You can call him Giordano or you can call him Gio, it doesn’t seem to matter much to him.
Where Giordano Vaccaro’s name gets called in the CFL draft next Tuesday, though, has much broader implications.
If the 22-year-old Winnipegger goes first overall, where some have him pegged, it’s believed he’d be the first Manitoban to pull that off – quite the badge of honour for a guy who used to prefer hockey because football was too much stopping and starting.
“It would be pretty cool to do that as a Winnipegger,” Vaccaro told the Winnipeg Sun on Friday. “If I went back to my younger self, even my 18-year-old self entering college at the U of M… I would have never thought I would be in this position at all.”
Where he’ll be on Tuesday: at a draft party organized by his parents, with some 200 family and friends from the Italian and football communities, including former teammates and coaches, in attendance at the Caboto Centre.
“It’s going to be pretty surreal,” Vaccaro said. “Getting my name called, obviously, on the big screen. And then ultimately just having all those people around you that have supported you over the years and put in time and effort.
“It’s going to be awesome and I’m going to celebrate it with everybody that I love.”
The 6-foot-2, 308-pound offensive lineman wasn’t actually supposed to come home for the big night. He had a conflict with a math exam at Purdue University, where he spent his final year of college after three at the University of Manitoba.
Realizing this was too good to miss, Vaccaro got the exam moved up a few days, but didn’t tell his family, preferring to surprise them when he showed up at their door early in the morning.
“I took the exam and then I drove home (Thursday) night,” he said. “First I went to my grandma’s house. She was on the way, so I stopped there. They were shocked… my grandma was crying.”
Then it was off to surprise his parents.
The trouble is, Angelo and Lisa Vaccaro had suspected something might be up.
“We weren’t 100 percent sure,” dad said. “We sensed some things were a bit weird.”
For one, their son’s agent had told them the kid was meeting with the Blue Bombers on Saturday.
“How is he going to meet with the Bombers on Saturday if he’s in Purdue?” Angelo and his wife wondered. “There were a few little cats maybe let out of the bag. And then at 7 this morning the dogs started barking, and there he was. Mom was delighted to see her little over-sized boy walk through the door.”
That not-so-little boy preferred skates and a hockey stick for 13 years.
His dad still remembers what his son said about that year of community-club football with the Corydon Comets.
“I’m not sure about this football thing,” is how Angelo recalled it. “There’s too much starting and stopping.”
When Vaccaro showed up at St. Paul’s High School, football coach Stacy Dainard steered him away from the rink and to the field, where his brother, Matteo, was two years ahead of him.
Vaccaro began to take the game more seriously at St. Paul’s, but still, Bisons head coach Brian Dobie, when he began recruiting him, could tell football wasn’t the kid’s top priority.
Dobie got the sense he was more interested in hunting and fishing.
That changed after high school when Vaccaro spent a year at Clearwater Academy, a prep school in Clearwater, Fla.
From there it was three years with the Bisons, culminating in Vaccaro winning the J.P. Metras Trophy as the best college lineman in Canada.
Today, Dobie can’t say enough about him.
“Gio’s attitude is friggin’ through the roof,” the coach said. “That kid will never take a rep off. It is a war zone out there with him. He is incredibly aggressive. He was like that in practice. He’s really intelligent. He always was way ahead of the curve. He’s not big. But he plays way bigger. He’s so aggressive and so technical. He’s such a great learner.
“He gobbles it up.”
A Jekyll and Hyde, Dobie calls him – nasty as nails on the turf, gentle off it.
Dad put it another way. “He literally is the biggest arsehole to be against on the field. And he comes off and you think this guy is a teddy bear.”
Ask Vaccaro about this dichotomy and he points to being an underdog throughout his career. He’s not the biggest or fastest O-lineman, but underestimating him hasn’t gone well for opponents.
“Whatever God gave me I had to make the most of it,” he said. “So I never really sat back and complained, I just put my head down and worked. Yeah, on the field I’m a nasty person. I really turn on a switch when I’m on the field. I just get in my zone.”
When he straps on the pads, he sees the defender opposite him as a threat.
“It’s me versus him. At the end of the day, the defensive lineman has to get to my money behind me. And I’m not going to let that happen. Whether that be my quarterback or running back. I just turn into a mauler.”
That’s one of the reasons every CFL team has called Vaccaro and will continue to up until Tuesday.
Whichever one calls him that night to say they’ve picked him will be just fine with him, whether it’s first, second or third overall.
And yes, he has allowed himself to wonder what it’d be like if it’s the Bombers, who have the fourth pick.
“That’d make the family and friends very happy,” Vaccaro said. “To come back and play for a professional team, the team you grew up watching, it’d be really cool and, again, surreal. It’d be awesome.
“The biggest thing is, and I’m really truthful about this, I really try not to focus on it. I’m grateful for any opportunity.”
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Winnipegger Giordano Vaccaro, who played this past season with Purdue University in Indiana, is expected to be one of the top picks in Tuesday’s CFL draft. (Photo: supplied)