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The father knows exactly what his son will go through in the days leading up to Saturday, when the Giants open their preseason in Carolina and a rookie with a name that screams fullback
will take the field for the first time as an NFL player and finally get to unleash all that fury.
The father, Henry Hynoski, sounds like a fullback, which he was. The son, also named Henry Hynoski, acts like a fullback, which he is. If you are not familiar what “acts like a fullback” is all about, stay tuned.
“You’ll get a feel for him, as it gets closer to game day you’ll feel the intensity with him start to build up,” Henry Hynoski, Sr., told The Post yesterday. “You’ve got to kind of keep him under restraints to a degree. He really does work himself up into a frenzy. You’ve just got to look at his eyes. You’ll see the fire, the intensity there. He has that craziness to him. I tell him off the field you be a gentleman, you can release your aggression when you play ball. I think he’s got a pretty good grasp of that.”
The younger Hynoski, it seems, also has a pretty good grasp of a roster spot as the Giants’ starting fullback, a position that is all about guts, rarely glory. He’s the only true fullback currently in training camp and to say he’s been opening eyes is not entirely accurate. More to the point, he’s been opening ears with the resounding thud
and audible smack
when he sticks his shoulder pads into an onrushing linebacker.
“That’s a pure fullback in the pure fullback position,” an impressed coach Tom Coughlin said. “Hopefully, he’ll be the physical presence that we need.”
Pure is the unadulterated abandon Hynoski brings to the game.
He was one of those insanely good high school stars in small-town Pennsylvania — Elysburg, to be exact — where he ran for 2,407 yards and 42 touchdowns, sometimes barely playing past halftime as a senior for state champion Southern Columbia Area. When the head coach at Pittsburgh, Dave Wannstedt, sat down on the living room couch he told Henry and Kathy Hynoski he wanted their son to play for the Panthers, but not to carry the ball for the Panthers. As a starter as a sophomore and junior, Hynoski got just 37 rushing attempts and caught 40 passes. Wannstedt was fired and Hynoski — who already earned his degree, opted to forgo his senior year for the NFL.
Thirty-six years earlier, the father, out of Mount Carmel, Pa., made a similar journey, picked in the sixth round by the Cleveland Browns after rushing for more than 2,000 yards at Temple. Henry Hynoski in 1975 was “an understudy” for Greg Pruitt. As a rookie he ran the ball seven times for 38 yards, caught it four times for 36 yards and loved this exciting NFL life.
“You’re kind of infatuated, you’re just so accustomed to read about all these guys in Sports Illustrated like O.J. [Simpson] and Larry Csonka and John Riggins and to think you’re on the field with these guys,” Hynoski recalled.
In his second training camp, Hynoski was running with the ball in a scrimmage, fell on his right elbow and dislocated his right shoulder, badly. The Browns wanted to “put hardware in there,” but his trainers back at Temple said inserting screws to stabilize the A-C joint was not a good idea. His football career was over.
“I wouldn’t have been a household name or anything, but I’d have been around four, five years,” said Hynoski, 58, now in management for Weis Markets. “It took me a while to get over it. To be honest I was devastated by that.”
There was disappointment in the Hynoski household when the younger Henry — his dad calls him “Young Hen” or “Tank” wasn’t drafted. The lockout meant there would be months of waiting for a team to call. Kathy Hynoski, a nurse anesthetist, called “the intellectual one in the family” by her husband, created packets of 15 teams with detailed information of rosters, position needs and free agent status of veterans.
“I was always hoping it would be the Giants,” the older Henry said. “We always did like the Giants. Where we’re from, you’re either a Giants fan or an Eagles fan, and you can throw Baltimore in there too.”
Once the lockout ended the phone began to ring. And ring. Sure enough, 15 teams were interested and at one point the father was on the line with the Ravens and the son was on the line with the Chargers. The Giants called and Kathy Hynoski kept a conversation going with Coughlin for 20 minutes, which in Coughlin time is an eternity.
“We went up for practice the other day and they met,” the older Hynoski said, “and he said ‘Kathy, I really did enjoy talking with you on the phone.’ ”
Hynoski, 22, said he has heard from veteran Giants that the player he’s trying to replace, Madison Hedgecock, was a bit unusual.
“I heard he was nuts,” Hynoski said, not minding the comparison.
“I want to be a fullback,” he said. “If I had to pick any position in the world it would be fullback. It’s the best position in the world. You get to run, block and catch. You get to do everything a football player dreams of. I know why they brought me in, they brought me in to hit people and be a thumper, that’s the first thing I’m going to do.”
Eli Manning said Hynoski “had a pretty good grasp of what’s going on from day one” and that “He likes playing fullback. He doesn’t care much about getting many carries.”
At 6-foot-1 and 266 pounds, Hynoski packs a punch. His grandfather, also named Henry, was a high school football star ready to accept a scholarship to join Vince Lombardi at Fordham, but this was during the Depression and his mother, a widow recently arrived from Poland, needed her son to earn money, not play a game.
“I’m not crazy about the name Henry, to be honest with you, but it goes go with my last name, kind of blends in there,” the older Hynoski said. “My dad’s name was Henry as well so I just kind of passed it on. Hen said ‘This is the end of the line.’ He’s stopping it.”
But he is keeping up a tradition. The parents plan on driving away from their rural environs — “We look out our back porch, I have 100 acres of ground back there, there’s deer and bear that come down into the backyard . . . it’s a paradise,” the older Hynoski said — for Giants games this season. The son hasn’t yet made the team, but as long as he stays healthy, they are planning on it.
“Once he makes this team we’re going to enjoy every moment of it, that’s what I try to tell him,” Henry Hynoski, the dad said. “You just never know how long this is going to be realistic, a lot of things can happen. What you’ve got to do is enjoy every moment you’re there, every day, every practice, because you might not have an opportunity to go through it again and you don’t want any regrets.”