Exeter superfan plays role in film
Exeter superfan Barry Vagnoni plays key role in new film “Maybe Next Year”
As its title implies, “Maybe Next Year,” the documentary about the Philadelphia Eagles’ 2017-18 season that arrived on DVD and Video on Demand last week, was supposed to chronicle just one more maddening chapter in the saga of a sports franchise that had been mired in futility for 57 years.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the closing credits (spoiler alert!): The team won the Super Bowl — its first in the then-52-year history of the big game.
For long-suffering fans of one of the NFL’s most beloved and maligned franchises, nothing could be finer than watching the season play out one more time through the eyes of four Eagles diehards, among them Barry “The Hatchet” Vagnoni of Exeter Township.
It’s enough to give you goosebumps.
Or, as superfan Vagnoni put it, “Your goosebumps will get goosebumps.”
During in an interview last week in the Locker Room, a 2,000-square-foot Eagles fantasyland adjoining his home, where Vagnoni would welcome family and friends by the dozens on game days prior to the pandemic, “The Hatchet” recalled growing up watching the Birds on Sunday afternoons with his father, the late Shorty Long, a legendary Berks County entertainer whose claims to fame included playing on early Elvis Presley records.
It all started in 1954, when his dad was performing on Broadway. With the Blue Laws in effect, he would take the train home Saturday nights and spend Sundays with his family watching the Eagles. The son has been hooked ever since.
Not surprisingly, Vagnoni, too, has showmanship coursing through his veins, as anyone who has ever attended a game at his Locker Room can attest.
Asked about his sometimes over- the- top antics, he deadpanned, “You don’t have to be nuts, but it helps.”
Decked out from head to toe in Eagles regalia and seated at one of the 33 stools lining his 35-footlong bar, The Hatchet described the long days spent working on the film.
“Thirty-four years I was in business in Reading, and I never worked as hard as I did for this movie,” he said. “Twelve-, 14-hour days they had me in here doing all kinds of crazy things.”
He’s depicted onscreen doing everything from cleaning toilets — the insides of which he had airbrushed with the logo of “the stinking Dallas Cowboys” — to sweeping up, to replacing 20-foot-high exterior flood lights, and then promptly shattering one while lowering the ladder he used to reach them.
(“I’m an accident waiting to happen,” he confessed. “Anything I do I mess it up.”)
And, of course, the film also shows him cheering on his beloved Birds with every fiber of his being and every beat of his quadruple-bypassed heart.
The camera even follows Vagnoni to his cardiologist’s office, where Dr. Louis Borgatta reminds him to keep a nitroglycerin tablet handy should he feel an episode coming on during a tense game.
“He’s a big Giants fan,” Vagnoni said of Borgatta, then smiled, adding, “but the day after we won that Super Bowl he called me at 7:30 in the morning (and said): ‘ I’m just calling to ask, “Are you OK? Did your heart withstand it?”’”
The film doesn’t sugarcoat things, showing the city and its fans — infamously sore losers and, at times, even sorer winners — in all their grit, grime, gusto and glory, living and dying with each snap of the ball.
Besides Vagnoni, it focuses on “Eagles Shirley” Dash, a regular caller to sports talk radio who describes herself as shy, except where the Eagles are concerned; Jesse Callsen, an earnest young father who wants nothing more than for his dying dad to experience an Eagles championship; and Bryant Moreland, an Eagles YouTube vlogger whose epic rants ultimately yield to a shot of him sobbing in disbelief in the stands at the Super Bowl after Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s lastsecond desperation heave fell slow motion-like to the ground.
These folks aren’t actors. They’re real and they’re raw — regular people who lay their souls bare for the camera in segments that alternate between vulgar and heart-wrenching. They epitomize the City of Brotherly Love and, like so many of their neighbors, they bleed Eagles green.
Vagnoni said the filmmaking team, led by director and lifelong Eagles fan Kyle Thrash, sought him out for the film on the recommendation of Eagles staffers.
“Whoever they talked to — and I still don’t know who it was — said, ‘There’s one guy you’ve got to talk to, and that’s The Hatchet, up in Reading, Pennsylvania,’” Vagnoni said.
Among his favorite scenes in the movie is one in which he is being feted by the 154 people in attendance at his Locker Room on Super Bowl Sunday, a ceremony that was capped by his grandson, Griffin Klee, presenting him with the MVP — Most Valuable Pop — Award.
“I lost it,” said The Hatchet, who only loves his family, including wife Dawn, and friends more than the Eagles. “I just lost it.”
In the end, the film is an unlikely and uplifting tale of an underdog team from an underdog city that miraculously comes out on top, not unlike that city’s iconic fictional son, Rocky Balboa.
“The way I describe it is it’s the ‘Rocky’ film for all sports fans,” Vagnoni said. “This is a feel-good movie that celebrates the underdog.”
Ever the optimist, Vagnoni still has high hopes for this season despite the team’s slow start. It’s almost as if the bits of confetti that still occasionally waft down from the Locker Room “rafters” nearly three years removed from the Super Bowl celebration portend what’s to come.
He anticipates his team winning the NFC East.
And from there, The Hatchet says, “anything can happen.”