FUN & GAMES
Sports help inspire Nyack lad on way to social media fame
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 nonItalian 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 nonsports 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.”