Starting over: Jon Stewart and Al Bagnoli

Presumably Stewart could have remained there forever — like, say, football coach Joe Paterno at Penn State. Instead he took the path chosen in 1992 by Riccardo Muti, who could have stayed at the Philadelphia Orchestra forever but instead left at age 51 and now leads the Chicago Symphony.

This month, at the middling age of 52, Jon Stewart announced that later this year he will ditch his sinecure at Comedy Central and explore new opportunities somewhere else. He mentioned no specific plans — only an intriguing rationale: “You shouldn’t stay somewhere just because you can.”

Bagnoli’s gamble

Something similar happened this week at the University of Pennsylvania. Penn’s longtime football coach, Al Bagnoli, had announced last summer that the 2014 season would be his last. This development seemed utterly logical and predictable: In 23 seasons, Bagnoli had won more games and Ivy League championships than any coach in Penn’s history, as well as the history of the Ivy League. Surely, it seemed, the thrill of victory had been replaced by “been there, done that.” At the age of 62, the stage was set for his graceful transition to a less stressful administrative role — the ultimate fate of not only old coaches but also old actors, musicians, and dancers.

But then, apparently out of the blue, the new athletic director at Columbia — perennially the worst football team in the Ivy League, a team that hasn’t won a game in two years or an Ivy League championship since 1961 — offered Bagnoli the head coach’s job, and Bagnoli grabbed it. Suddenly he was no longer an ex-coach marking time until retirement; now he was newly energized by a fresh (not to mention downright awesome) challenge.

Forsaking Doonesbury

“There are no second acts in American lives,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously (and ridiculously) declared in The Last Tycoon. But Julia Child didn’t learn to cook until she was almost 40. Harland Sanders didn’t open a restaurant until he was 40 and was 62 when he first franchised Kentucky Fried Chicken. Vera Wang spent the first 40 years of her life as a figure skater and journalist before she became a famous designer. Tim and Nina Zagat were both 51-year-old lawyers when they published their first restaurant reviews. Grandma Moses didn’t start painting seriously until she was 78, after arthritis forced her to give up her preferred craft, embroidery. The 20th-century Philadelphia tycoon Albert Greenfield (subject of my recent biography) started out as a real estate broker, reinvented himself as a banker, then wound up running a huge chain of department stores. “I would rather fall off the highest rung,” he declared, “than never climb the ladder.”

Of course it takes tremendous pluck to forsake a secure existence and start over from scratch. Michael Jordan, possibly the greatest basketball player who ever lived, left the game in 1993, when he was 30, for a new challenge: to see if he could make it in professional baseball. When he failed, Jordan returned to basketball in 1995 for five more seasons. Garry Trudeau took a two-year sabbatical from Doonesbury in the mid-1980s to recharge his batteries, with no assurance that his devoted audience would wait patiently for his return. He has now taken another sabbatical in 2013 to prepare his Washington-based TV series, Alpha House. We will see how that works out.

Vince Lombardi’s second career

But of course it can be just as easy to fail by overstaying your welcome. Joe Paterno hung on to his head coaching job at Penn State for 46 years, stubbornly refusing to step down gracefully even when he was 84. We know how that turned out.

The secret about starting all over is that you’re not really starting all over: The second time around, you bring a lifetime of experience to your new job, not to mention your past reputation. The great football coach Vince Lombardi took charge of a failing Green Bay Packers franchise in 1959 and produced five National Football League champions over the next nine seasons. Then, hungry for new worlds to conquer, in 1969 he took over another demoralized franchise: the Washington Redskins. That spring, one Redskins lineman was relaxing at home in his backyard; upon hearing the news of Lombardi’s new job on his radio, he jumped up from his lounge chair and started doing pushups. A reputation for success can motivate people that way. That fall, under Lombardi, the Redskins produced their first winning record in 14 years. Al Bagnoli could engineer the same transformation at Columbia. And if he fails, his choice still beats playing canasta in a retirement home.

Many Jon Stewart fans profess dismay that Stewart won’t be around to inject a note of sanity into the 2016 Presidential election campaign. And many of my fellow Penn alums feel Al Bagnoli has betrayed the school by skipping off to a hated rival. Not I. By starting over, these two proven winners have demonstrated that life may yet hold some surprises in store for all of us — and some of those surprises may even be good. Wherever Stewart and Bagnoli go, I’ll be rooting for them — except when Columbia plays Penn, of course.