhering To Values
The beauty in what has become Coan’s calling card is his nephew, the one who starts at quarterback for one of college football’s most prestigious programs, can take the values his uncle lives by and employ them every day at Notre Dame.
Quarterbacks are innate leaders. It comes with the territory.
“He’s seen by his peers as a warrior, somebody that is on time for every workout, is there, is committed,” Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly said of Jack Coan in August. “You can count on them. He’s a guy that you want lined up next to you in the foxhole, right? You can count on that guy.”
By Jack’s own admission, humor might be the value of the three he needs to work on the most. He takes everything seriously. He said he gets that from his mother, Donna. But it’s why he won the starting nod over sophomore Drew Pyne, and it wasn’t particularly close.
Jack is all business. He’s been that way since he was a toddler.
“Jack was the kid who always, always wanted to throw the ball,” Dan said. “Baseball, lacrosse, football, basketball shooting hoops. He was always the kid like, ‘C’mon, Uncle Danny,’ and we’d throw the ball to see if we could get to 10, then it was 20, then 30. It always just kept going up. ‘We had 30 last time, let’s get to 50.’ He never wanted to stop.
“He was always going, going, going. The kid’s work ethic and the goals that he sets, he’s very private socially about his goals, but he’s very hardworking. He’s not a guy of a lot of words. He doesn’t open up to just anyone. He sets his goals and works his butt off. When he comes home for breaks, he’s speed training and strength training every day. He’s got a strict diet. He’s not a big social guy. He’s with his family. He’s not a huge out-and-about guy.”
There isn’t much levity in a relentless work ethic. Workouts at 5 a.m. aren’t funny. Sweating so much you can fill up a beach bucket isn’t funny. Staying home on a Friday night instead of going out with friends probably produces less laughter.
None of that is to say Jack isn’t having fun with what he’s doing, though. D’Allara had fun being a cop. Jack has fun being a football player.
If he throws a touchdown pass in practice and makes a defensive teammate look silly in the process, then like any athlete he’s probably right there to throw a wise-guy type crack in the player’s direction. Tossing touchdown passes in and of itself is fun, too. Jack won’t shy away from a celebration.
“At the end of the day, I’m just playing a football game,” Jack said. “My uncle Dan and my uncle Jim, they’re out there risking their lives for this country. That’s a lot more serious. If they can have fun, I can too.”
As for the absence of a fear of failure, Jack displayed that when he took a chance on himself and transferred to Notre Dame. The NCAA transfer portal is alluring for veteran players, sure, but it doesn’t always work out for them in the long run. A graduate transfer quarterback could just as easily crash and burn as he could shine in a new uniform.
Vigiano wasn’t afraid to try anything. He was a better worker for it. Jack wasn’t afraid to transfer to Notre Dame. Now he’s the starter there. That speaks for itself.
He was originally slated to play lacrosse at Notre Dame. Then scholarship offers from college football programs trickled in, and everything changed. He set his mind to something else, just as Vigiano would have done, and became the starting quarterback at Wisconsin before earning the same title at Notre Dame.
“You could tell a switch flipped and Jack wanted to be a college football player,” Dan said. “And he never looked back.”
‘Just A Nightmare’
It’s OK to look back, though. If you’re Dan Coan, how couldn’t you?
Had he arrived at the World Trade Center complex a few minutes earlier, he’d have entered the towers to bring supplies to his fellow officers and died alongside them. Had he not been assigned to another ESU unit that day, he’d have been with Vigiano, Curtin and D’Allara from the start.
He’d have died alongside them.
“Five more minutes and we’re inside the tower,” Coan said. “Five more minutes, and we’re a picture on a wall somewhere. There was a lot of that that day. You make a left, you make a right. You make a right, somebody lands on you and you’re dead in the street. You make a left, you may get away.
“Fate? Yeah. There’s definitely something to it.”
Looking back gives Coan perspective. It allows him to realize how close he was to losing his life. He cherishes the memories he’s making with family. His friends weren’t so fortunate.
He and Jack would never have made it to 50 catches in a row had he been buried in the rubble. He would have never gotten the chance to see his godson start a football game for Notre Dame.
“You sort of think back on it now and hearing about how many friends he lost, how many guys he worked with he lost during that incident, it’s pretty crazy to think if he made one turn different or did one thing different he may not be here right now,” Jack Coan said. “It sort of just taught me to cherish every moment you have with him and your family because you never know what can happen.”
He would have never gotten to witness his own son try to follow in Jack’s footsteps and become a football player. That process is in its early stages. Dan can’t wait to watch it play out.
He was eerily close to losing all of it.
“It was just a nightmare,” said Mike Coan, Dan’s brother and Jack’s father. “If something ever happened like that again, you’d run up to your family right away.”
Mike was running his landscaping business as usual on the morning of 9/11. His wife, Donna, called him twice — once after each tower was hit. He didn’t believe the news at first. Then he didn’t know if his brothers were alive.
Dan was able to call his father, a retired policeman himself, around midnight, roughly 14 hours after the horrifying events in New York City began. The Coan family had no idea if Dan and Jimmy, the NYPD aviation sergeant, had survived. They were in the dark all day.
When Dan was finally able to call from a somehow operable phone booth in a lower Manhattan hotel, he told his dad to let the family know he was OK but that he wasn’t going to be leaving the wreckage site “for a while.”
He was one of many officers to stay the night in a nearby high school so they could wake up early and search for survivors. It ended up being a more of a mission to provide closure for grieving families rather than a mass rescue.
“There were body parts everywhere,” Dan said. “You just hoped that you’d find somebody alive. It didn’t happen.”
“It changed everybody,” Mike added. “It made everybody a little closer. When I spend time with them, I’m like, ‘Holy cow. This guy could have been gone. He was so close.’”
Dan has never talked with Jack about what transpired on 9/11, but he knows Jack still has a deep understanding of what took place. He’s too smart not to.
Jack has seen the Academy Award-winning documentary on Vigiano’s family. He’s had conversations with his dad. He toured the memorial museum at ground zero with his Wisconsin teammates prior to the 2018 Pinstripe Bowl.
He’s seen enough. He’s heard enough.
“Obviously as I got older I learned about 9/11 and his involvement in it, and it just amazed me,” Jack said. “The bravery he had. Truly making the biggest sacrifice he could for New York and the country, putting his life at risk trying to do as much good as he could.”
When Jack suits up in blue and gold and plays on the field at Notre Dame Stadium on the exact 20-year anniversary of the day his uncles nearly lost their lives, a piece of them will be with him.
“He has the appreciation for law enforcement and for what we do,” Dan said. “He understands the dynamic. He’s an athlete. He gets the physical and adrenaline part of it.
“But I also think he understands the emotional toll we took after 9/11, too.”
“They’re special guys,” Jack said. “They’ve definitely always been heroes to me and guys I’ve tried to be like. I’m thankful they’re in my life.”
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