Football legend Joe Moglia celebrates Columbus Day after NYC parade canceled

The football legend who was meant to lead this year’s Columbus Day Parade celebrated “Italian heritage” Monday despite the event being rained out for the first time in its 81-year history.

“Rain or shine, I’m always proud of my Italian heritage and my hometown of NYC,” Joe Moglia, who had been set to serve as the parade’s grand marshal, said as he refused to let the dreary weather bring him down.

“Though the parade was canceled, all the events this weekend, from the Gala to today’s beautiful mass led by Cardinal Dolan, will remain one of the highlights of my life,” he wrote in a post on X.

Moglia, 76, told The Post last week that the call asking him to be the grand marshal for the annual march down Fifth Avenue surpassed even the highs of his time coaching football.

The excitement transported him back to being offered the head football coaching gig at Coastal Carolina University two decades earlier.

“I never expected it! For me to be Grand Marshal of the Columbus Day Parade is literally the greatest honor I’ve ever received in my life,” he said proudly of the “overwhelming” offer to lead the 81st annual march.

“I’m very overwhelmed with gratitude.”

The Columbus Citizens Foundation announced last month it had picked Moglia because of his impressive success as the CEO and Chairman of TD Ameritrade — a career he ditched after several decades to return to his passion as a football coach.

Moglia gave up the glamor of Wall Street to start at the bottom of the football food chain, but quickly rose through the ranks to become the head coach of the Division 1 team at Coastal Carolina University, where he led the Chanticleers to three consecutive Big South titles.

But before the first-generation American became the football legend and wolf of Wall Street he is known as today, he was a scrappy young boy whose parents were struggling to make ends meet in Inwood.

His mother and father, who immigrated from Ireland and Italy, respectively, had limited educations and were raising their five children in a two-bedroom apartment on Dyckman Street.

“That was a gang area when I grew up — and I was part of a gang,” recalled Moglia, adding that he was stealing and drinking with his buddies from as young as 10.

The rough living led to a tragic end for two of Moglia’s friends, one who succumbed to an overdose and the other at the hands of police during a botched burglary at a liquor store.

“Had I not been playing football at Fordham Prep … not a maybe, I would have been with him. That was a pretty good wake-up call,” Moglia said, referring to the Bronx Catholic high school he attended and would later coach.

The native New Yorker threw himself into the sport and his studies, opening a new path that would ultimately lead him to being named the grand marshal of the biggest Italian celebration march in the US — which was scrapped over Gov. Kathy Hochul’s state of emergency order and inclement weather spurring heavy rains across the tri-state area.

The Columbus Citizens Foundation, which organizes the parade through Manhattan, announced the cancellation late Sunday, just over 12 hours ahead of its scheduled start time.

Dozens of football players from Moglia’s decades-long career — including those from his time as Forham Prep’s coach in the 1960s — would have been standing along Fifth Avenue to cheer on their hero as he led the march.

At age 22, Moglia took a job coaching football at Archmere Academy, becoming the youngest coach in state history, and 10 years later achieved his dream of working as the defensive coordinator at Dartmouth College.

The pay wasn’t enough to sustain his four children, and Moglia was forced to pivot careers at the age of 34 to follow the money.

Moglia finally put his Forham economics degree to work at Merrill Lynch, where he worked for 17 years before becoming CEO of TD Ameritrade in 2001, a position he held for seven years.

But football was always in Moglia’s heart, and he returned to the sport in 2008, first with an unpaid position at Nebraska, and then as the head coach of the United Football League’s Omaha Nighthawks, before his iconic career as Coastal Carolina’s second-ever head coach.

His impressive career has resulted in a dozen Hall of Fame inductions and dozens of awards, but Moglia pointed to the relationships he founded over the years as his biggest prize.

“It’s important to me. At the end of the day, leadership is not about who you are, it’s about the people you’re responsible for,” he said.