Doyel: Ex-Roncalli athlete Joey Mulinaro is hot young star on social media and painfully shy

His future is seared into his arm, and has been since he saw that documentary about a dead man.

This is a future Joey Mulinaro saw coming even if nobody else did, and who could have possibly seen it when he was a freshman at Ball State, shy and quiet and homesick, telling his mom he was coming back to the southside, where he was most comfortable?

Even now there are people who don’t know the central truth of this story, and those are people closest to Joey Mulinaro, a breakout internet sensation from Indianapolis, Roncalli class of 2012. His brand of digital comedy – impressions of Nick Saban and Andrew Luck, sketches of youth baseball coaches and irritating bar customers and whatever he thinks of next – has him on the fast track to…

Somewhere.

Where does Joey Mulinaro go from here, anyway? Where does he go next? The digital world is changing, evolving right before our bleary eyes, with content producers and entertainers inventing and reinventing themselves, inventing and reinventing how we spend our time, because all we know is this:

We enjoy people like Joey Mulinaro.

It’s the damndest thing, and not only for people who’d never heard of Mulinaro until last year or last month or last week. It’s the damndest thing for people who know Mulinaro best, who’ve known him since he was the star player on his state-champion CYO basketball team at St. Barnabas at age 10.

These people, they knew Joey Mulinaro before the broken back, before that truck full of potato chips. They knew him before Chris Farley, before The Joker, before the tattoo. And now they know Joey, as he’s called on Twitter and Instagram – just Joey, no last name required – as a married homeowner with grass to cut and a baby on the way.

But they don’t know the Joey they’re about to discover, here.

“If people I’ve known my whole life read this and see, ‘Hey, I’m Joey Mulinaro, the shy guy,’ they’d be like: What?” he says. “They’ve known me forever – that’s not me. But around strangers I feel uncomfortable, insecure: ‘People don’t like me, people think I’m awkward.’ Even now, I’m a homeowner, and it’s tough for me to go small-talk the neighbor about the yard.”

Joey pauses to laugh at himself.

“It’s a really weird, backward thing,” he says, “because if we’re out and someone recognizes me and wants to talk, get a photo, I thrive in those situations. If they want to talk to me? Then I’m all good. But I was never somebody who could go and be the opposite way. It’s always been a frustrating thing for me. I don’t want to burden – well, I don’t know, not burden, but still. It’s just always been tough for me.”

Joseph Frank Mulinaro IV is 28 now, and much has changed since he was an anonymous, low-level grunt at 1070 The Fan: his address, his tax bracket, his ability to go out for a quiet dinner with his wife. But not everything has changed. He’s still Joey Mulinaro, the shy guy.

You just don’t see that part. Probably because you’re too busy laughing.

Joey Mulinaro's impersonation of Andrew Luck

It was March 27, 2019, when he hit “send” on that tweet.

Any idea how hard that was? Until that moment Joey Mulinaro had been a closet impressionist, suspecting he was good at it because friends laughed, but not knowing for sure. Like, isn’t that what friends do? They laugh.

For years, friends had laughed at his impersonation of Colts quarterback Andrew Luck. By then he’d seen Heath Ledger as The Joker six times, and he’d watched Chris Farley’s buddy recite “The Clown’s Prayer” once, and he’d made his decision. It’s one thing to decide, though, and a whole other thing to do, and now Joey was doing it. He’d just seen what we’d all seen on March 27, 2019: That BodyArmor commercial featuring Luck and Angels outfielder Mike Trout having a dance-off to disco.

Joey saw it and grabbed his phone. At home, standing in front of a closet, blond hair peeking out from a black ballcap, black-framed glasses – looking nothing like the Colts' franchise quarterback – Joey starts talking: Deep voice, dorky giggle, enunciating words in that cadence peculiar to Andrew Luck.

"Heh heh heh ah yeah, oh yeah, I wouldn’t consider myself a TY or an Ebron by any means but uhhhhh I’ve been known to bust a move every now and then."

The video is on his phone, lasting 38 seconds, lasting a lifetime, and Joey’s not tweeting it. Not yet. It’s a little after 5 p.m., and he waits. It’s 5:10, it’s 5:15. Now it’s 5:20 on March 27, 2019, and Joey Mulinaro is pressing the “Tweet” button and putting down his phone. Whatever happens next, he can't look.

“You know how it is,” Joey says now, “putting yourself out there for people to consume. Obviously, with the consumption comes judgement. I was definitely nervous.”

Ten minutes later, his phone buzzes. A text from a buddy:

Dude, that Andrew Luck!

His buddy has added an emoji: a face crying with laughter.

Now his phone is buzzing again. And again. Former Colts punter Pat McAfee has retweeted the video to his enormous following, and soon the Andrew Luck impersonation has drawn more than 200,000 views.

“Such relief,” Joey says. “I was like, ‘OK, this might be good.’”

All night, his phone was buzzing.

More: Tour Barstool Heartland's new digs with Pat McAfee & Colts Insider Zak Keefer

In real life: Joey Mulinaro was a great athlete in high school

So many breaks along the way, long before Joey Mulinaro went public with Andrew Luck, and he knows it. Takes a village, all that, and Joey’s village includes longtime Roncalli sports information guru Rob Brown. It was Brown, the play-by-play voice for Roncalli football, who mentored students and parceled out broadcasting assignments. During his junior year, 2010-11, Joey asked Brown for an assignment.

Brown gave him girls basketball play-by-play.

“By the middle of his senior year I could tell Joey had a future on the air,” Brown says, “but I could tell also that it may not actually be doing play-by-play. I could tell he was comfortable in front of a microphone, but I didn’t know if it would be sports-related.”

By then Joey was done playing sports. He’d been a good but unlucky athlete, especially in football, an injury-prone slotback in Scifres’ run-heavy offense. A broken collarbone in practice ended his sophomore season before it started, and his senior season crashed to a halt one week after he ran five times for 35 yards and caught two passes for 30 yards against Franklin Central. It was a running play the next week against Martinsville, Joey blocking on the outside, when Roncalli running back Dylan Evans – who'd later be in Joey’s wedding – was tackled into him from behind, rolling up Mulinaro’s legs.

In the press box, calling the game, Brown remembers the silence, the delay, the ambulance. Joey was carted off with a crack in his L5 vertebra.

“I was done right there,” Joey says. “Blink of an eye.”

Joey had already decided he wouldn’t be a college athlete. His best days were earlier, at St. Barnabas and as a pitcher-outfielder on the Edgewood team that finished eighth of 64 teams at a national 10-and-under baseball tournament in 2004. As a sophomore pitcher at Roncalli he earned the win against Warren Central, and as a junior right fielder cracked a bases-loaded double off the wall at Victory Field against future Mets 11th-round draft pick Christian Montgomery of Lawrence Central. That helped Roncalli win the 2011 Marion County Tournament.

Joey had known what he wanted to do since he was 14, and it wasn’t sports. Wasn’t even sports broadcasting. It was a secret he kept for years, until he put it out there, on his left forearm, for the world to see.

And in my final moment,

May I hear You whisper:

‘When you made My people smile,

You made Me smile.’

'Man, I don’t know any of you guys'

An actor? An entertainer? Joey Mulinaro? No way. He’s been shy his whole life, his insecurity driving him into his dorm room at Ball State and mostly keeping him there until he decided, late in his second semester in Muncie, to hell with this. He needed a smaller campus. He needed to come home.

That’s how Joey Mulinaro ended up at UIndy as a sophomore. Soon he was volunteering at the campus radio station WICR, then doing play-by-play for UIndy sports teams, then becoming sports director. As a junior he picked up a part-time job at Emmis' 1070 The Fan, working behind the scenes. Eventually he was graduating from UIndy and working part-time at Emmis and supplementing his income by delivering chips for his grandpa, Joseph Frank Mulinaro II – Big Joe – a manager at Seyfert’s chip company.

Joey picked up an internship on Pat McAfee’s show in 2017 at Barstool Indy, where he met his wife … with help. Riley Christen was a year younger, a cheerleader at Purdue, a video editor. Joey liked her, but McAfee had a large group of interns, maybe 20 college kids, and that’s a lot of strangers.

“I’m a shy guy, I don’t really want to break out, and all these kids are so ready to become best friends,” Joey says. “Man I don’t know any of you guys. It’s a really tough thing for me.

“In my mind, these are faux relationships – 'You guys are all putting on a front, an act, want to be cool together' – which is fine. That’s how a lot of people operate. Just, not me. Luckily I had Ben.”

That would be Ben Polizzi, a comedian now and a McAfee intern then, yet another Roncalli graduate in the new media space – think also: Colts play-by-play voice Matt Taylor and Emmis producer Jimmy Cook – and Polizzi isn’t shy. Most of Joey’s friends aren’t, which he finds so irritating, because his buddies are making friends with strangers at the bar while Joey’s sitting there with his beer, alone on that stool unless someone approaches him first.

And people approach him all the time, now. He’s Joey Freakin’ Mulinaro, a rising star nationally. But in 2017 he was just a shy UIndy graduate, comfortable at the McAfee studios around Ben Polizzi, using that comfort level to start chatting up Riley Christen. They were engaged within months, and married in 2019. They’re expecting a child in September.

Joey was promoted to full-time at Emmis in 2018, more grunt work, but he was working privately on his impressions, nailing Andrew Luck, when that BodyArmor commercial hit the airwaves March 27, 2019. Hours later, Joey’s hitting send on a tweet and his phone is buzzing.

Encouraged, Joey tries again a few months later. He’s been working on a Nick Saban.

Joey Mulinaro's impersonation of Nick Saban

It’s 12:51 p.m. on Nov. 28, 2019, and Joey is tweeting a few words above a 16-second video. The words:

*Mrs. Saban prepping Thanksgiving:* “Honey, what side should we bring?”

“Well I still like both sides,” Joey says on the video, sounding so much like Nick Saban, it’ll make your ears smile. “I still think green beans and mashed potatoes are good. I think that our family would enjoy both of them, aight? Why do you continually keep asking me to say something that’s not going respect one of them? I’m not going to, so quit asking!”

Exactly 2½ hours later, at 3:21 p.m., ESPN’s main Twitter account shares the video with its millions of followers.

By then, Joey’d been doing more than grunt work behind the scenes at Emmis. He was also being invited onto various Emmis stations to be Andrew Luck or Nick Saban or LSU coach Ed Orgeron. His Colin Cowherd is exceptional. His Mel Kiper is devastating.

But his Thanksgiving 2019 Nick Saban video goes absolutely bonkers, registering nearly 2 million views.

Soon, Barstool Sports – the parent company, not McAfee, who'd left Barstool a year earlier – is offering him a job. He spends two years at Barstool, then goes out on his own. Today he has large followings on Twitter (more than 357,000 followers), Instagram (180,000) and TikTok (200,000), with brands hiring him to promote their company. He provides original content, endorsements on social media, that sort of thing. He also has speaking engagements, like hosting the “Quenton Nelson Blocking Cancer” event July 21 in Carmel.

And that’s how it happened. That’s how the former Roncalli slotback went national, though it hasn't been as random as it looks. To explain that, he does something he’s loathe to do. He mentions a politician.

“Agree or disagree with Ronald Reagan’s politics, I was always fascinated,” Joey says. “That’s a guy who went from baseball announcer to Hollywood actor to spokesperson for huge brands to becoming governor, to all of a sudden the president. That was always fascinating to me: How do you go from a kid on the southside of Indianapolis, who has no connection or any idea how to do it, into entertainment?

“I always looked at it as sports radio first; then at least I’ll have a mic and platform. Maybe parlay that into people thinking I’m funny enough to do standup. Then from doing standup, it’s: ‘This guy could be on camera.’

“That’s how I’ve thought since high school. Look, I know I’m not going to go from 19 (on the southside) to being 21 and a Hollywood actor. I know that’s not how it’s going to happen. Maybe if I go this way and that way and this way, and bust my ass, maybe it’ll happen by the time I’m 35.”

Maybe sooner. He’s just 28.

Chris Farley's poem, Heath Ledger's 'Joker'

“The Dark Knight” hit theaters in July 2008. That’s the Batman movie with the late Heath Ledger’s startling turn as The Joker. Joey Mulinaro watched it six times, and the shy kid from the southside had an epiphany: He'd become an actor.

“That was a lightning bolt for me: ‘That’s it, that’s it right there,’” he says. “’I want to give a performance that makes people feel something when they watch it. I want to have an impact on people the way (Ledger) did with that role.’

“That became the dream, whether I wanted to admit it to people or not, because it was so crazy where I grew up, talking about wanting to be an actor, an entertainer.”

Then another lightning bolt, this one during his senior year at UIndy as he watched “I Am Chris Farley,” the 2015 documentary about the late actor/comedian. It ends with Farley’s friend, Pat Finn, reciting the “The Clown’s Prayer,” the poem Farley carried in his wallet and spoke quietly to himself before auditions and shows.

The poem is of unknown origin, a letter of supplication from an entertainer – the clown – to God. Joey was so moved, he had the final stanza tattooed on his left forearm. He’s telling that story, explaining himself further, and the voice you’re hearing isn’t Mel Kiper or Nick Saban or Andrew Luck. It’s just Joey, shy guy from Roncalli, trying to explain why he chases something that once made him so uncomfortable: the spotlight.

“I always looked at it as living my purpose,” he says. “I always felt like, everybody has to do what they have to do to make a living, provide for their families. But when I was trying to figure myself out, in that 20-to-24 (age) range, it was: ‘OK, but what do I want to be? What do I want to do?’

“I kept coming back to: There’s nothing like making people laugh, nothing like bringing joy to people. For me it was worth putting myself out there to hopefully bring an escape for people, to bring joy.”

He’s speaking softly now, this Catholic kid from the southside, and he’s making you feel something as he shares the final line of “The Clown’s Prayer,” this whisper from God:

When you made My people smile,

You made Me smile.

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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Joey Mulinaro: Shy Roncalli athlete to famous sports funny guy