Joshua Borne

Mike Viti coaches tight ends at Miami, and in 2014 he walked 4,400 miles with a pen in his pocket. He stopped every kilometer to write a name. The names were American service members who did not come home from Iraq and Afghanistan. He walked one kilometer for each of them. There were 6,830 names by his count. So the walk was 7,100 kilometers, and it took him 232 days. That is about 19 miles a day, every day, for roughly eight months. He started in DuPont, Washington, in April. He carried a backpack with a cot and his rations in it, a hat, an American flag and the pen. Every kilometer he stopped, took the flag out and wrote one name on it. When a flag was full, which took two or three weeks, he handed it to a man named Alex Larson and Larson handed him a blank one. He filled 14 flags. D.J. Byrnes caught up with him for Eleven Warriors while he was still out there walking, and Viti put the whole thing in six words. "They're heroes, every single one of them." He met 64 Gold Star families on the way. He finished at the Army-Navy game in Baltimore. Viti was a fullback at Army from 2004 to 2007 and a team captain. He played 31 games and most of what he did was block for other people. Nobody drafted him. Buffalo signed him on May 2 of 2008 and let him go on July 1. So he went and did the job he had signed up for at 18. He served in Afghanistan, came home with a Bronze Star and retired as a captain. Miami put out a piece on him in June, not long after he got to the building, and the whole of what he has to say in it about his year in Afghanistan fits into one line. "The single most honorable year of my life." He and his wife Laura helped start a foundation called Legacies Alive, which exists for Gold Star families. They are both still on the board of it. He went back to Army in 2015 and joined the coaching staff in 2016. He coached fullbacks for six years and then the offensive line, and the line he coached in 2024 won the Joe Moore Award, which goes to the best one in the country. In 2019 he was named the assistant coach of the year by the American Football Coaches Association. In March he left for Miami. Mario Cristobal, who hired him, got a question about his new tight ends coach this summer and did not take long over the answer. "He's exactly what we thought. Relentless, intense energy and he's an animal in a good way." Today is Veterans Day. Miami plays Duke on Saturday at noon, and the man coaching their tight ends spent 232 days writing out 6,830 of the reasons for today, one name at a time, a kilometer apart.