The biggest Eagles fan in Baton Rouge paid the ultimate price

BATON ROUGE, La. — Phillip Chialastri had to lose something dear to him to become an Eagles fan.

Growing up in Baltimore in the early 1980s, like so many in that city, he had loved the Colts, only to have their owner, Robert Irsay, spirit the entire franchise to Indianapolis during the dead of a March 1984 night, Mayflower trucks pulling away in the darkness. Fine. He would find another team. The Chicago Bears.

The Bears were cool at the time: Walter Payton, “The Super Bowl Shuffle,” that funky QB Jim McMahon. When the Bears lost Payton’s last game, in the 1987 NFC playoffs, Phillip began to hate the team that had ended his favorite player’s career: Washington. He was living in the Chesapeake Bay region then. Nothing but Washington fans surrounding him. In sixth grade, he bet a classmate $12 that the team would lose to the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXII. Washington won, 42-10. He couldn’t go to school the next day. “Got a whuppin’,” he said, for losing the bet. His adolescence was like that, rough. Child of divorce. Foster care for a while.

He held on to the Bears until he was 15, until a Monday night in November 1990.

“The Body Bag Game,” he said.

Eagles 28, Washington 14 at Veterans Stadium. Buddy Ryan’s defense knocked nine players, including two quarterbacks, out of the game, one of the most brutal in NFL history. It made Phillip fall in love with the Eagles. “How could it not?” he said. “We couldn’t brag as a champion, but we were Rocky, man.” At 19, he had the Eagles. He had a wife, Marty. He had a job as a tire salesman. And he had an apartment … but no car. He’d walk to work. When he became a father that same year — to a son, Matthew — he raised him to be an Eagles fan, too.

Phillip was 21 when he moved his family here. A coworker had told him, Baton Rouge is ground level, man. Go there, and you’ll be running your own shop soon enough. Plus, his marriage was shaky. Maybe relocating would strengthen it. He and Marty had another son, Marcus, five years younger than Matthew.

They had no cable TV in their small house, no cell phones. They’d follow the Eagles by reading USA Today and other newspapers, by tuning in for those occasions when the team was featured on a national telecast. To fill their spare time, Phillip and the boys would take long walks and talk throughout them. Walk along the sidewalks of their neighborhood. Walk to a fast-food joint. Walk to a Circle K. Walk around in the air-conditioned store. Turn around and walk home. They wouldn’t have to buy anything and often didn’t.

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“The whole point was the journey,” Phillip, 49, said. The point was the time that a tall thin man with a thick black beard spent with his two sons talking about anything, about deep, serious subjects, about what it meant to live a good life, what it meant to have a good death. How many years would you shave off your life, one of them asked, to be a hero? Talking about the Eagles, about what made Andy Reid an excellent coach and Donovan McNabb an effective quarterback. Talking on the way to the local library, where Matthew would do his homework and Phillip would read books about psychology and the American Revolution and the U.S. military, where one day Matthew asked him a question.

Dad, would you give up going to the library for the rest of your life if the Eagles could win the Super Bowl?

No, I wouldn’t.

Then you’re not a real fan.

Matthew was a paradox. He was a terrific student at Woodlawn High School, but he didn’t like school, didn’t like sitting in a classroom. “Never figured that one out,” Phillip said. In ninth grade, Matthew told him that he would be the valedictorian of his graduating class. It’s not that hard, Dad. In 10th grade, he told Phillip that he didn’t want to go to college. He joined Woodlawn’s Junior R.O.T.C. program; clearly, he had soaked up something from those books that Phillip had read, from the conversations they’d had.

“My love of this country was appealing to him,” Phillip said. He left the program to concentrate on his academics, grew his blond hair so long that his high school friends called him “Jesus.” By the early months of Matthew’s senior year, his father and brother were telling him that he looked like the rookie quarterback the Eagles had just drafted in the third round: Nick Foles.

“When Foles would hold the ball because he didn’t want to throw an interception,” Phillip said, “I’d say, ‘There you go again, Matthew. Tsk, tsk.’”

A year after graduating as the valedictorian of the Woodlawn Class of 2013, Matthew enlisted in the Navy. He wanted to be an aircrewman. “He sold me on it,” Phillip said. “I was confident he would do well.”

The date was Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2017. Just a couple of weeks earlier, Matthew had been home, back in Baton Rouge, walking and talking with Phillip about the Eagles. They were hopeful. They had reason to be. The Eagles were 9-1 and rolling, having just routed the Cowboys on the road. Carson Wentz was the leading candidate to be the NFL’s MVP.

Phillip and Marty had divorced after Matthew enlisted, but they remained in close contact. She told him that, not long ago, she had received an email from Matthew that he was in Japan.

Phillip was at work that day. He had heard, through a conversation with his sister, that a Naval aircraft had crashed, but he wasn’t worried. Matthew had sent that email. Matthew was already in Japan. Matthew was safe. Then his phone rang. It was his former mother-in-law. She was crying, so hysterical that Phillip couldn’t make out what she was saying. She put her husband on the phone. He told Phillip that Matthew was dead.

“Apparently,” Phillip said, “the email was, ‘I’m going to Japan.’”

Airman Matthew Chialastri, 22, was one of three sailors who died when the C2-A Greyhound he was aboard, on its way to rendezvous with an aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan, crashed in the Philippine Sea near Okinawa. It was a routine transport flight. The cause of the crash, unknown until later, was a dual-engine failure.

Phillip was angry. The Eagles kept winning. Phillip couldn’t comprehend that Matthew was gone. Wentz tore two ligaments in his left knee in early December and was lost for the season. Phillip wondered and worried about Marcus, who had idolized his older brother. Foles stepped in and led the Eagles to Super Bowl LII, against the New England Patriots in Minneapolis. Phillip got an idea. He would get tickets to the game for himself and Marcus.

There was one problem: He had no idea how he would get them. He called the Eagles. He called the Navy. Desperate, he messaged a Nick Foles account on Facebook. Finally, he remembered that, in the aftermath of Matthew’s death, Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy had told Phillip, If there’s anything I can do … Phillip called Cassidy’s office and asked for anything. Cassidy got him and Marcus tickets.

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The two flew to Minnesota, splurged on a hotel room near U.S. Bank Stadium, couldn’t believe how close their seats were to the field. “Steph Curry was behind me,” Phillip said. “That’s how good the tickets were. Only time I’ve ever lost my voice was at this game. Yelling every play. I said to this guy next to me, ‘I wish they could hear me.’ He said, ‘They all can hear you.’”

The rest, every Eagles fan knows by heart. The final score: Eagles 41, Patriots 33. The game’s MVP: Nick Foles.

In May 2019, after an 18-month investigation that included the deepest recovery of an aircraft — 18,500 feet — that the Navy had ever attempted, Matthew Chialastri’s body was found. His remains were returned home to Baton Rouge that July. The discovery provided no closure for Phillip. He and Marcus had grown fond of watching Arrow, a TV series based on a comic-book superhero who had spent five years on a deserted island. Phillip had allowed himself to imagine that Matthew was just like that superhero, and when the Navy brought his son’s body up, that coping mechanism wasn’t available to him anymore.

“Let me tell you what I learned about grief,” he said. “The first stage of grief is anger. You have to burn that energy off. It’s a smart reaction of your body. Two years later, they bring the body up. There was no anger. That was my saddest time. I had no buffer for the grief.”

Phillip Chialastri was sitting at his kitchen table Wednesday night here with his wife, Sara, telling this story in all its love and sorrow. The Eagles will play in the Super Bowl again on Sunday, just 70 miles east in the Superdome. There are few Eagles fans in Baton Rouge, so he and Sara and Marcus, who is 24 now, will watch the game at home. An American flag, folded inside a triangle box, rests on a desk. A portrait of Matthew hangs on a living room wall, a green FLY EAGLES FLY banner underneath. “I wish,” Phillip said, “when I was peaking as a fan, this was the team we had.” It is not the only wish of this real fan and father who lost something dear long ago.