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).
