Steve PolitiTue, November 25, 2025 at 12:36 PM UTC·11 min readMike Higgins Jr. leans forward to scrutinize a photo of a newspaper clipping I had opened on my laptop. The subject of the decades-old article is a dear one for the Rutgers football player, but still, I feel uncertain.
Will he want to relive his father’s glory days so soon after his death? Or will this story and all the others I found at my hometown’s library elicit emotions that are still too raw for him to process?
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementRight away, though, I see he is interested. I tell him that the article is from a weekly newspaper called The Nutley Sun, back when a 15-year-old kid with no journalism experience — namely, me — made $4 an hour chronicling the exploits of an athlete that was among the very best in town history.
His namesake. His father.
“Is that the Linden game?” Higgins Jr. asks me.
It was indeed. The Nutley High football team was having a historic season in 1988, and in the state playoffs, defeated Linden 20-10 to advance to the sectional championship. Mike Higgins Sr., as he did time and time again, had led the Maroon Raiders to a level our town hadn’t reached in a generation.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementI cringe as his son reads my typo-ridden account over my shoulder:
Everyone, please stand up and give quarterback Mike Higgins a round of applause! Another chapter from the book of Higgins’ Heroics was written on Saturday afternoon as he scored twice on sneaks to lead the 8-0-1 Raiders ...
The son smiles. He knows his father was the ultimate three-sport star at Nutley High, an All-American catcher who led Rutgers to three NCAA Tournament appearances and a prospect for the Colorado Rockies before he retired to pursue a banking career.
Former teammates, who talk about him in reverential tones, have told his son countless stories. I quickly understand that those old newspaper accounts can’t capture him like his dearest friends.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementBut I had one story to share that never appeared in The Nutley Sun. It is a story about that scared teenage reporter facing bullies in a locker room and the team leader who protected him.
I had to tell Mike Higgins Jr. that his dad wasn’t just the first great athlete that I covered over my four-decade career as a sportswriter.
He was a stand-up guy, too.
# # #
Two thoughts hit me as the senior tight end pulls up a stool after a practice last week. The first is the absurdity of his father’s friends still calling him Mikey — or even Little Mikey — given his chiseled 6-foot-5, 250-pound frame.
The next is the striking resemblance to his father. He looks like a bigger version of the athlete I covered on those Essex County fields almost four decades ago.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementIn the wide shoulder pads of the time, Mike Sr. didn’t look like a typical quarterback. He wore No. 44 because he idolized Brian Bosworth and, until midway through his sophomore year, looked on track to follow in the mohawked Oklahoma player’s footsteps as a defensive star.
“Mike could have been a Division 1 linebacker. He was that good,” one of his offensive linemen, Jim Bevere, remembered. Then the starting quarterback of the team, his older brother Marty, went down with an injury. “I remember coach saying, ‘You gotta go play quarterback.’ And Mike was just like, ‘(Screw) it, I’m quarterback now.’”
Nutley had long struggled in a league loaded with city schools and parochial powers. But in 1988, Higgins led a team of childhood friends to new heights. An opening-season tie with Montclair was the only thing that separated Nutley from perfection when it traveled to play powerhouse Randolph in the sectional final.
Mike HigginsA line of buses took fans from the high school parking lot to Morris County. Pete Labarbiera, the team’s longtime coach, told the players in the visiting locker room that not a day would pass that they didn’t think about this game — “and he was absolutely right,” said Joe Piro, then an offensive lineman and now the school’s athletic director.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementNutley lost, 15-12, after a controversial pass interference penalty on a fourth-and-30 play late in the fourth quarter. I remember thinking that the town might never recover, but the next week, Higgins went to work leading the basketball team. In this era of specialization, it seems almost absurd.
“But that was Mike — he could do anything,” said Mike King, a teammate and friend.
When basketball season was over in March, Higgins tossed the sneakers into the closet and brought out his catcher’s gear. He never stopped.
Baseball was his calling, and he used an all-state season to land at Rutgers. Doug Alongi, his classmate in Piscataway, remembers seeing Higgins on the first day of camp and wondering how the Scarlet Knights had “a 35-year-old veteran catcher” on the roster.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“At the end of the day I find out, ‘He’s a freshman?’” Alongi laughed. “He just had such a big presence on the field, in the locker room, in the dugout. He was an elder statesman on Day 1 somehow, and I don’t know how.”
He once told Fred Hill, the legendary Rutgers baseball coach, that he was wasting his time recruiting another catcher because the kid would never play. He once brought two left cleats on a road trip to Miami, used his stipend money to buy another pair at a local sporting goods store and hit a grand slam with a dozen scouts watching.
The Rockies drafted him in the 22nd round in 1993 after he hit .370 with a then-school record 56 RBIs. His teammates were certain they would see him in the big leagues, but after kicking around in the minors for four seasons, he went to work at Bank of New York.
That’s where he met his wife, Lori, and together they built a happy life as a suburban dad in Ho-Ho-Kus and Lavallette. Mike Jr. and daughter Ashley were at the center of everything, and when “Little Mikey” parlayed just two seasons of high school football into a scholarship at his alma mater?
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“He couldn’t talk about anything else,” Marty Higgins said. “He couldn’t wait to get back to campus for those tailgates.”
That’s how I got to know a different Mike Higgins. We told old stories over beers in Bloomington, Indiana, before a Rutgers road game in October 2023, living out a Springsteen song in Mellencamp territory. But his glory days no longer defined him.
He seemed content, relaxed, on top of the world.
He had less than two years to live.
# # #
Mike Higgins Jr. knew.
He felt a queasiness in the pit of his stomach during the second half of the Scarlet Knights’ loss to Oregon on Oct. 18. He looked up into the stands where his parents always sit behind the bench at SHI Stadium.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“I had all of these emotions hit me at once. I was like, dang,” he said.
He knew his father, in a hospice facility in Saddle River, wouldn’t be sitting there. But neither was his mom, and she never missed one of his games.
Lori had gotten the call from Marty in the first half and rushed to the hospice. Mike found out from his grandmother as soon as the game ended. Without telling his already dejected teammates, he packed up his locker and headed home.
His father was dead at 54.
A week after I saw him in Indiana, he started feeling a numbness in his left side and called for an ambulance. An MRI revealed the grim prognosis — glioblastoma — in the back right corner of his brain.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementHe underwent three craniotomies and multiple rounds of radiation and chemotherapy, and he tried new medications that cost $8,000 a pill. He started to have seizures, struggled with loud noises and needed help walking. The life expectancy for someone with an aggressive cancer like his is about a year. Mike Sr. doubled that.
“We did everything,” Lori Higgins said.
He still made it to the first three games of the season, waiting with words of encouragement for his son outside the locker room. Mike Jr. was there for him, too, driving home after practices and team meetings to help him navigate the challenging final few weeks.
NCAA football: Rutgers vs. Wagner Meanwhile, his old Nutley and Rutgers teammates would call Mike Sr. for updates, and instead, they would get tales about whatever Mike Jr. and Ashley were doing. They knew his situation was serious, but until the very end, most didn’t know that the leader from their athletic days was dying.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“You thought you were immortal for so long,” Piro said, “and now you realize, oh shit, nobody stays here forever.”
The names that filled my old Nutley Sun stories, now men in their 50s, rallied around him. The tight end, Bob Schweikert, took the day shift at the hospice while the running back, Vito Mielnicki, slept in his room at night. Mike Sr. was never alone.
In the days before the end, Bevere, now a school superintendent in Pennsauken, had to get something off his chest. It still bothered him that he failed to make a block when the quarterback had broken free on a play against Paterson Eastside — a play that ended with Mike Sr. breaking his collarbone after he was caught from behind.
“I’m sorry about that,” Bevere wrote in a text that Ashley read to her father in hospice, and from his bed, he could only smile.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementI found myself wishing that I had told Mike the story that sticks with me the most from those days in Nutley. So I did the next best thing.
I told his son.
# # #
In one of those old newspaper clips I didn’t show Mike Jr., I decided to flex my muscles as a young sportswriter with big aspirations. I questioned if the players on that 1988 football team let its success go to their heads. I wondered if they were getting overconfident with the biggest games of the season yet to come.
I picked them to beat Hackensack by a single point, 21-20, which was tantamount to predicting a five-touchdown loss in the hometown paper.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementIt was my first lesson about the power of the written word. Nutley not only won that game but won it easily, and in the victorious locker room, I became a target.
One player barked for me to stay away or he would kick my ass. Another wrapped me up in a muddy hug and lifted me off the ground, smearing me in grime. Even Coach Pete, my affable gym teacher at the time, reamed me out in his office.
Then I turned to the team’s star. If Higgins had laid into me, too, I would have taken my notebook and left without a story. Would I have had the guts to return after the next game? It felt like a fork-in-the-road moment.
“Uh, Mike, got a second?”
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementHe stood in front of his locker like a pro, looking me in the eye and answering all of my questions. I don’t remember what I asked or what he said, but I do remember how the temperature in the locker room dropped around him.
He set the example. Everyone else fell in line.
“Yeah, that sounds like my dad,” Mike Jr. said.
The younger Higgins, his teammates say, leads from the front, too. Twice, Rutgers has dipped into the transfer portal to grab tight ends, lessening his role. That almost always results in a player jumping into the portal himself in search of more action, more money, more everything.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementNot this player.
His father told him when he signed with Rutgers that he was “making a four- or five-year commitment,” and that is what he intends to do. He plans on staying next season as a redshirt senior to leave Rutgers with a master’s degree.
“Do I wish I played more this year? Sure,” Mike Jr. said. “But there are so many other things that matter more.”
Maybe that’s why he inspires the same kind of loyalty as his father once did. Several teammates waited an hour and a half at a memorial service where 1,500 people paid their respects. Jordan Walker, a defensive lineman, was still wearing his suit when he arrived back on campus for a team meeting.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“The two Mikes inspired me to get back closer with my dad,” Walker said, “because you don’t know how long you’re here for.”
That’s the kind of legacy Mike Sr. would have loved far more than anything he did on the playing field.
When our interview ended, Mike Jr. gave me a hug and thanked me for sharing those stories about his dad. As he walked away, I couldn’t help but see the stand-up guy I wrote about all those years ago.
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