foreplease was his pizza forum name. Tony is the name he went by. It was his middle name though, turns out he was a Joseph. I don't recall him telling many golf stories but he was very into turf management. I know he made fairways on several golf courses...and baseball or softball fields, football turf, probably had some soccer pitches in there too.
Just a really nice guy. Always welcoming to new people online, happy to offer solid pizza making advice and words of encouragement. Tony really loved some traditions, we share that. One of his biggest traditions was meatballs. He made and gave them out at the holidays. Everybody loved them. The list of recipients continued to grow until he got pushed out of the house and found space in a commercial kitchen to make them each year. Thousands of meatballs over the years.
The last 5 or 6 years, Tony was dealing with some pretty aggressive cancer. He got into a few trials and lived his final years as a science experiment receiving new drugs and cancer fighting treatments. On more than one occasion, I believe he was the first human test subject. The treatments worked pretty well for some time. Got Tony some pizza making time with grandkids. He beat 5 relapses. The 6th relapse got him.
Over the years, enough people had asked about him and his treatments so they set up a blog/email list. Every once in a while there would be an Update On Tony. Most were written by Tony describing his treatment and what was going on. I knew another treatment had started in August. When the posts started to not be written by Tony in September, I knew it wasn't a good sign. That was when I started cyber-stalking Tony. He wasn't posting on the forum much, but you can tell when someone had logged on. If Tony was still logging on most days to poke around, I had hopes he was doing OK. I sent a private message to kind of check in and wish him well. It took a few days for him to get back. That hadn't happened the past. Responses came in hours.
Tony passed away last week. His funeral was Saturday. I made a batch of his meatballs.
If you want to make a batch of Tony's meatballs, the recipe is in the second page of this thread.
https://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,45810.0.html
And Fuck Cancer.