He’s a Delco native, youth pastor, and recovering addict who’s now a hilarious Philly sports sensation on Instagram

That’s a Super Bowl team you seen, Jon. Super Bowl teams run the ball. They hit you in the mouth. And they overcome adversity. Like when the refs are trying to rig the game. Or like when your kicker can’t hit an extra point to save his life. It’s a disgrace. Your star receiver, who couldn’t catch a door at Wawa, is looking like Nelson Agholor out there. Still got the book, A.J.? They got a chapter in there about how to catch the ball? How about some outer excellence next week, bud?

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It seems real, doesn’t it? Of course it does. That paragraph reads just like the kind of diatribe that the stereotypical Philadelphia sports fan would deliver to a local talk show the day after the Eagles struggled to win a playoff game. Gabe Mahalik knows exactly how such a Philly sports-radio rant should sound. He’s been hearing them his whole life. Even went on a few himself back in the day. So on Monday morning, less than 24 hours after his favorite team had beaten the Los Angeles Rams to reach the NFC championship game, Mahalik pulled a black Eagles T-shirt over his head, slid into the driver’s seat of his car, set the camera app on his smartphone to VIDEO, and — his right index finger stabbing the air, his voice a bark, his yesterdays sharpened to yisterdees — delivered that monologue. Which was not real. Which is what made it hilarious.

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When it comes to the parodies of Philly fandom that flood social media these days, there is Mahalik, and there is everyone else. Since May, when he began recording and posting a series of satirical videos to his Instagram account, @dj_gabereal — videos in which he mimics an especially passionate listener to either 94.1 WIP or 97.5 The Fanatic — he has collected nearly 24,000 followers. The number, already large enough to qualify him as a microinfluencer, is growing steadily, and it’s no wonder why.

“I’m touching the heartbeat of something super-authentic,” he said in a recent phone interview. “It’s been a fun ride.”

A Delaware County native, a former call-screener for 97.5, a self-described “4-for-4” fan of the Eagles, Phillies, Flyers, and 76ers, Mahalik in many ways fits the ideal profile of the character he has created. And in many ways, he doesn’t. He’s 35, a born-again Christian, a youth pastor at Brandywine Grace Church in Downingtown, a husband, a father of three, a part-time DJ, a part-time stand-up comic, and a recovering addict who has been sober since 2013.

That’s a journey with a lot of exit ramps and hard turns. It started when Mahalik was growing up in Collingdale, not yet a teenager, and he and his older brother, Jestin, discovered WIP through its midday show, hosted at the time by Glen Macnow and Anthony Gargano.

“We’d sit in our room and listen,” Mahalik said. “We didn’t even know what they were talking about. We just loved it. We were mesmerized by everyone, including our uncles and our dad, all obsessed over these games and these players.”

One day, Mahalik and his brother were in the car with their mother, the radio on, and Gargano revealed that he and Macnow were doing a remote show from a Delco burger joint. The kids begged Mom to drive them there. She did. The brothers spent four hours in the restaurant, splitting a milkshake — “We didn’t have any money,” Mahalik said — and fixated on the hosts.

“We just became obsessed,” Mahalik said. “From that moment on, we lived and died on every pitch, every pass, every game. We were optimistic-slash-naive.”

It was the early 2000s, a time for optimism and, as always, cynicism about the teams here. The Flyers had clubs that were loaded with veteran talent but couldn’t win a Stanley Cup. The Sixers had Allen Iverson and didn’t win a championship. The Eagles, with Andy Reid and Donovan McNabb, went to four straight NFC title games and couldn’t win three of them, let alone a Super Bowl.

“We really caught a bad case of Negadelphia,” Mahalik said. “People think it’s for no reason that we have a negative outlook on things. Dude, we have every reason, and there’s some justification when people hear me yelling, ‘Run the ball.’ They’re like, ‘Yeah, dude. We’ve been saying that since the ‘90s.’”

After graduating from Penncrest High, Mahalik went to Albright College, then transferred to Widener, his heart set on a job in sports media. He interned at 97.5 and still considers it a badge of honor that host Mike Missanelli called him an idiot to his face. “He’s one of the best still doing it,” Mahalik said. He thought the station’s managers would hire him. They didn’t. He went into sales instead. Two weeks after Mahalik had turned 14, his father, the disciplinarian in the household, had died. Now Mahalik was directionless, his personal life a mess. “Sort of went crazy,” he said. He smoked pot every day, drank every night, and dabbled in other drugs. “Lucky to be alive,” he said.

Eventually, he got clean, converted to Christianity, and poured so much of himself into his church that its leaders made him its director of youth and outreach. His other, lifelong devotion had never waned. He, his brother, and his cousin for years kept up a text thread about the local teams. The chat rambled and meandered and, like most discussions about Philly sports, reached a pitch that would seem ridiculous only to those who don’t live here.

After the Phillies played a particularly sloppy game last spring, after the thread took its usual turn into the wild and crazy, Mahalik got an idea.

“Bryce Harper got doubled up,” he said. “The infield let a pop-up drop; everybody decided it was somebody else’s job to catch it. Me and my brother were just going off about it, and I was like, ‘Dude, I’m going to get a video of this. This is too good.’”

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First-time, long-time. How you doin’? I been better, Jon. Listen, Jon, this team’s got problems, and if they don’t fix ‘em, it’s gonna be another choke job in October. We’re becoming the Donovan McNabb of the MLB, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because of stupid baseball like yisterdee. Bryce Harper doesn’t even know how many outs there are? Gets doubled up, dude? What is this, Little Lig? What is this, the Clifton Boys Club? Dude, you make 25 million dollars a year. You better know how many outs there are. I make 25 thousand dollars a year pouring concrete, and I knew how many outs there were.

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Real? No. Authentic? Absolutely. Mahalik’s Instagram reels feature certain staples, joke templates that he relies on and that, if you didn’t know better, might make you think he was being sincere. There’s the “Past Trauma Reference,” in which he mentions a painful moment from the city’s sports history. There’s the “Derogatory Nickname” (e.g. slumping Eagles kicker Jake Elliott becomes “Missy Elliott”). There’s the “Lower Delco Reference,” and there’s the delicious “Blue Collar Flex,” both of which he wielded in his Harper tirade.

Always, he addresses an imaginary host named “Jon.” There have been so many radio hosts here with the name — Jon Marks, Jon Johnson, Jon Ritchie, John Kincade — that using it allows him to be generic and specific at the same time. He’s done more than 40 videos, usually dropping one on a Monday morning in the aftermath of an Eagles game. The one he posted following the Eagles’ regular-season finale — his character complained that the team, by having Saquon Barkley sit out, deprived him and his son of the chance to see Barkley break the NFL’s single-season rushing record — was viewed more than 840,000 times.

His rising popularity is forcing him to balance his role as a youth pastor and his creation of his comedic persona. He thought, he said, that God would use him as a vessel through his preaching and mentoring. “But as I mature,” he said, “I’m realizing that God is not outside me. He made me funny. He brought me through what He’s brought me through.” So there are certain choices that he believes he has to make. A beverage company wanted him to be its spokesperson, for instance, to endorse its brand of hard seltzer on his Instagram feed. He turned down the offer.

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“Even though there’s nothing technically wrong with that,” he said, “is that a bad look for a guy who leads 60 to 70 teenagers who look up to me like I’m their role model, to be plugging vodka seltzers? I decided not to do it.”

The character and the man aren’t so disparate, though. At Lincoln Financial Field last Sunday, Mahalik wandered through the parking-lot tailgates, fans recognizing him along the way. During the Eagles’ 28-22 victory against the Los Angeles Rams, amid a swirling snowstorm, he went shirtless, screaming his support from the stands.

“I was so filled with joy,” he said. “I didn’t have a sip of anything. I had no substances whatsoever, and I had the best time ever. If this was 12 years ago, I would have blacked out. I would have been asking somebody what the score was the next day. My Philly sports fandom has been redeemed. I feel like I’m enjoying it to the fullest degree now.”

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Yeah, how’s that feel, Jared Verse? Getting clowned by Saquon like it’s recess at Amosland Elementary School. That’ll teach ya to keep our name out your mouth, loser. Saquon’s making history — 205 rushing yards yisterdee, franchise record. I told yuz last week, Fan Duel can’t make that line high enough. And I’ll tell you what, if the old lady didn’t lock me out of my account, I’d be contacting John Port from Selling Delco and finally moving out of Darby!

Editor’s note: Mike Sielski is a part-time host on WIP.