On the football field, Tony Siragusa would wrap his meaty arms around a quarterback and squeeze with every bit of force his 340-pound frame could muster.
The 6-foot-3 defensive tackle was only slightly less aggressive when planting a smothering hug on his daughter, Sammi.
“My body adjusted over the years,” Sammi said. “The squeezes got tighter and tighter as I continued to get older, but I survived those bear hugs.”
It has been a year since Tony Siragusa died unexpectedly on June 22, 2022, at age 55. And boy, does Sammi miss those hugs from Dad.
“I would give anything for one right now, even if it meant not breathing for a second,” she said recently.
Tony Siragusa’s massive frame matched his larger-than-life personality. His play on the field was an instrumental part of the Baltimore Ravens’ stellar defense in 2000, but his happy-go-lucky persona in the locker room was every bit as significant in helping the team win the Super Bowl.
“I don’t think we would have been the team we were without Tony,” said Kyle Richardson, the punter on that Super Bowl squad. “Everyone wants to talk about Ray [Lewis] and his impact on the game, and certainly he was great. But Tony had a way of lowering the tension.”
Siragusa was proficient at finding the weak spot in the opposition’s offensive line, and with the Ravens he had a knack for zeroing in on a vulnerable trait of a teammate and picking it apart with a sarcastic barb.
“Tony was always railing on the kickers, saying [place kicker Matt] Stover and I should play for free,” Richardson said. “Stretch warmup was always ‘Tony Time,’ when he would hold court while we’re all thinking about just getting practice over with. One time, he looks down the row and says, ‘Hey Stover! Are you dying your hair?’ Nobody ever realized it, but we looked at Matt and thought, ‘Man, it does look dark.’ And Stover says, ‘Aw, you got me.'”
No one was safe from Siragusa’s biting zingers.
“Everything Tony did wasn’t always right, but he did it for a reason,” former teammate Bennie Thompson recalled. “He did it to make other players laugh. How can you not laugh, even if the joke is on you? He did it to me, and at first it ticked me off. But if everyone else is laughing, I have to also. That’s how he was. That’s who he was.”
CARRYING ON
For friends and family of Tony Siragusa, life goes on. But there are fewer hilarious moments, much less laughter and far too many reasons to lament how such a caring and generous man was abruptly taken away.
“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about my father,” Sammi said. “A lot of my thoughts have to do with, ‘What would he say? What would he do? How would he react in this moment?’ He was a man who was full of life. He was always making everybody laugh — especially his family, especially me.”
Siragusa was a standout football player with the Indianapolis Colts from 1990-1996, and then with the Ravens from 1997-2001. The man known as “Goose” was also a true friend to hundreds of people, most notably the guys he used to joke with in the locker room.
“He paid attention and stayed in contact with his teammates, even as he grew old. He became the heart of that Super Bowl team,” said former Ravens executive vice president of public and community relations Kevin Byrne, who served as the liaison between the players and the media. “He was always busy with his family, his kids, his businesses, the fun, but for him to check on people on a regular basis was very important to him. And if he couldn’t get in touch with someone, he would ask us to make sure the guy was OK.”
One of Siragusa’s best friends was former Ravens defensive lineman Rob Burnett. They first met when both were visiting the University of Pittsburgh as recruits, and after they were finally done with football, the duo hunted and fished together, played cards and often traveled to the biggest game of the year.
“The Super Bowl, we used to go to just about all of them as fans,” Burnett said. “I skipped the last one, and it had nothing to do with the location or the teams. As many times as we attended, I just couldn’t do it.”
Sammi’s life underwent a far more dramatic transformation. Not long after the funeral of her father, she abandoned her job as head of a social media agency in Nashville, Tenn., and moved to Florida to take over “Goose Flights,” a charitable organization that Tony envisioned providing private chartered flights for underprivileged or handicapped children, veterans and former NFL players in need of specialized treatment across the country.
“I was planning to settle down and build this whole beautiful life in Tennessee. Then, my entire life completely changed in every possible way you could imagine,” Sammi, now 26, said. “I moved to Florida, where my family is. My dad would call almost every single day and say, ‘So when are you moving to Florida to be with me?’ Now I’m here, but it’s hard because I wish he was here, too.”
GOOSE FLIGHTS TAKES OFF
Sammi has plenty of help in her effort to lift Goose Flights off the ground, but she’s doing it without the man who was her guiding force.
“My dad was my biggest inspiration in life. He always knew the right things to say and he always knew how to help me through difficult times. He was my best friend,” Sammi said, her voice cracking with emotion. “I definitely was a daddy’s girl, so not being able to make an easy phone call or get on FaceTime with him really hurts me every single day.”
Sammi has maintained a connection with her father through Goose Flights, an offshoot of the Florida-based Titan Aviation Group founded in 2014 by a foursome that included Siragusa and Dirk Vander Sterre.
Siragusa and Vander Sterre quickly bought out their other two partners with Titan, and soon after that, the aviation company took off.
“Tony had tremendous business savvy,” Vander Sterre said. “I knew the aviation part of it, and Tony had the marketing ability like no one I ever met. It was a nice team. Obviously with Tony you get instant credibility, and that really shot our business in the right direction.”
Vander Sterre was told about the concept of Goose Flights for the first time by Siragusa just five days before Goose passed away.
“On June 17, he and I flew home to Florida for a weekend,” Vander Sterre said. “Tony turned to me and had this idea of utilizing the NFL and the NFL alumni. He wanted to fly children and veterans and law enforcement and his NFL alumni guys, taking them to doctors they couldn’t necessarily get to by car for treatment of concussions or if they were sick.”
At the funeral service, Richardson, who’s head of the Baltimore chapter of the NFL Alumni Association, told Sammi that he wanted to talk to her about the venture after her life settled down a bit.
“Six weeks goes by, and I get on a Zoom call with Kyle and he essentially shared the idea of Goose Flights,” Sammi recalled. “Slowly but surely, I heard about it from multiple other people and that was just kind of the beginning of it.”
It’s all about paying homage to one of the most likeable and revered athletes in Baltimore history.
“When we heard the news that Tony died, we were all in shock, players from around the world and Baltimore in particular,” Richardson said. “We were thinking, ‘What can we do to continue the legacy that Tony represented to all of us in the locker room? How can we keep his legacy alive with something that was important to him?'”
The answer: Goose Flights. To show just how committed he was to the idea, Richardson helped organize a tailgate at a Ravens game that included more than 20 of Siragusa’s former teammates and raised roughly $200,000.
“That really was the impetus to get Sammi on board, when she decided that maybe this is something I want to do and create an organization around it,” Richardson said. “That’s where Goose Flights was born.”
It turned out to be a family affair. His wife, Kathy, and all three of the couple’s children — Sammi, Anthony and Ava — help run the show.
“Goose Flights was a vision of my dad’s,” Siragusa’s 23-year-old son, Anthony, said in May. “We put that together and started that cause about six, seven months ago. My sister is the president. I’m co-founder and sit on the board with a few family friends and acquaintances of my father. I run my father’s aviation business. We’re a private charter broker with private jets. I’m currently the CFO here and taking over his role.”
The first Goose Flight took Cayden Winstead (who has a serious brain condition) and his family to the Super Bowl in February 2023.
FAMILY MAN
Tony Siragusa loved his teammates, went out of his way to shake hands with policemen and Army veterans, and would often pick up the check of strangers at a restaurant. Mostly, though, he was all about his family.
Offered a big role in the HBO show, “The Sopranos,” Siragusa balked when told he would be needed for the entire month of May.
“He goes, ‘No can do. I have a trip to Italy with my family,'” Anthony said. “He basically tells the producer of the No. 1 TV show in the world that they’re going to have to change his role. They ask him if he can change his schedule, and he says, ‘Nope. I heard Italy is great in May.'”
And so, despite pleas from his agent and the show’s producer, Siragusa went to Italy and ended up on the set for only two weeks.
“My dad was an excellent football player, he was an excellent personality, but he was even a more amazing dad,” Sammi said.
He’s gone now, but his family keeps him close to their hearts — literally.
“All our family members have necklaces with his fingerprint on it that we wear all the time,” Anthony said. “He’s always with us.”
TEAM PLAYER
Bennie Thompson recalled Siragusa as the ultimate team player, and not just because the big man clogged the middle with Sam Adams to enable Ray Lewis to make dozens of tackles.
“Tony did something that really got my attention,” Thompson said. “I played with New Orleans, Kansas City and the Cleveland Browns. None of the teams ever had a rookies’ night out, when the rookies hang with the veterans and the rookies find a way to pay the bill. Tony brought it to Baltimore. It was a one-night deal where we all meet up, order food and drinks, talk and joke around. And then, at the end of the night, Tony gave the bill to the rookies.”
The exercise wasn’t designed to get the veterans a free meal. Rather, the off-the-field affair was a way to unify the squad.
“You mingle, talk about your family, everything,” Thompson said. “It brought us together as a football team. That’s what Tony brought to the table in Baltimore.”
Everyone has a favorite story about Goose. There are enough to fill a book, but here’s one that really shows what Tony Siragusa was all about.
Fernando Smith was a defensive end who came to Baltimore from Jacksonville in 1999. Two days before Christmas, Smith’s condo burned down. After offering his sympathy, Siragusa jumped into action.
“Tony set him up with another place to live and then arrived on Christmas morning with presents for Fernando’s kids,” said Byrne, the former public relations chief. “He took some of the presents that were going to go to his own kids. He told his wife that Fernando’s family needed it more, and he also brought over a Christmas dinner for them. That was the soft side of Tony. He did it quietly, did it by himself and told no one about it. Fernando told me that story.”
On the lighter side, Byrne recalls the time that Siragusa borrowed the Super Bowl trophy a few weeks after the Ravens had beaten the New York Giants to become world champions. Goose returned the hardware with a big dent in the silver football.
“I called him, and said, ‘Say, what did you do with the trophy?'” Byrne said. “He says, ‘Do you know there’s a little screw on the bottom of the trophy that allows you to take the football off? Well, we might have played a little football with the silver ball.’ I told him about the dent, and he replies, ‘Yeah, that dent makes it ours.'”
Fortunately, the NFL sent the Ravens a second trophy with the score of the game inscribed at the base. That’s the one on display at the team’s training complex in Owings Mills.
When the Ravens’ 2000 Super Bowl team got together in May 2022 for an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, Siragusa shared the stage at the filming in Baltimore. In a segment not caught by the cameras, he told the crowd that the success of the team extended beyond the players, coaches and player personnel staff.
“Tony goes, ‘There are other people who are important to winning,'” Byrne said. “Then he points to me and says, ‘That guy over there, he was part of it and you should know that.’ It was very nice.
“So afterward, I was talking backstage with Shannon Sharpe and Goose came walking by. I said, ‘Hey Tony, I appreciate the kind words out there. We’re usually in the background and don’t get public applause like that, so thank you very much.’ And Tony turns to me with a big smile and says, ‘You know what Kevin? F— you.’ And then he came over, kissed me on the top of my head and said, ‘I love you.’ And that was the last phrase I heard from Tony Siragusa. That tells you all you need to know about Goose.”
Siragusa’s credo was “Enjoy Life!” Said Anthony: “That was his big thing. That was his email signature. No name, just Enjoy Life with an exclamation point.”
That spirit lives on with his family.
“I carry on, knowing he would want me to continue to live life and make the most of it,” Sammi said. “Never stop laughing, never stop smiling. That’s what gets me through every single day. But not being able to hear his voice in an instant, or hear his laugh in an instant, or just give him a bear hug, it’s painful. It really is.”
Top Photo Credit: Shawn Hubbard/Baltimore Ravens