EXCLUSIVE: As a football player, comedian Nick Di Paolo teamed up with Mark Bavaro, lettered 2 years at Maine

August

I finish our extensive and exclusive Nick Di Paolo coverage with a SportsCenter-style Did You Know and a link to my full feature article about him in today’s Journal News.

Did You Know the stand-up comedian and Massachusetts native helped captain a Danvers High School football team that included former New York Giants star Mark Bavaro, then lettered two years on the University of Maine squad? Seriously!

Now a northern Westchester resident, Di Paolo said his favorite on-the-field moment was against the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), whom Maine hadn’t defeated in about two decades:

“My first starting job was as a running back against UMass on Homecoming, and we did a double-reverse. I went 65 yards, outran a kid, Grady Fuller, who ran a sub-4.4 40 (yard dash), and I outran him. … I went around this kid like he was standing still. The coaches kept rewinding it, because this kid was an All-American and (stuff). So I had the reverse for the touchdown—I had two touchdowns that day and I had 85 yards on the ground and 65 in receptions for 150. And we won 42-16 or something like that.”

Even cooler is the fact that Di Paolo said he caught the comedy bug as a high school senior when he did running commentary for a slideshow at Danvers’ football banquet:

“I killed! It was like 300, 400 people there and the pictures were killing. I remember going home really excited.”

(Photo by Carucha L. Meuse/The Journal News)

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 at 11:49 am by Chris Serico.
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