TV host by day, soccer coach by night

This isn't one of those stories about human hardship or adversity, or some guy's lonely quest for glory. It's not about sports heroes or goats, either, or those unexpected magical moments that Oprah or Dr.Phil tells us about - that can turn a humdrum life into an extraordinary one, usually between commercial breaks.

Instead, this is a story about Massapequa - that lovely, sprawling and quintessential middle-class town by the Great South Bay - and about soccer. Mostly, though, it's how one man, Brian Kilmeade, changed his life through both, with help from family and his own personal field of dreams - a sleek Astroturf-covered expanse at John J. Burns Park on Merrick Road.
Here's a lesson he learned: Don't fear rejection - it will make you stronger. And: Failure teaches you how to succeed. And another: Winning's not as important as the effort exerted.

Funny thing about Brian Kilmeade - he doesn't look like Deepak Chopra. On a recent day, he doesn't even particularly look like Brian Kilmeade, though that may have more to do with his wearing black running pants and cleats, while his windbreaker was flapping furiously in a stiff late-spring breeze.

Two Brian Kilmeades exist. The first is a father of three, host of Fox News' morning TV show "Fox & Friends" and the syndicated "Brian and the Judge" radio program, veteran sports commentator and author of the recently published book "It's How You Play the Game."

Then, there's the Vince Lombardi of Nassau Division I under-10 boys team of the Massapequa Soccer Club. He strides the sideline at Burns Field. He scowls. He cheers. He lectures. He praises. He has laser focus and expects his team to as well.

When one of his pint-sized Pelés misses a pass during a recent scrimmage, he says nothing, but doesn't have to. They always know exactly what Coach Kilmeade is thinking.

"They want to win," says Kilmeade, 43, glancing out at kids who look like they had recently learned to tie their shoelaces.

"I never talk about winning. I talk about effort. [We] lost 1-0 in a recent game, and I thought we played great. We won another game, 3-1, and I thought, 'When are you guys gonna start playing?'"

The theme of his book

If Kilmeade sounds like the high-school jock you avoided in the hallway, then appearances are purely coincidental. He readily admits, however, that sports - specifically soccer - changed him, while life and sports are inextricably bound.

That's also the theme of his second book. ("The Games Do Count" was a bestseller, a couple years ago.) "It's How You Play the Game" is an inspirational chronicle of life-changing sports moments for 90 or so athletes and leaders. "Winning is certainly part of their stories," wrote Kilmeade. "But it's not what makes people who they are."

What made Kilmeade partly who he is happened on a soccer field many years ago, when he failed to cover a player on the opposing team during a big game. The player scored and the humiliation drove the obsessive 15-year-old almost nuts.

"I was almost like the coach," he says, adding that he also played "stressed.... I was constantly worried."

"He was," says older brother Jim, former general manger of the Long Island Rough Riders professional soccer team, "the hardest-working kid in town."

Back at the home he's lived in for five years, Kilmeade walks through a handsomely remodeled kitchen and new sitting room - bounty of a successful career at Fox - while his wife and high-school sweetheart, Dawn, is in the other room. Someone comes from behind and starts pulling at his sleeve. "Daddy, Daddy...."

At 4, Kaitlyn is the youngest while Bryan is 10 and Kirstyn is 6. Each knows how to kick a soccer ball with seasoned proficiency. Daddy made certain of that.

Kilmeade grew up in a small house not far away, "16 Pennsylvania Avenue, not 1600," he says, where his mother, Marie, lived until recently. As a kid, he worked for Jerry Seinfeld's dad ("a little guy ... he could lift a piano on his back...."), made friends with the Baldwin boys, and never gave a thought to leaving Massapequa.

A detour to the West Coast

He did leave, for the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University in Brookville, then later to Manhattan, where he did stand-up, then to the West Coast, where he worked as a sports anchor and commentator. When he joined Fox in 1997, he sank down roots here for good.

Kilmeade gets up most mornings at around 2:30 for the limo ride into the city. Why not move closer to work? "I wanted to be the guy that becomes successful in Massapequa [because] everyone else left," he says.

"The Kilmeades all hold the mast up" for Massapequa, says "Fox & Friends" executive producer David Brown. "When the Amy Fisher-Joey Buttafuoco [dating story] came to light recently, he was like, 'Noooo.... Do we have to do this? It's my hometown.' He's very, very much about Massapequa."

And Massapequa is very much about soccer. Like many suburban towns across America, it began embracing the sport 30 or so years ago. Unlike most of them, the embrace turned into a bear hug. Addie Mattei-Iaia, president of the Long Island Junior Soccer League, says membership "has skyrocketed" in Nassau and Suffolk counties, thanks in part to the relentless Kilmeade boosterism. But Massapequa's love affair, she adds, dates to the early '70s, when the town rented a home for Gordon Bradley, then the player-coach of the New York Cosmos. The profile of an also-ran sport, deep in the shadows of baseball and football, rose dramatically.

Or as Jim Kilmeade puts it: Before Gordon arrived "you couldn't buy a soccer ball locally."

Soccer became an obsession for the Kilmeades, too. Brian was the first to join a team, followed by Jim and youngest brother Steve. Finally, their father, James, became Brian's coach - and a mini-dynasty was born.

Soccer wasn't merely a dinner-table fixation, but "a metaphor for some lessons you learn in life," says Jim, now a sports marketing executive who lives in Northport. "It's about perseverance [while] as a player, you're on your own out there."

Another Kilmeade friend, Chris Mazzilli - who played soccer with the brothers and later became manager of Manhattan's Gotham Comedy Club, where Brian did his stand-up routine - says, "A lot of us caught baloney playing soccer , so you kind of stick together. It's like a brotherhood."

Brian's relationship with his father was special. He played hard and relentlessly because he yearned for his old man's love and approval. He got that - in abundance.

James ran a bar and restaurant in Manhasset called Kilmeade's Manhasset Hill on Plandome Road. Early one cold January morning in 1979 - just weeks from taking full ownership of the bar that bore his name - he was driving home when his car hit a 30-foot steel sign on Shelter Rock Road. He was dead at 47.

"Almost total silence"

The months afterward were like "falling off a cliff," Brian recalls. "In [our] house, where there had always been this great pulse ... there was almost total silence."

When the soccer season began later that year, Jim, just 17, stepped into his father's place to become the youngest coach in the history of Long Island junior soccer.

Brian stayed with the team, but it would be years before he overcame the pain of his loss.

He finally did. During his freshman year, his college coach "stuck me in at outside back" to guard - or "mark" - a player on the opposing team during a game in Florida. Kilmeade had no hope against the guy - a budding superstar - but held him scoreless. No fan from Massapequa witnessed the greatest game of his life.

"No one was judging me, and I wasn't judging myself," he wrote. "I came to learn that pressure comes from within, and how we handle that pressure defines how we do later in life, as well as the degree to which we enjoy the process."

It is mid-June, and Kilmeade's on the other end of a phone line. His team had just played a tough, resourceful Albertson team for the championship. "We won by three goals and won the division," says Brian Kilmeade, Massapequa soccer coach and (oh, yes) Fox personality, too.

And he reports: His boys "played very well."