Transcript of CS#115: Danny Abramowicz Crossing the Goal

Transcript of Interview with Danny Abramowicz about Crossing the Goal. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

Danny Abramowicz books and videos at The Catholic Company.

http://search.catholiccompany.com/search?w=danny%20abramowicz

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Chris Cash: This is the Catholic Spotlight, the show where we talk about what’s new, cool, and exciting in the Catholic marketplace. I’m your host, Chris Cash, director of eCommerce for catholiccompany.com, your source for all your Catholic needs. Today, in the spotlight, we have Danny Abramowicz, former football player and special teams coach for the New Orleans Saints, also was a coach for the Chicago Bears and he has some excellent new spiritual workouts for us today. Mr. Abramowicz, glad to have you on the show!

Danny: Good, Chris but you can call me Dan and not Mr. Abramowicz.

Chris: Oh well, thank you sir.

Danny: Just Dan is good. I’m glad to be with you.

Chris: All right, well Danny…very good. You’re going to tell out listeners a little about yourself and what brought you to the point where you started to get involved more with doing faith-filled things rather than working so much with the football end of things.

Danny: Well, Chris, I’m originally from Steubenville. I was born and raised same with my wife and in fact, it’s amazing how life turns. We’re back after 40 years. We’re living back in Steubenville. Raised a Catholic and then went away to college and then got drafted by the Saints and had a career down there and then went haywire from there for a while and got off the track through booze and stuff and then through AA and then a conversion experience back in December of ’81 that really started changing my life around and as I was growing and getting back into my faith life, the Lord put on my heart that I need you in Men’s Ministry and just prayed on us so that Lord, I think I can be of service to You in that area. Use me if You want. Watch out for those, Chris, whenever you pray that kind of prayer, He always answers those kinds.

Chris: You’re absolutely correct right there.

Danny: Yeah, so I got involved first starting a prayer group of my own at my house and then which grew to unbelievable…I started with 12 guys and within a year, we had over 80 guys meeting at my house first and third Monday night. We got so big, we had to move it out and that prayer group to this day is still going on and over the years, I have started speaking at various conferences and everything and that’s been for the last 25 years, that’s sort of been my life along with I was coaching and when I finished coaching, it was in 2000, I was the offensive coordinator with Mike Ditka. We all got fired and I said, “Well, this is enough of this business plus…”

Chris: That’s a good way to put on a career change, for sure.

Danny: Yeah, get fired. But when you coach, it’s not if you get fired, it’s when you get fired so I knew that the Lord wanted me to do something else and I end up getting involved with a Catholic family down in New Orleans with a guy named Joe Canizaro who I knew who was a real estate developer and banker there and he asked me to come run his foundation, the Donum Dei Foundation which I did for eight years and then still did all these other things, the Men’s Ministry thing along with it and started growing it and I became a board member of EWTN which I’m proud to be and then about a year-and-a-half ago, I set out on my own…you know, I set up the Crossing the Goal ministry which is basically it’s a TV show that we put on EWTN but it’s unlike any other type of Christian show that is out there. It’s got a sports flavor to it. When I prayed to the Lord and EWTN wanted me to do this show because I did once before but it was more of myself, one talking head and I don’t think that’s effective to really evangelize to men. You can’t preach to men, you have to take them where they’re at and sort of use the subject matter that they can relate to in their life wherever they’re at in their stage of life. So as I prayed on this, I said, “What do men really like?” Men like sports and I said, “What’s the most watched shows are shows like Sports Center, NFL Today, and all that.” So we put together a package with that and in fact, if you look at our set, I don’t know if you’ve seen our shows, Chris.

Chris: Yeah, I have and I’m very impressed by the fact that you turn on the show and the whole thing looks just like you are watching some kind of a sports center show.

Danny: That’s why we did it. We duped the guys a little bit some because the guys aren’t sitting out there so okay, let’s get a six-pack tonight and go watch EWTN. I mean, that’s not going to happen but they’re surfing the stations and then all of a sudden, they see this and think it’s a sports-centered type show and then they see it’s not but they like to hear…you know, we’re dealing with subject matter like courage and perseverance and if you think that internet pornography a problem in your life and these issues that are out there that the current guys that I’m after, I’m trying to get the Catholic guy that’s not in the pew that’s a guy that dropping his wife and kids off and not going to church, he’s going home watching sports or whatever. The statistics now say that 25% of Catholics attend mass on a regular basis. It’s even less than that with men. So I’m trying to get men back in the pew and I don’t think they’re not just going to walk back in. You have to affect them in some kind of way and I think that what Crossing The Goal has done is put some branding on Catholic Men’s Ministry. It’s given them something out there to watch that they can relate to and then we then bring them to our website which is www.crossingthegoal.com which also has the show streaming on air because I found out a lot of young people, they don’t watch TV anymore. They get stuff through the internet. So we do that and then try to get them into…we have also Crossing The Goal conferences, the men’s conferences that we’re involved with in various places so it’s really been effective. In fact, the Armed Forces Network picked us up and we’re broadcast to the soldiers worldwide so this thing is…the Holy Spirit has jumped on it and we’re really happy about it and it’s doing exactly what I had hoped it would do.

Chris: Now, what kind of a reception have you been getting from the viewers? Are you getting much feedback?

Danny: You know, it’s amazing. People don’t realize EWTN is worldwide so it has the capability of reaching 150 million homes worldwide of course. That’s doesn’t mean 150 million people watching but that’s larger and we’ve gotten emails of course from the United States, from Russia, from China, from all over the world, people have watched the show and like it and women are into it too. With women who are watching and trying to get their husbands or fiancés or whatever, boyfriends to watch it so the response has been tremendous. We’ve taken what we call across the goal on the road. We did a men’s conference up in Columbus, Ohio. We had over 1600 men there and this coming year, we’re going to do one in Boston, one in Pittsburgh, one in Jacksonville, and then we’re also in negotiation with the Diocese of Miami, Florida.

Chris: Now what year are these taking place in? Are these going to be 2010?

Danny: Yes.

Chris: Okay, just for our listeners who are listening well beyond the date we’re recording here. So definitely, if you’re out there interested in checking out one of these conferences, you’ll be able to find all that information about when they are occurring over at crossingthegoal.com, correct?

Danny: Right, yes.

Chris: So even if you’re listening three or four years from now, hopefully we’ll still find plenty of information over at crossingthegoal.com on when these conferences are and where they are. Hopefully, they’ll be even greatly expanded by then. So, I think that is an interesting tool in one respect because you talked about the channel surfing, it’ll also be very easy to pick up one of these DVD sets and just turn it on at a youth group meeting or at a church function or something and have it just kind of sit in there. People walking by are easily going to mistake it for any number of sports shows. I mean, it is of the same caliber and quality of the majority of sports shows that I’ve seen so there’s just a huge amount of opportunity to just catch eyes who are unsuspecting and draw them in.

Danny: That’s why we did it too. If you look at a lot of stuff out here in ministry work, Catholic ministry, a lot of times, it’s under budgeted, volunteer-based and really has no permanency to it. If you look at all the stuff we did with the set and the lighting on our show, it’s different, it’s quality. The same with the DVDs, we have a DVD and then we packaged it with a playbook. We call it Crossing The Goal Playbook which, take for instance, the first nine shows we did, we do them in a series like this. We’re on the virtues, the cardinal virtues and theological virtues then we put together a playbook to go along with it. We partnered it up with Emmaus Road Publishing and it can be purchased. You can go to our website which we will take you to Emmaus Road to purchase it. These are perfect for individuals but it also, what we’ve had envisioned in this was to use it for men’s accountability groups or prayer groups or whatever at parishes or in their homes where guys could put the DVD in, ten guys and they get ten playbooks and they can follow along and sort of write down and discuss and there’s questions in there. It’s really helpful. It’s been great and we’ve had a great response for that so if guys wanted to change their life and get something going, we’re putting together a package here and we’re doing other things as we go along in this interview and like when we…it’s not only just touching guys like when we do a conference, it’s not just a conference and it’s over with. We’re going to offer to the men as they go to these various conferences what we call a spiritual fitness retreatment afterwards with three of our members who will go and we’re tied up with Franciscan University here. It’ll be one of these Crossing The Goal members, take for instance, myself, one other lay person from Franciscan, and then a Franciscan TOR priest and we’ll come into the diocese and put on this spiritual fitness retreat. So we’re talking about how the Holy Spirit in your life, that this is your past, how to grow deeper in your appreciation of the Holy Spirit and how you can grow even beyond your wildest imagination in the spiritual life because the conversion experience takes place at the conference but if you don’t do anything to follow up, you revert back to the way you were before so we’re encouraging that and also we put together a team to also help and show leaders in these various dioceses that are putting on these conferences, how to funnel guys into small groups so they have something when they go back to their parishes that they can get involved with and continue to grow until next year’s conference and then just keep…it keeps growing. Does that make sense?

Chris: Absolutely! Absolutely, you are making complete sense. You have to have that ongoing conversion after the initial conversion experience or it just falls flat. Now, one other thing that has been out in the marketplace recently that’s kind of a somewhat similar vein is The Champions of Faith series. Are you guys tied in with them at all or are they…?

Danny: No, no. We’re not tied in with them. That’s the sort of the conversion…you look at that and that’s sort of a conversion thing and it gets you inspired but you have to have something besides that then you come to the spiritual fitness workout or small groups. You have to do something. Whatever it is, Cruzio or whatever happens where it touches your life, you need followup or growth takes place. You never stop. It’s just like in your business or whatever business a guy’s in out here. If he’s an engineer, he just doesn’t have a one-time but he goes to college and he gets his college degree and then he stops? No. He continues on, he keeps growing with continuing education. Well, in the faith, we think as Catholics, oh I’ve been baptized. I’ve received the sacraments. I go to Mass at 11 o’clock on Sunday and that’s sufficient, that’s good. Well that might be okay but I don’t think Christ came and died on the cross and rose from the dead and ascended into heaven for us just to go to Mass at 11 o’clock on Sunday and that’s it. If we did our job one hour a week, how good would we be? We wouldn’t be too good. Now how in the heck are we going to do our faith one hour a week and expect to be solid Catholics and grow in our faith and be meaningful where we can go out and touch other lives besides ourselves?

Chris: Absolutely. Well, we’re going to take a short break here to hear from our sponsor but we’ll be back in just a minute to talk a little more with Danny Abramowicz about Crossing The Goal as well as Spiritual Workout of a Former Saint. This is the Catholic Spotlight.

Chris: And we’re back on the Catholic Spotlight with Danny Abramowicz. So Danny, let’s talk a little bit about the Spiritual Workout of a Former Saint. I know this book was written a little earlier. Was this during the time when you helping to run the other ministry?

Danny: Yeah, I was involved with Donum Dei Foundation. I was doing that and then writing the book on the side which was very difficult. You know, it’s not like I was sitting on some lake somewhere with plenty of time and just reflecting and writing. I had to work and then come home many nights and write and you know, the devil didn’t want me to do that so I’d be sitting there sometimes for two hours and got four words down and I said, “Lord, at this pace, I will be dead and gone before this book even gets finished.” And then all of a sudden, it starts flowing and you start writing so it’s come out. The book, I wanted to do it, Chris where it would be like me speaking to you or to a guy and I wanted it to be a book where that a guy that was a person that works in the construction or something or a guy that’s a professor could read it and still gets it, that both of them would get something out of it and it has to do with a lot of the basic fundamentals of our faith. But I throw in the angle of the NFL and how you prepare for games and a lot of analogies of how we do this in the sports world and how you tie it into your spiritual life. I think that’s what guys really like and plus you better not have a thick book and try to sell it to men. It’s not going to happen. You got to have…it’s not a real thick book.

Chris: Does it need to have pictures in it too?

Danny: Yeah, it got the crayons and the pictures and stuff…yeah. No, but it has a lot of stuff that guys can really relate to and we’ve gotten a tremendous response from that. In fact, that is a Sunday Visitor was a publisher that I’ve taken at and I bought that from them and I have that myself and put it into the joint venture that we have with Emmaus Road Publishing so Crossing The Goal and Emmaus Road will be selling my book from now on, along with the DVDs and the playbook.

Chris: And of course, you can always get all of that stuff at catholiccompany.com as well.

Danny: There you go. Good.

Chris: All right, was there anything else you wanted to share with our listeners before we end up here?

Danny: Well, I just encourage guys to watch…I just didn’t do this show just to do a show. We’ve got some great guys on there. Brian Patrick’s a professional guy, the guy that’s sort of the Chris Berman of the show and then Peter Herbeck has been around in this ministry for a long time. He’s with Renewal Ministries. He’s a man’s man. He’s very astute in the spiritual realm. Also Curtis Martin who is the founder and president of Focus which is a Catholic peer ministry that he’s been running for 12 years and doing tremendous on 45 campuses and myself. And we talk about things, issues that men can relate to and then we personalize it and at what we call the Red Zone portion of our show. I really encourage men and I ask priests and other guys to really encourage men to watch this show. Give it a try. I always tell people, “Try it for three times. If you don’t like it, we’ll give your misery back.”

Chris: Well thank you so much, Danny for coming in on the show, for sharing about your wonderful books and DVDs. I hope everybody goes out there and gives them a try, checks it out, especially at least go over to crossingthegoal.com and watch a couple of episodes on the streaming webcast even if you can’t get EWTN or aren’t interested in turning on the big television, you can get it there. Pick up some copies of these DVDs, get them over to your church, get them in front of your men’s group, get them to your prayer groups, whatever it takes, just help people to get out there and get off their duff and start learning something new about their faith. All of you Catholic Spotlight fans, it’s a new month, please go on over to Podcast Alley, send us some vote love there to help us get up in the ratings and bring in more listeners so we can share this message with more and more people. Danny, thank you so much.

Danny: All right, Chris. Thank you and God bless you. Bye-bye.

Chris: God bless you, too. Bye.

Chris: Thank you for listening to the Catholic Spotlight, a production of the Catholic Company, your source for over 10,000 Catholic books and gifts that make a difference. Find us online at catholiccompany.com. You can find more podcasts from the Catholic Spotlight at catholicspotlight.com and if you have a question, comment, or would like to be featured in our intro, call our voicemail at 206-312-0069. We would love to hear from you. You can find more info on being featured in our intro at catholicspotlight.com as well as announcements about future interviews. Have a great day and God bless.

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Transcript of Interview with Danny Abramowicz about Crossing the Goal. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

Danny Abramowicz books and videos at The Catholic Company.

http://search.catholiccompany.com/search?w=danny%20abramowicz