If you had asked Gabe Ferraro, his claim to fame before this week was the abbreviation he says he invented. Long before the days of text messaging, Ferraro says he used to sign off most of his virtual communication with the letters G-F-Y-S. He has an old Eagles Michael Vick jersey with those letters on the nameplate and had T-shirts printed with the slogan long before the advent of Google. It is the name on most of his social media handles today.
Short for “Go F--- Yourself,” it would seem to align with Ferraro’s general ethos as a fearless, Philadelphia-bred Italian American who is—in the most original way—the perfect collection of almost every beautiful stereotype one would affix to a sports fan from that region of the country. He claims to have celebrated so hard after the Eagles defeated the Patriots in Super Bowl LII that it caused the end of the relationship with his then girlfriend (she was a Patriots fan, and they watched the game on different floors of her home, after which he slept on the couch). He says he used to cook the Thanksgiving turkey for Flyers forward Claude Giroux every year and played on a high school football team coached by Phillies legend Greg “The Bull” Luzinski.
That backstory set the stage for his viral star turn last week and earned him a unique position in the wonderfully twisted Eagles fandom Hall of Fame (population: The baby-rescuing Nelson Agholor shade thrower and the mom who yelled “that’s f---ing bulls---” on live television, among many others).
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Inside his Cape Coral, Fla., home on Sept. 28, Ferraro listened to reports that winds were about to exceed 90 miles per hour, approaching 100, over the next few minutes; Hurricane Ian would be touching down the next day in Florida. Ferraro decided to grab the green Eagles flag that usually flies atop his mobile cheesesteak truck and walk out into the middle of the street to fly it in the sideways rain. He handed his phone to his 78-year-old mother and asked her to tape it.
“I said ‘Ma, look, this thing is coming in hot. Just stand in the doorway, you’ll be all right,’” Ferraro says. “When I got back inside, the radio said the winds were up to 128. I was like, ‘Jesus, another few miles per hour and I would have gotten knocked over.’”
He posted it on Facebook and piped in AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” as a backing track. A friend of his, Brett Holcomb, who used to work in Philadelphia sports talk radio, saw it online and asked whether he could spread the word. The post racked up more than 200,000 views in the first few hours.
The clip surfaced at the perfect time, just a few days before a rain-soaked Eagles comeback over the Jaguars that put them at 4–0, continuing a run that shows no signs of slowing down. The Eagles will likely be favored in every game they play until at least Christmas. During the 2017 team’s run to the Super Bowl, their theme was one of underdogs. Players donned terrifyingly realistic masks of German shepherds and other breeds to hammer home the point. This year, they are simply flattening everything in sight. The image of an Eagles flag and a fan in stoic defiance of the chaos ahead is perfectly memeable, and perfectly Philadelphia. As one Eagles fan noted underneath the video on Twitter: “Eagles fans will always weather the storm.”
Ferraro wants to make clear he isn’t downplaying the hurricane, which has been one of the worst in a century down in Florida. Local officials have yet to come to terms with the scope of the damage and the number of lives irreversibly changed or lost. This was supposed to be a moment of levity, a sort of dual-purpose middle finger to the storm and a high-five to his friends in Philadelphia. He has donated dozens of his cheesesteaks to first responders and has a standing offer of free food to anyone helping with hurricane efforts. The truck, called Double Dee’s Munchies (yes, a reference to the bra cup size, though his niece was the one who came up with it), sells more than 175 sandwiches per day. After the first day of Hurricane Ian, he inspected his food stockpile and, after confirming it was still edible, drove into town and posted up in a parking space. He sold 200 sandwiches in three hours.
“Everybody that was coming was ordering five or more,” Ferraro says. “I had a woman from Philly who works in the hospitals down here who ordered 22 of them. People look at [Pat’s King of Steaks] or Geno’s [the two cheesesteak institutions in Philadelphia with claims to the invention of the sandwich] and they have 12 guys in there. It’s just me, if you look at what I’m doing in 2½ hours, that’s more than people can do in a whole day.
“These people are coming in guns hot, like, ‘We want the cheesesteaks.’”
His determination to make only authentic Philly cheesesteaks using ingredients from the city is running into some trouble, even if he hasn’t been deterred yet. Right now, he can reach his supply of meat and peppers, but he has no power to slice the authentic Cooper Sharp cheese, which means he has to do it by hand in the dark. He said a few blocks from where he was selling sandwiches recently, a 7-Eleven sign had been blown into someone’s yard. Downed telephone poles crashed through houses. An hour north or south of his locale, he said, is an “absolute war zone.”
“I can’t get my shipment of Whiz down here right now,” Ferraro says, referring to the golden-colored cheese-adjacent sauce that can also don an authentic steak. “They tried, the closest they can get is the East Coast, which is three hours away. And you gotta have the Whiz.”
From his food truck on Tuesday, as he waited for some food shipments to come in, Ferraro talked about global warming, the incredible Floridian spirit and the troubling idea that only cataclysmic events like natural disasters or acts of terrorism seem to bring us together. He referenced 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, and wishes that kind of togetherness could remain in the moments between.
He also talked about the Eagles, and quarterback Jalen Hurts, who is slowly growing on him.
“Carson Wentz ran a little too much, and he got hurt. It shell-shocked him and changed the way he played football. It happens to a lot of quarterbacks,” says Ferraro, who says he played quarterback at Iona College. “They get injured and the way they play changes. But Hurts, I apologize, I wasn’t a fan but I am becoming a fan. That’s the way we are in Philly. It’s what-have-you-done-for-me-lately style. We don’t care how you did last week. What are you going to do this week?”
It would be hypocritical if it wasn’t an expectation that Ferraro has for himself. Selling cheesesteaks is how he makes a living. After the pandemic shut down his beer garden back in 2020, he couldn’t allow a hurricane to derail another business. In the Philadelphian spirit, he had to tell Ian to G-F-Y-S.
