Seventh-round pick missed two seasons because of knee injuries
Thomas Fidone lost two full seasons of his college career to back-to-back ACL tears in his left knee. Despite that, Fidone did enough at Nebraska to be drafted in the seventh round by the New York Giants.
On Saturday, Fidone told New York media that he would change his path.
“It was definitely difficult, but I’ve always said this from college, and I wouldn’t take them back,” he said. “I think that they’ve made me who I am mentally and physically, and it made me train harder in terms of just physically and being able to get back better than I was before. So that’s always the kind of goal that I had when it came from getting back from the injuries.”
Fidone leaned on his experience from the first knee injury to recover from the second.
“I have a very close, tight family with lot of support and good friends, good friend group, but I knew I made it through the first one, came back strong, fast and explosive, so I knew I could do the second one even better,” he said. “I almost had some experience unfortunately in a way, but just kind what to do and what it takes helped me push myself and get back to where I wanted to be.”
The 6-foot-5, 243-pound rookie is not just a football player, he is a self-taught tattoo artist. He has even done some of his own tattoos.
“It was hard just because it hurts doing it to yourself,” Fidone said. “You can’t really tell the artist no, but when you’re doing it, you have control. So being able to get through it, I guess.”
Fidone said he learned to tattoo because he “got kind of bored” during COVID.
“Once I got done training and stuff like that, we couldn’t do anything. I’d go train and lift at like seven, eight a.m. get done at probably 10, have all day, everything’s closed,” Fidone said. “It was winter, so it was like I got to do something. I just kind of picked up tattooing.
“I definitely watched on YouTube kind of just how to do it and select depth and needles and how not to get someone’s arm taken off because of an infection or something.”
Fidone played for former Giants assistant and Carolina Panthers head coach Matt Rhule at Nebraska, which he said was an advantage coming to the NFL.
“He brought a lot of very similar things in terms of just the formations and how they family things up and stuff like that,” Fidone said. “We didn’t do one word play calls. It was long wordy, play call, and a lot of verbiage in the offense. So just being able to compartmentalize a lot of things with Rhule’s offense has helped definitely with this one.”
