Nick Cassano was bored out of his skull. We all were. Remember? Remember the very middle of the pandemic: no place to go, nothing to do, an endless blur of binge-watching TV shows and staring out the window?
It was mind-numbing for a lot of us.
Nick Cassano figured he’d had enough.
“I could only sulk in the negative for so long,” Cassano says. “I needed to find something to do.”
For years, two of the biggest parts of his life had been simple ones: baseball (at the time COVID hit, the Nyack High graduate was playing baseball at Montclair State). And making his friends and family laugh.
“I say this humbly,” he says, “but I was always kind of the funny guy.”
Nick’s father, Eric, remembers when Nick was a kid, he was a little quiet, a little small, and suddenly one day was doing drop-dead impressions of his uncle.
“He went from not speaking for days at a time,” Eric says, “to talking like a 25-year-old.”
So Nick decided to make a brief video of a bit that had been percolating in his head and making him laugh, about Italian fathers and non-Italian fathers when their kid wants to go out. He taped it. Edited it. Posted it.
And the next morning, he woke up, looked at his phone.
“A million people had viewed it,” Nick says.
So he responded exactly as you might expect.
“He told me he deleted the app,” Eric says. “It freaked him out a little.”
But the father knew the son was on to something. At a time when people were desperate to find the funny in life again, Nick had managed to capture exactly that. He reloaded the app and made a few more videos — a lot of them sports themed, such as the beer-bellied high school coach getting exasperated trying to get his players to listen to him.
There’s a regular series of non-sports characters — the pizza guy twirling “pizza dough” that’s really a bathroom towel, the bagel-shop guy, and an endless series of homages to relatives and friends whose quirks translate to some awfully entertaining stuff.
Some are riotously funny. Some just make you smile. All do what they are supposed to do: bring a snippet of laughter into what can sometimes be a decidedly unfunny world.
And he’s a hit. He has 1.5 million followers on TikTok (@nicky.cass1) and 1.4 million on Instagram (@nicky.cass). He works on the vignettes from about 8 a.m.-10 p.m. daily, produces about five new ones a week, and has enough in his catalogue that each week there’s 40 or 50 that he reposts.
And the way these things work, people notice. A year ago, the Arizona Diamondbacks and Texas Rangers both invited him to spring training to talk to their teams. When he showed up at the D’backs camp in Scottsdale, manager Torey Lovullo asked Nick what he intended to say.
“I’m gonna make ’em laugh,” Nick said. And then he did. He told the pitching staff he was a mental-performance therapist, walked them through a meditation, said, “imagine your best baseball memory, and now imagine you’re covered in pink feathers like a flamingo.” Soon the entire staff of the future National League champs were flapping their wings.
Nick isn’t especially obsessed with where this goes for him. He talks of living an entrepreneur’s life, saying, “I just want to be the best possible version of myself because a rising tide raises all ships. If I can be at my best, I’ll bring out the best in the people I care about most.”
He laughs.
“If I can walk into a store and be able to buy all the organic chicken and steak I can,” he says, “that’s all I want.”
He’s a huge fan of the “Boomer and Gio” show on WFAN and a considerable sports fan, though he tends to root for individual players — Christian McCaffrey, Adam Fox, Logan O’Hoppe — more than teams and says, “I’m not throwing stuff at the TV.”
His father interjects: “Well, unless the Giants are on.”
Eric is bigger fan of New York sports, a die-hard Mets fan, and he laughs when it’s pointed out that since the Rangers and Diamondbacks both made it to the World Series last year, maybe the Mets might want to latch onto the good-luck charm.
“Hey,” Nick says, “the Mets could use a couple of laughs.”
Vac’s whacks
Here is a terrific hoops read for you, coming out this week: “Pipeline to the Pros: How D-3, Small-College Nobodies Rose to Rule the NBA” by Ben Kaplan and Danny Parkins. Trust me.
Five weeks after he suffered a severe heart attack, Darryl Strawberry has received medical clearance to travel again, and he went back on the road this week to continue his ministry work. “I will take it easy though,” he says. “I need to be ready for my big day.” The Mets will retire his No. 18 on June 1.
As happy as you were at any point this week, you couldn’t have been any happier than Patrick Mahomes the moment the Chiefs picked Xavier Worthy.
I see some Philly folks trying to equate Joel Embiid’s takedown of Mitch Robinson with a similar move by Donte DiVincenzo against Kelly Oubre Jr. in a mini-brawl last month at the Garden. That’s like the deep thinkers who posted videos of David Wright sliding hard into Chase Utley the day after Utley almost murdered Ruben Tejada with a filthy take-out.
Whack back at Vac
Joe Gregorio: Is DJ LeMahieu the new Jacoby Ellsbury or Aaron Hicks for the Yankees with the never-healing injury?
Vac: When he’s right, there are few Yankees I enjoy watching more than him, so I sure hope not.
Joe Benigno: You know I love ya, bro, but you can’t leave Game 5 of the ’70 Finals off your list of best MSG finishes. Knicks came back against Wilt and the Lakers without Willis Reed. Best Knicks game I ever saw.
Vac: I defer to the gentleman from New Jersey and ask
for a do-over.
@LGBrandon93: Had to mention one away win that we were reminded by the “Brunson Bounce” — the 1999 Allan Houston 1 over 8 bounce in Miami over the Heat. You always remember the good bounces. You forget the finger rolls!
Vac: And that, in a nutshell, fairly summarizes sports.
Walter Farley: Someone needs to tell the crowd that one can’t chant F-Embid at a game kids are attending. That’s a new low in taste.
Vac: The Garden has a lot of wonderful traditions. This is not one of them, and it started with Trae Young a few years ago. We’re better than this.
