Stephen Mallozzi at the entrance of Founder’s Garden at O’Connor Plaza. | BRIAN NELSOS / THE TEMPLE NEWS
Stephen Mallozzi is all about the grind. The third year Beasley School of Law student studies for more than ten hours each day on weekends, attends school at night and works two jobs.
The first, working at Duane Morris Law Firm full time, puts money in his pocket. The second, driving in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series, is his life’s obsession.
“Law school is a job on its own, right?” Mallozzi said. “I’m at the point where I work at a firm full time, 9 to 5 every day except Wednesday. Then I’m in school, basically a night student as this point, and still doing a couple races a season.”
Mallozzi will receive his Juris Doctor from the Beasley School of Law in May after three years of racing and night school recitations. He raced during his first two years of law school, traveling across the country as far as Las Vegas to race at night and attend law school in the morning. After graduation this May, he’ll be out of school for the first time in his racing career.
Mallozzi has loved racing since he was in diapers. As a child, he rarely spoke except to rattle off car brands impromptu—a peculiar habit that puzzled his parents.
“I did speech therapy, where they teach you to talk as a kid and all that extra stuff,” Mallozzi said. “Now my mom says I never shut up, which is awesome. That turned into toy cars, which turned into Need for Speed and NASCAR games and Mario Kart”
At eight years old, Mallozzi won the championship for the NASCAR Thunder 2004 video game and told his father he wanted to do it in real life. Mallozzi’s father hesitantly obliged for his son’s ninth birthday, and it soon became Mallozzi’s favorite pastime. At 13-years-old, Mallozzi began competitively go-kart racing in the continental northeast with his father as his mechanic.
In 2016, Mallozzi’s father was diagnosed with Stage 4 non-small cell lung cancer and was given six months to live. The family put racing to the side, and Mallozzi went to the University of Virgina for economics.
“Then my dad got sick,” Mallozzi said. “Retiring at 16 or 17 is a ridiculous thing to say, but all the funding at that age comes from your parents. A lot of money went into racing.”
He last raced overseas in 2017 for Team USA at the Rotax Grand Finals in Portugal and was the runner-up in the Senior Rotax National Championship Series. But he couldn’t stay away from sports; at UVA, he switched from athlete to athletic commentator.
But Mallozzi carried the weight of abandoning his dream, and by 2021 he was “just being a douche” until his dad confronted him.
“My dad walks into the room and he says, ‘What’s your problem?’” Mallozzi said. “I look at him and tell him I never go my shot at racing, and I think I could have done it. He turns and walks out the door, then walks back into room, sticks his index finger an inch from my face and says, ‘Son, let me tell you something. If I had treated my cancer the way you treated racing, I would have died five f—king years ago.’”
Mallozzi took the message to heart. He thought about all the time and money his father had devoted to his go-kart racing and vowed to dedicate himself once again.
“He’s been tasked with an impossible fight,” Mallozzi said. “And five years into it, I’m whining about not being a race car driver.”
Mallozzi wasted no more time, emailing every person he thought could get him into the industry—including Marc Zumoff, associate director of the Claire Smith Center for Sports Media and former play-by-play announcer for the Philadelphia 76ers.
Zumoff and Mallozzi emailed back and forth for years when Mallozzi had a serious interest in sports broadcasting. Zumoff was blind to Mallozzi’s extracurriculars until Mallozzi tried to get back into racing and dropped that he raced professionally.
Zumoff was shocked and immediately put Mallozzi in touch with a NASCAR coverage broadcaster.
“I was immediately taken aback by his eagerness to learn and how passionate he was,” Zumoff said. “I’ll say this about [Mallozzi]: he’s the quintessential Rocky story. If he ever wins a race, I want to be able to buy the movie rights because of the incredible elements of his story that I think would be compelling for people.”
Ten minutes after meeting Zumoff’s contact, Mallozzi got a call to come down to North Carolina. Everything was done virtually at UVA due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so Mallozzi packed his bags and went south.
Mallozzi was dropped at Team Reaume racing, unwrapping cars and sweeping the shop while working as a delivery driver at Domino’s part-time. There he worked under Josh Reaume, a NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series driver for Team Reaume and a fellow adolescent go karting champion.
“He was sort of connected to me through networking,” Reaume said. “I didn’t really have any idea that he had an interest to go race. I mean, everybody wants to be a race car driver, right? Then I understood what he had achieved in go karting, and that resonated with me a little bit because we accomplished the same things.”
Reaume respected Mallozzi’s desire to drive but made no commitment to Mallozzi’s career in the beginning. Reaume noticed the sacrifices Mallozzi made to be in North Carolina and became partial to his work ethic.
Reaume started with guiding Mallozzi on the technicalities of racing, like getting licenses and sponsors to compete, and now Mallozzi races for Reaume.
“I’ve met a ton of different people, all walks of life, whether it be a celebrity or an MMA fighter,” Reaume said. “Stephen stands out of the crowd. He’s just going to be successful in whatever he does. If he decides tomorrow to go be an Olympic swimmer or a farmer, with zero knowledge, he will crush it one hundred percent. He’s just a special guys when it comes to that—I genuinely hope that I keep him in my circle and network closely, because I want to ride whatever way he goes in life.”
Mallozzi believes a great NASCAR driver has more than technical talent. The sport’s landscape has evolved with the digital era and Mallozzi believes driver personality, a major factor in fan support of a driver, has gone in favor of personal or familial connections to big business.
As an outsider who worked his way up to racing, Mallozzi believes it’s hurting the sports’ watchability.
“When I have kids, the driver I’m rooting for now will be retired,” Mallozzi said. “So how do you pick a driver to root for? It’s based on personality. It’s based on their story. And the problem is with the advertising difference in NASCAR, now we’ve gone from people who can market themselves and who have personalities and stories and who companies want to represent to a personal connection or relation to the company.”
Since 2022, Mallozzi has balanced racing for Reaume with everything else life throws at him. He’s been racing while maintaining a solid GPA in school and studying for the bar exam in July.
He’d love to merge his two main interests, sports and law, by working in sports contracts, but isn’t holding his breath for the perfect position.
“That’s such a tough field to get into at the end of the day,” Mallozzi said. “Everybody wants to do something in sports. I think I have a unique perspective, obviously, as one of the few people who did a sport professionally and then wound up being a lawyer.”
Regardless of the discipline he chooses—law, racing or some blend of the two—Mallozzi plans to be great at it.
“I love this,” Mallozzi said. “I want to be successful. I want to be a great lawyer. I want to say when I’m done racing that I tried to do it for as long as I could, and it just didn’t work.”