No. 1 Son

He tried sitting in his seat. He tried coming down on the field. He tried pacing the sidelines. Nothing calmed his anxiety or soothed his nerves.

In 41 years of coaching, through good decisions and bad, Jim Mora had never been through anything like it. Because in the Atlanta Falcons’ season opener against the San Francisco 49ers in September, he couldn’t make any of the decisions.

The head coach of the Falcons is named Jim Mora, but that’s Jim Mora Jr. The man watching in the background was Jim Mora Sr.

That’s how they are known, anyway. For the record, the Atlanta coach is James Lawrence Mora. His father is James Ernest Mora.

Although father and son remain extremely close, Junior has been struggling to establish his own identity for a long time, to get from under a shadow that stretched across nearly a quarter-century in the coaching ranks of two professional leagues.

Nepotism shouldn’t have been an issue when the younger Mora was hired as head coach of the Falcons at the end of last season. At 42, he was entering his 20th season on a pro coaching staff. And in all that time he had worked for his father for only five seasons, from 1992 to ’96 with the New Orleans Saints.

Falcon owner Arthur Blank had it right when in introducing his new coach to the media he said, “The reality is that Jim has been preparing for this position for his entire life.”

The preparation shows. Mora’s Falcons won their opener against the 49ers and went on to an 11-5 record, the NFC South title and the No. 2 seeding in the conference playoffs. And today, against the St. Louis Rams in Atlanta, the son will try to exceed the father.

In a 15-year head coaching career with the Saints and Indianapolis Colts, the senior Mora, now a broadcast analyst, amassed a 125-106 record. But he never won a playoff game, going 0-6.

In continuing to build on his success, the younger Mora has shown no hesitation in crediting his father.

“I am a product of a great environment,” he said.

But his father is quick to deflect the credit, stressing that after his son had had modest success playing as a walk-on at Washington under coach Don James and had worked one season for the team as a graduate assistant, he didn’t ask his father to so much as place a phone call when he started looking for a pro job.

“I didn’t even know he wanted to go into coaching in pro football,” the senior Mora said. “He wrote a number of teams and Denver and San Diego answered. He went to work for the Chargers and paid his dues. Every time the coaches needed a soft drink in the office, he got one and put it in the refrigerator.”

It was a little more than that, actually. In seven years with the Chargers, the younger Mora started out as a quality control coach -- duties growing from soft-drink delivery man to game-film evaluator and beyond -- was promoted to assistant secondary coach and then to secondary coach.

He went to the Saints to be secondary coach and, in his first two years on the job, New Orleans led the league in pass defense.

Then it was on to the 49ers for two years as secondary coach and five as defensive coordinator, the job that finally earned Mora the credentials to become a head coach.

Some assistants might, after two decades, have grudgingly given up the idea of advancing to a top job. Not Mora, who had already learned the rewards of patience.

He first saw his future wife, Shannon, when he was a sophomore and she was a freshman at Washington, immediately told a friend he was going to marry her, then doggedly courted her for 11 years.

In Atlanta, Mora’s gung-ho, spirited approach to the game proved to be ideal for a team that had become splintered in Coach Dan Reeves’ last season.

But for Mora, there’s a thin line between fiery spirit and outright rage. It’s a sore subject with him because it draws comparisons to his father, possessor of a well-known temper.

Remember the senior Mora yelling “Playoffs? Playoffs?” over and over again in a high-pitched voice in a famous postgame meltdown while with the Colts?

The younger Mora showed the same kind of fire this season when he became outraged at the end of the first half of a game against the Rams because he felt the clock was running improperly. Mora made his feelings known in a very public manner to Blank, who was on the sidelines preparing for a halftime ceremony.

“He’s got a little of me in him,” his father conceded. “He’s got a little temper. He gets wired up pretty good. He’s learned some things from me not to do.”

The younger Mora knows he has been called short-tempered. He can live with that.

He’s called Coach by his players. He loves that.