NEW YORK
Esquire
BY ERIC LEWIS NOV 17, 2016
During the summer of 1968, Robert and Pamela DiBenedetto spent four weeks at sleepaway camp in upstate New York. The siblings, twins from Brooklyn, were twelve years old, and their camps were on opposite sides of a lake. One morning, Pamela woke up in her cabin with a swollen arm, an injury that puzzled the camp nurse: Pamela had not fallen or tripped, been bitten or stung. At the end of the season, however, she learned that her brother had broken his arm across the lake the day her swelling began.
As a high school student at Fontbonne Hall, a Catholic girls’ school in Bay Ridge, Pamela came to every football game at Poly Prep, the nearby boys’ school where Robert and I were both students. Now sixty-one, she long ago took the last name, Romano, of her late husband. But when I saw her recently, she had the same bright green eyes and balletic grace that she had in her youth. She told me the story about her arm to illustrate the bond that she and her brother had shared until his death in 1984.
Robert had been two grades ahead of me at Poly Prep. A smart kid with wiry hair and glasses, he was always laughing at the center of a gang of football players. He wasn’t big enough to play on the great teams of our era, but from ninth grade on, he served as a manager for the varsity squad. Known to everyone as DiBo, Robert had close friends among the players, and he took it upon himself to introduce new guys like me to the team, whether at school or at Short’s, the dive bar where we hung out on the weekends. (A sign over the bar said STRICT PROOF OF AGE REQUIRED, which, we joked, meant you had to prove you had an age.)
After the twins’ father died suddenly when they were in ninth grade, Robert was taken under the wing of Poly’s head football coach, a squat colossus of a man named Philip Foglietta. Fat and muscular, Foglietta was around five foot five and weighed well over 250 pounds. From the moment he’d arrived at Poly Prep, in 1966, he had dominated the campus; players, students, and colleagues all saw him as the ultimate macho man. Those of us on the football team were desperate to please him, but we also feared his wrath, which often found expression in his unique dialect of Neapolitan Brooklynese. (“Gamine Gotz, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” was a favorite curse.) By 1972, when Foglietta took Poly to the Ivy Prep School league championship, he was widely regarded as one of the best high school football coaches in New York City.
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