Stunted growth

Giants DE Ferrara inherited his daredevil instincts from dad

The story of Frankie Ferrara, the Giants' 280-pound defensive end, starts with his bloodlines. To understand Frankie you have to understand his father, Frank Sr.

"It's Frankie's senior year at Rhode Island, and we're sitting in the stands at Hofstra on Long Island, watching them getting killed," says Dr. Kenneth E. Leistner, a Long Island chiropractor and personal trainer for a select group of NFL players, among them Ferrara and the Giants' offensive left tackle, Luke Petitgout.

"I'm sitting next to Frank Sr., right in the middle of the Ferrara clan. This guy a few rows back starts yelling, 'Ferrara! Yay Ferrara! Go Frank Ferrara! Go, Rhode Island.' I mean, loud. Frank Sr. says to me, 'I can't take this anymore. I'm getting a headache from this guy.'

"He won't shut up. 'Go Ferrara! Go Frankie!' Frank Sr. is ready to whack him. Finally he turns around and says, 'Will you shut the hell up?'

"OK, I'll shut up,' the guy says, and he does, and now there's deathly silence. Frank Sr. turns to me and points his thumb in the guy's direction.

"'My freakin' cousin,' he says."

Frank Sr. makes his living as a stuntman on TV and in the movies. He's been a stunt double for certain actors, big guys mostly -- Sean Connery, Peter Boyle. He's James Gandolfini's stunt double for The Sopranos.

"Remember that dream sequence where Tony Soprano's in a car crash and goes through the windshield?" Frank Jr. says. "That's my dad.

"He's still going strong at 56. They want him to hit the ground on a stunt, five, 10 times, he's ready to go. He'll sell out. No short cuts."

Sometimes it can be tough on the people around him.

"That game against Hofstra's over, and Rhode Island's gotten killed, and I'm waiting outside the locker room for Frankie to come out," Dr. Leistner says. "His father's been off somewhere, and now he shows up and he says to me, 'C'mon, let's go, I need you.'

"'You need me for what?' I say. 'Some guys,' he says. 'Actually, eight guys. We gotta clean out a section. We've gotta kick hell out of those guys.' He'd been wearing Frankie's Rhode Island jacket and I guess these guys had been pretty rough on him, and he'd told 'em, 'Stay right here. I'm going to get somebody.'

"'OK,' I say to Frank.

"'OK? Waddya mean, OK?' my wife says. I mean, Frank's a pretty big guy ... played a couple of years of high school football at New Utrecht in Brooklyn ... but we were both 51 and he hadn't told me if those eight guys are big or little or what.

"'I'll explain it later,' I tell my wife, and we go looking for those guys, and I'm, thinking, Be gone, please be gone. They are gone, and Frank is disappointed. He says, 'You wanna go look for them?' and I say, 'Nah, let's get back to the locker ... Frankie's coming out about now.' So we never got to find out what would happen, but this kind of thing was not an unusual occurrence for Frank Sr."

Now, you take those genes and you plant them in a 6-foot-3, 280-pounder who never has caught much of a break in his four years as a pro, who came in as a free agent and had to scrap and claw for everything he's gotten, and you're going to have a different kind of package. Aggression, dedication, work ethic, all the buzz words for those who entered the league on anything else but the Golden Trail, and with Ferrara, you could put "aggression" in upper case.

They still talk about the big fight he had in camp last year with rookie tackle Jeff Hatch, or the one that broke up practice in San Diego when he taxied there briefly in 2000. That one was with tight end Steve Heiden. Or the ... well, it wasn't exactly a fight at the Giants' minicamp a couple of weeks ago. More of a misunderstanding. The offense ran a toss play to Tiki Barber on Ferrara's side. He could just la-di-dah it and let himself be ridden out of the play, or he could work on his technique and play his keys and stand firm. Which, uh, involved a bit of contact -- more like a bump, actually. Which didn't exactly sit well with one or two of the veterans.

"Look, when you've come from nowhere, and then figured you're finally making it, only to get sent down again," Ferrara says, "you don't take a play off. You don't give them any excuses. And you don't take any crap from anybody."

It was 1992 and Ferrara had just finished a productive season for New Dorp High School in Staten Island, and it was time for the scholarship offers to come in, but there were none of them. Zero. What to do? Time for the PG route, Post Grad. Play your ass off and hope a scout is watching.

"Milford Academy in Connecticut," Ferrara says. "Cost my family five-thousand bucks to send me there. A halfway house. I'd never been north of the Bronx in my life."

So he played a season, and one college was interested, Division I-AA Rhode Island. "I went up there on a visit with my father," Ferrara says. "We were so na•ve that we didn't even know they'd planned activities for us that night, and we were supposed to stay over. We just got in the car and drove home at the end of the day. I was 6-3, and I only weighed 215, but the guy who'd scouted me said I had a good frame. I'd fill out. I was just excited that someone wanted me. So I went to Rhode Island."

It was an interesting career. In his second game he fractured his fibula on the second play of the contest -- "Leg-whipped a pile," he says -- and played the rest of the game on a broken leg. He suffered the same injury against the same team as a senior, and redshirted. But eventually he ended up All-Atlantic 10 Conference, and when he graduated he was the career and single-season sack record-holder for the Rams. He was up to 272 pounds and could regularly run the 40 in under five seconds. But the team finished 3-8, and it was, after all, Division I-AA.

"I'd get in the habit of crashing workouts for prospective draft choices," he said. "I got an agent, just so I could find out where those workouts were being held. There were three guys in his office handling players -- the A guy, who was the head of the agency, the B guy and the C guy, who took Yankee Conference players and was my agent. He had a picture of himself from his high school football team, with his legs crossed, wearing glasses. He was very proud of it."

Ferrara became a regular at the workouts -- Giants, Jets, Jacksonville at Rutgers. At the Alan Herman's Sports Stars workout in the bubble outside Giants Stadium, they had one-on-one drills. "Everyone took it easy," he says. "I went hard. Pat Kirwan of the Jets came up to me afterward and he was laughing. 'Tenacious,' he said. 'Ferocious. Parcells would love you.'"

No one loved him enough to draft him. Ferrara ended up with the Giants, a street free agent.

"In the dining room at camp, the rookies had to stand up on a chair and give their name and college and how much their bonus was," he says. "I said, 'Frank Ferrara, Rhode Island, seven-fifty.' Some guy said, 'Seven hundred and fifty thousand?' I said, 'No, seven-fifty ... 750 dollars.' They were all laughing. Yeah, right."

The first exhibition game was against the Vikings in the Metrodome. The first two defensive right ends went down early, and all of a sudden Ferrara was in there -- against the Viking firsts. "I'm staring at Jeff George across the line," he says, "and in front of him are Todd Steussie, Randall McDaniel and Jeff Christy. I got lucky. Steussie tried to cut me, he missed and I stumbled onto George's neck. He fumbled and Christian Peter recovered for us.

"I wasn't coming out. There was no one else to put in. Peter wanted me to run an end-tackle game, wanted me to stick my nose inside, right into the meat grinder, so he could stunt outside. I didn't want to do it. I was dying. I did it anyway. In the fourth quarter I'm still going 100 miles an hour, anything I could do to make the team. They're holding me, tackling me. On the last play, I tried to chase across the field and I collapsed on the sideline. I'm lying there staring at what looks like the Space Shuttle. It's the roof of the Dome. No one came over, no trainer or anything. I couldn't make it out of there on my own. Filippi Sparks, our cornerback, had to help me up those little stairs that led to the lockers."

On the flight home he got a seat in the last row on the plane, traditionally reserved for rookies. "I can't move my body," he says. "I'm cramping up. Turf burns everywhere. But I'd had a couple of sacks and forced a fumble. I was making the team. Next day I got calls from my friends ... Hey, way to go. Ryan Kuehl, who the Giants brought in as a long snapper this year, came over to me in the locker room and said, 'You know, I've known about you ever since that game.'"

There exists in the NFL, and at every other level of football, actually, a coaches' comfort zone. No. 1 draft choices automatically fall within that zone. So do free agents who cost a lot of money. Rookie free agents do not. They have to prove themselves twice as often, twice as dramatically, to have a chance. Ferrara never fell within that zone. Maybe it was the image. Not really that tall, fast but not a real blazer coming 'round the corner. A tough guy. A taxi-squadder. And in the offseason it was off to NFL Europe to play for the Amsterdam Admirals.

"Sure, why not?" Ferrara says. "I'd do it for the cultural experience. What I got was a room at the Hotel Zeud in Haarlem, a suburb. My first roommate had a deviated septum and didn't stop snoring. Then there was a guy who'd bring girls into the room, with me trying to sleep in the next bed. Finally I told one of them, 'You're gonna have to leave.'

"'Vot?' she said. "Yeah, vot -- please leave so I can get some sleep.'"

He had a good year for the Admirals. "I sacked a Heisman winner three times," he says. Danny Wuerffel of the Rhein Fire. He reported to the Giants' camp without a real offseason. They were interested in their No. 7 draft, Jeremiah Parker, a defensive end from Cal. Parker is out of football now, facing charges involving the death of his infant child. He never showed a thing but he was running ahead of Frankie in that 2000 camp.

Ferrara taxied again. The coaches mentioned that they liked his work ethic. In November he was gone. Three weeks later he was signed to the Chargers' cab squad to close out the season. He'd picked up a few thousand bucks with San Diego. The flight home cost $700. He asked the Chargers to pay for it. Sorry, it doesn't work that way.

He'd booked himself on a swell redeye that made stops in Las Vegas and Columbus, Ohio. "I got into New York on Christmas day," he says. "My luggage had been lost."

This was what was known as the crossroads of a career. His agent told him he might be able to get him over to Europe again. The old grind. Play a season, report to camp, pack another season on top of it.

"No," Ferrara said. "I'm done."

From force of habit, though, he continued his brutal, grueling workouts with Ken Leistner, "Dr. Ken," his players called him.

"The kind of workouts you'll never see at a team complex," Ferrara says, "because they don't want to risk injury. Would they drag chains up and down the driveway? Would they do squats with heavy weight, or farmer's walk or explosive lifting?"

Well, I don't exactly know what some of these things are, but to me they connote only one thing. Pain.

"Pain? You don't know what pain is until you've done one of Dr. Ken's workouts," Ferrara says. "So there I'd be, driving from Staten Island out to Valley Stream, Long Island, across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, to the Belt Parkway to the Southern State, or to vary it maybe I'd take the Van Wyck and the Atlantic Beach Bridge. An hour and a half to get there from my house, and God only knows how long to get back, after a workout, when you're cramping and delirious. Every day like that."

He'd been up at bat twice in the NFL without a hit, but maybe that phone might suddenly ring. And then, in late July 2001, a few days after the camps had opened, it did.

"My mother woke me up and said, 'Coach Fassel's on the phone,'" Ferrara says. "'He wants to know if you can be in camp tonight'"

Well, he made the squad, and after seven inactive weeks he got his start in Game 8 against the Cowboys. The Giants were thin on the defensive line, but after seeing no action in the first half, and overcome with an overpowering hunger, he swiped some food from the trainer's room at halftime.

"A hot dog with sauerkraut and mustard and a chocolate chip cookie," he said. "Sure enough, with two minutes left, Ross Kolodziej, who'd started at right tackle for Keith Hamilton, who was hurt, takes himself out, and I'm in there."

The game was headed for overtime, thanks mainly to Ferrara, who killed the Cowboys' last series by sacking Ryan Leaf, and then set up a Mike Barrow sack in OT, which ruined a drive and led to the Giants' victory.

"I'm chasing Ryan Leaf and burping sauerkraut," he says.

Last season Ferrera played in all 15 games. He had one start, against Atlanta, when he got a sack and a half against Bob Whitfield, nine tackles, total, and two forced fumbles. During the bye week he made a trip down to Dunellon, Fla., to visit an old idol of his, Kevin Fagan, the ex-49ers defensive right end, whose form, Ferrara says, had been "technically close to perfect.

"My pass rush was going nowhere," he says. "I had to do something. I called my old high school coach, who was in Orlando, and he told me to come down. So I met him and watched his girl's soccer game, then we drove an hour inland to Dunellon to meet Fagan. He was very gracious, very helpful. There we were, in the middle of his house, going at it in football stances. But oh, man, the things he showed me ... techniques, body control, all the little tricks."

Speaking of techniques, have you ever seen Ferrara doing stunt work in a movie or on TV? His father got him into the Screen Actors Guild, and he started picking up jobs, sometimes alongside Frank Sr. Did you catch the remake of Godzilla? Do you remember the fisherman in the truck, who's minding his own business when everyone's fleeing the monster, and then Godzilla bites through the truck and grabs the fisherman, and there's a close-up of him facing the gigantic teeth? That's Frankie.

"They told me to react to the teeth," he says. "So I overacted. I crossed my eyes. Then I did a somersault out of the truck. I told everyone to watch my big scene, but they'd edited it down to almost nothing. At least I came out better than my father did. He was a cop who got stepped on and squashed by Godzilla.

"I was driving a car in the Brad Pitt movie, Meet Joe Black, and I'm in the scene where he gets hit by a cab. Somehow the cars got rearranged, and a car in the middle of the pack's supposed to come in tight off Brad Pitt's ass and just miss him, but all of a sudden, I'm in the middle of the pack, not in the back, where I belong, and I'm going 50 and I almost nailed him. I could see the headlines: STUNTMAN'S SON RUNS OVER $20 MILLION MOVIE STAR.

"I'm in Anger Management, in the scene where Adam Sandler breaks through the barricade to propose to Marisa Tomei. I'm a security guard who tries to catch him, but he pulls a Jake Plummer and dodges me -- and I get blindsided by another cop and go on my ass. Now I've got this little twinge in my shoulder, and I'm not sure the Giants are gonna like it if I really screw it up by repeatedly hitting the ground, but my father's in the scene, too, and there's the old man, flying through the air, selling out, hitting the ground, and I said, 'What the hell,' and I took the dive. Landed on the NY emblem behind home plate. Ten times we did it, 10 takes."

A few weeks ago, when Ferrara got into his jam at minicamp, an interested visitor was Pat Narduzzi, who'd coached him at Rhode Island. "So what do you think, is he a little too rough?" he asked Jim Fassel.

"I love Frankie Ferrara," the coach said.

We'll see.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Paul Zimmerman covers the NFL for the magazine and SI.com. His "Inside Football" column and Mailbag appear weekly on SI.com. To send a question to Dr. Z, click here.

 

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