1. Anthony Fera is a red-shirt freshman kicker on the Penn State football team.
It’s 11:30 a.m. on a brisk February morning, and I’m sitting in my sports writing class as my teacher talks about profiles. He’s been around Penn State athletics for decades, and has covered Penn State football for more than 30 years. We are sitting in a circle, discussing possibilities for our own profile projects, and I hear my name.
‘Luke, who are you doing for your profile?’ the teacher asks.
Who, me? I think to myself. I don’t really know. I had asked one person the day before, and he’d said yes. But the problem was, I wasn’t entirely sure how good of a profile I could write about someone who hadn’t really accomplished much at the collegiate level. I thought maybe it wouldn’t be that interesting, and that’s why I hadn’t made up my mind.
‘I asked Fera, and he said he’d do it,’ I say.
‘Who?’ my teacher asks.
‘Fera,’ I answer. ‘He’s one of our new kickers.’
‘Oh,’ the teacher answers. ‘What’s his first name?’
‘Anthony,’ I say. ‘Anthony Fera.’
The teacher nods his head enthusiastically. ‘A kicker…I like that idea. Yeah, do him.’
Truth is, my teacher isn’t the only person who’s closely involved with the football team and doesn’t know who Anthony Fera is. But in a university as football-obsessed as Penn State, that’s pretty unusual for one of the most sought-after recruits in the nation. Which, on second thought, makes this article unique. I’m now officially happy with my subject. Moving on….
2. He went to St. Pius X High School.
It’s 11:30 a.m. on a brisk February morning, and it’s the year 2007. There’s a certain buzz emanating throughout the halls of St. Pius X High School in Houston, Texas. During third period, the football team is called down to the cafeteria. Anthony Fera is on that football team, but he doesn’t go down. He stays in class.
An hour later, he is sitting with other players in the cafeteria during lunch. They are huge– bigger than your average high school football players– and most of them are now playing sports for the likes of Pitt, Texas, Alabama, Colorado and Vanderbilt. Lots of them wear letterman jackets — black with tiny orange rings around the sleeves. Today they are showing off their most recent luxury item- colossal state championship rings with an orange gemstone in the center. Fera, along with seven other players who recently transferred to St. Pius, doesn’t have anything to show off. He was not on the team two months ago.
He sits at the table eating his lunch, talking with teammates and glaring at the huge rings. But deep down inside he can’t stand it; he has to get one for himself. It seems so unfair that nearly everyone else on the St. Pius Panthers football squad gets a shiny, jeweled ring to show off, and he doesn’t.
It’s March 2007, and then April, and then May. The other players wear their rings all the time. They brag about them in class. They show them to their friends, and then their girlfriends. Anthony Fera can’t. And all he can think about is, Man, I have to get one of those for myself. I just have to.
3. His family lives in Cypress, Texas, near the city of Houston.
4. He was born on June 18, 1991.
5. He was a darn good freshman kicker for Klein High School.
It’s a Thursday evening in late October 2005. A freshman football game is being played under the lights in a small stadium outside of Houston. Klein High School is taking on its archrival, Klein-Collins, and is losing 27-14. Anthony Fera paces the sidelines for Klein as the offense puts together one last drive. There are less than two minutes left on the clock…not enough time to come back. The game is out of reach. Fera watches as the offense completes a big pass…they cross midfield.
There are four seconds left on the game clock. The line of scrimmage is the 41-yard line. The coach walks up to him. He wants him to try a field goal.
Anthony almost can’t believe it. He thinks, Oh my God, is he serious?
His dad, Tony Fera, watches with other parents from the half-filled aluminum stands.
‘What’s this coach doing?’ yells one of the men beside him.
‘He’s going to kick a field goal,’ his dad answers calmly.
‘He’s got to be crazy,’ answers the man. ‘There’s no chance of this kid making it.’
As the players trot onto the field below, Tony Fera leans close to the man and says, ‘By the way, John, I think he’s going to make it.’
The man gives him a look.
The ref blows his whistle. The center lowers his head to snap the ball.
Back in the stands, there is a curious murmur in the crowd.
‘There’s no way!’ one woman cries emphatically as the ball reaches the holder.
Fourteen-year-old Anthony Fera lets it fly, shallow and fast, towards the goal. The murmuring of the crowd grows louder as the ball sails through the air. It clears the yellow post with room to spare. Behind the goal, a lone referee raises his hands.
On the field, everyone is jumping up and down. The holder is hugging Anthony like crazy.
In the stands, fans of both teams give him a standing ovation. Everyone is clapping. Everyone knows how special this is. Tony Fera stands among them, the proudest father in the world that night.
Back on the bus, the whole team is pumped. It doesn’t even feel like they lost. For Anthony Fera, it feels as if he won the game. He knows he’s done something amazing. He knows that now he has something to point to when future coaches ask about him.
‘That’s when I knew,’ he says. ‘That’s when I knew I had the potential.’
The 58-yarder is a state record.
6. His mom’s name is Donna Fera.
7. He has two sisters, Melissa and Deanna. They both go to the University of Texas.
8. He really gets pumped up on gameday.
‘Typically Anthony is a pretty quiet, humble kid,’ Tony Fera says. ‘But he was pretty amazing when he would put the pads on. Especially before a game, the adrenaline would take over, and he was a completely different kid. He’d turn into almost this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type of thing. Even when he only played kicker (his senior year), he would get really pumped up. He would hit 50- and 60-yard field goals. I’d say, ‘Is that my son out there?”
And that hasn’t changed with his new school.
‘Before the first game of the year…he kicked a ball into the student section during pre-game warm-ups,’ says Mike McQueary, Anthony’s kicking coach at Penn State. ‘I said, ‘You gotta do that all the time,’ and he said, ‘Well, I just get fired up on gameday.’ What I gotta get him to understand is, in order for him to earn a spot and be the guy, he’s got to show me that all the time. A guy who can kick the ball off like that is a real asset.’
‘He only missed three, maybe four field goals in four years,’ adds Tony Fera. ‘I know he was 15 for 16 his junior year, and his senior year he was nine for 10. The only miss was a 57-yarder.’
9. He was the center of attention before Penn State’s night game against Michigan in 2006.
Anthony is a sophomore, and his dad is taking him on his first ‘unofficial’ visit to see a college football program. They walk out of the tunnel in Penn State’s Beaver Stadium, and see more than 100,000 fans surrounding them. Fifteen-year-old Anthony wears a gray Penn State hoodie with a plastic field pass around his neck. They walk towards the right corner of the field, and the white-out student section begins the cheer.
‘He was the first or second guy out, and the crowd’s just screaming, ‘Pick Penn State! Pick Penn State! Pick Penn State!‘, and he’s just looking around like ‘This is really outstanding’,’ Tony Fera recounts. ‘I know that’s the one thing that stayed in his mind more than anything. You never experience that anywhere else but Penn State. Nowhere else were they screaming like that. The Penn State fans knew, ‘Hey, that’s the kid from Texas!’ Other schools…they didn’t even know (who you were).’
He sighs. ‘But the reality is, Penn State didn’t offer him at first, and wasn’t going to offer him, because they’d brought on some walk-ons that they thought were pretty solid and could make a real difference with the team. They told me, ‘We don’t want to commit to your son unless we feel we could really use him.”
10. Wide receivers/kicking coach Mike McQueary is the guy who recruited him.
‘He came in during our summer camp (in 2008) and I held him after practice one day. I wanted to watch him kick a little bit,’ McQueary says. ‘The grass fields weren’t marked during that time….so it was tough for me to tell the distance he was kicking, but I knew it was a long way back. So I tried to mark it off, and he was about 60 yards, and he’d made a couple of them. That was kind of a convincing argument for me, because he definitely showed some natural strength….(From that point on), I knew he’d be a guy we would go after.’
11. He received scholarship offers from Ohio State, Penn State, Michigan, and Kansas State….all within 36 hours.
It’s a hot summer morning in August 2008, and Anthony Fera’s cell phone rings. Penn State is offering him a full scholarship to play football.
‘As soon as those offers started coming in, they weren’t going to wait,’ Tony Fera says, hinting that the Penn State recruiting staff knew what was coming for Anthony in the next day-and-a-half.
Kansas State calls a few hours later. They offer him a full scholarship.
Ohio State calls that night. Another scholarship offer.
The next morning, it’s Michigan.
‘That was a pretty exciting time….to see all the hard work finally pay off,’ he adds. ‘Not many kickers get scholarships. For Anthony to be recognized by some top-tier programs was an excellent thing to happen. It was very nice to see that happen to your own kid. Here you are, you just turned 17, and all these offers are coming in.’
12. He committed to the University of Michigan in August 2008.
That happened a week later.
‘They were low on scholarships,’ Anthony says, ‘so they kind of needed a decision sooner than I wanted to make one. They were really pushing me.’
13. He’s a Philadelphia sports fan (his family is originally from there).
14. Todd Kulka is his academic advisor.
He still remembers the first time he met Anthony, when he was still deciding where to play college football. ‘He was a quiet, high school student, who was kind of ‘not in his element’, sitting around in the recruiting process,’ Kulka recounts. ‘I think when you look at him you’re not going to say he’s the star football player, because of his size and stature, but that’s because of the position he plays. So he’d be pretty unassuming if he walked across campus, and you had to pick out one of the best kickers in the country.’
15. He has two Great Danes at home– Trotter and Lexi.
16. He still isn’t sure who he was rooting for when Penn State played Michigan on Oct. 18, 2008.
‘Hey, how’s it going? You watching the game?’ Tony Fera says when he walks into the room and sees his son sitting in front of the TV. ‘Who you rooting for?’ he asks casually.
Anthony is slow with his answer. ‘Both teams,’ he finally says. ‘It’s just a really good game.’
‘That’s when I knew his heart wasn’t in it for Michigan,’ he tells me. ‘I could kind of sense that things were happening in his mind, and he was a little confused. So that’s when I decided to have my talk with him.’
‘That was kind of a turning point,’ Anthony says about Michigan’s early 10-point lead. ‘It was like, I don’t even know if I want them to win. It wasn’t the right feeling, I guess.’
‘I sat down and explained to my son that this is a really important decision in your life,’ Tony recounts. ‘I told him, ‘If your heart isn’t in it, you’ve got to talk to Rich Rodriguez and let him know. Where do you feel most comfortable? Where do you feel you fit in best?’ His response was, ‘You know, dad, it’s Penn State’. So I said, ‘If that’s where it’s at, you need to call Rich up right away’.’
17. He decommitted from the University of Michigan in October 2008.
It’s later that evening, and Anthony is alone in the house by himself. He had actually told his parents to leave, because they were making him more nervous than he already was. He goes up to his room with his cell phone. His stomach is in his throat.
He calls the number. Thump, thump, thump. He can hear his own heart beat nervously as the phone rings. A voice answers.
‘Hello,’ says Rich Rodriguez.
‘Hey, coach, it’s Anthony Fera,’ he answers. Thump, thump, thump.
‘Hey, buddy, how’s it going?’ Rodriguez answers enthusiastically. ‘I hope everything’s going well with you!’
‘And I was like, ‘Oh, shit!‘,’ he tells me later. ‘I mean, he’s so nice on the phone. I was just saying to myself, ‘oh shit.”
Thump, thump, thump.
He stares at the list of bullet points he has ready in front of him. He takes a deep breath.
‘Coach, as you know, I went to Penn State on a visit a few weeks ago, and then I came here the very next week,’ he says. ‘And after visiting both schools, I kind of feel like Penn State is more for me. It doesn’t have anything to do with the game; it’s not that Penn State beat you guys. I just feel like I committed when I wasn’t ready to, that’s all. I just don’t feel like Michigan is the right place for me.’
Thump, thump, thump.
Rodriguez takes a breath. Oh, boy, here we go, Anthony thinks to himself.
‘You know, Anthony, normally when somebody commits to one place, but then they take visits somewhere else, you have a feeling that their mind isn’t made up,’ he begins. ‘Obviously, we want you to be a Wolverine. You’re going to have fun wherever you play football, but even beyond that, we want you to enjoy your time here at Michigan. If it’s not the right place for you, then I don’t want you to go somewhere you don’t want to be. What we really don’t want is someone that doesn’t want to be here. I understand, if it’s not the right place for you, then it’s not the right place.’
‘Coach, I’m really sorry if I kind of led you on,’ Anthony says, feeling like a huge weight has been lifted off his shoulders.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Rodriguez replies. ‘But Anthony, I’m very sorry if you felt pressured by us. I don’t want you to feel like you were pressured into anything.’
Anthony accepts his apology. ‘I wish you guys good luck with the rest of the season,’ he says politely.
‘And I wish you good luck with your decision, wherever you decide to go,’ answers Rodriguez. ‘And good luck in your future games….except when you play us,’ he jokes lightly.
Anthony chuckles. ‘All right…have a good day.’
‘Have a good one,’ says Rodriguez.
He closes his phone.
Two days later, he commits to Penn State.
18. He lives in Nittany Apartments with teammates Ty Howle, Lou Eliades and Tom Golarz.
It’s 16 months after Anthony Fera made that call. He’s been through a full year as a member of the Penn State football team, and actually wishes he had a different apartment because this one’s got cracks all through the walls (seriously). We’re sitting in his room talking about when Penn State won the Big Ten championship in 2008.
‘We’ve got a really good recruiting class this year,’ I say, ‘so hopefully we can win it again in the next few years….’
‘We’re going to,’ he interrupts. It’s a statement. ‘We have to,’ he adds. There’s no doubt in his voice, just confidence. I start writing on my notepad. ‘Don’t put that in there,’ he says hurriedly. I stop writing. ‘OK, don’t worry about it,’ I tell him.
19. He hangs out with Ty Howle a lot.
Howle plays center for the team, and came to Penn State at the same time as Anthony — January 2009.
‘He loves comedies and Will Ferrell,’ Ty explains. ‘Stepbrothers and The Hangover have been our two movies of choice recently.
‘He’s probably the worst basketball player I’ve every played with,’ he goes on. ‘He might be the worst dribbler I’ve ever seen in my life. But he’s getting better.
‘He loves soft-serve ice cream. He’s humored by his dogs…and squirrels. We were walking into breakfast one morning, and this squirrel jumps out of this trashcan. He busts out laughing,’ he recounts. ‘Look at that squirrel!’ Ty shouts, pointing excitedly at an imaginary squirrel. ‘That’s what he does every time we pass one.
‘He’s funny,’ he adds. ‘He’s airheaded.’
20. He doesn’t have a favorite TV show, but he has been watching a lot of Law & Order lately.
21. He’s trying to push for starting time this year.
‘His skill set and technique aren’t quite as far along as Collin’s (Collin Wagner is the current starting kicker), and that leads to a little bit of inconsistency,’ McQueary says. ‘But he does have great, great promise. Natural strength and talent is something he has that I can’t coach. Anthony also has the talent to punt…with his skills and his natural talent, we’ll try to work him into the punting rotation.’
‘I really want to punt,’ Anthony tells me. I start writing on my notepad. ‘I really want to kick off, too,’ he adds. ‘I really want to do all three.’ I keep writing. He hesitates. ‘Don’t write that I said that, though,’ he finally says. ‘OK, don’t worry about it,’ I answer.
22. He likes to play Call of Duty, and he’s pretty good at it, too.
‘That’s a really good score for him,’ he explains to me as we sit in his room watching Ty play the game. ‘He usually sucks.’
‘He’s really good, though,’ Ty adds, taking his eyes off the screen for a second and nodding towards Anthony.
‘Watch out! You almost got killed!’ Anthony shouts.
‘This is what we do all night,’ Ty adds as he fingers the joystick. ‘We just sit here and yell at the TV.’
23. His favorite artists are Lil’ Wayne and Linkin Park.
24. He doesn’t have a girlfriend, but he does have lots of friends who are girls.
‘What’s something about Anthony that most people wouldn’t know?’ I ask David Soldner, one of our back-up kickers.
‘He always has a pretty girl with him,’ smiles Soldner.
‘Pretty girl or me,’ Ty says later. ‘Either one,’ he adds. ‘Sometimes both.’
‘I don’t even know what he’s talking about,’ Anthony protests. ‘Maybe on weekends…I guess we’re always walking with girls.’
25. His favorite food is a chicken tender wrap from The Mix convenience store, with honey mustard and American cheese.
26. He talks to his dad on the phone about five times a week.
Tony Fera tells me about his most recent phone conversation with his son. Anthony had been out practicing field goals of 50 yards and over that day. ‘He said he was 10 for 10,’ he recounts.
‘He can kick some ridiculous field goals,’ Ty adds. ‘We’ve been rooming together since day one, and we’d always go over to Holuba Hall (the indoor practice field), and I’d watch him kick some,’ he goes on. Then he shakes his head. ‘It was unreal.’
‘But whenever you ask him how he did, it’s always about the team, and not about how he did,’ explains Tony Fera. ‘I like that about my son.’
27. His right leg is 11 millimeters shorter than his left.
28. He played in the state championship game his junior year of high school.
It’s a cool December evening in Temple, Texas. The year is 2007, and St. Pius X High School is about to take the field for the state championship game. This time, Anthony Fera is on the sideline. He’s ready to go.
Minutes into the game, St. Pius scores, and the packed stands erupt with cheers. Anthony jogs onto the field for his first opportunity to claim his own ring — the state championship ring that all his teammates have. The center snaps the ball for the extra point attempt. The holder can’t get it upright in time. His kick sails wide. He walks off the field with his confidence fading.
The St. Pius Panthers go for two after their next score, and make it. After the third touchdown, he jogs onto the field to try again. This one goes through.
It’s the end of the first half when he gets his first big chance of the night. The Panthers are trying for a field goal from about 30 yards out. Anthony kicks it through without a sweat, and his team leads, 24-7.
The anticipation builds on the St. Pius sideline as the fourth quarter winds down….the game is out of reach for the opponent….they are going to repeat as state champs….
Anthony Fera is on the field playing linebacker — his position on defense — for the last play of the game. Everyone is rushing towards him as the game clock winds down to zero, even the parents in the stands. He has done it. He’s helped his team to a state championship.
29. He owns a state championship ring.
It’s 11:30 a.m. on a brisk February morning in 2008. Anthony Fera is called down to the cafeteria with his other teammates during third period. Tony and Donna Fera are there waiting, along with other players’ parents. His name is called. He walks up, and the coach presents him with a tiny velvet box. Inside is a massive diamond-studded ring with two orange gemstone footballs in the center- one for each state championship. His last name and the number 30 are etched into the side.
Words can’t describe how he feels right now. He finally has the thing he’s wanted for so long. He wears it in class, in his room, around town…everywhere. It’s extra special because he had to earn it, and he did.
30. He wears No. 30.
It’s an unusually warm afternoon in early November 2009. I’m walking toward the Penn State sideline as the team prepares for kickoff against Ohio State. There isn’t a cloud in the sky, and I have to shield my eyes from the sunlight flooding the massive stadium.
Among the crowd of blue jerseys I spot a number 30. Anthony Fera is standing beside linebacker Mike Mauti. He, like Anthony, is red-shirting, and he’s wearing street clothes beneath his jersey. He has a massive, diamond-studded ring on his forefinger with the words ‘Big Ten Champions’ engraved into the side. Anthony doesn’t have a ring. He was not on the team during their 2008 Rose Bowl run. But he just has to get one for himself, he tells me. He can’t wait.
