Jack Hanna steps onto his front porch in Poinsettia Heights and squints across the street at the house where Brian Piccolo grew up, but it doesn’t take long before his gaze drifts far beyond the square little yellow house and its powder-blue shutters.
With Wake Forest in South Florida to play Louisville on Tuesday in the FedEx Orange Bowl, memories of Fort Lauderdale’s favorite son are flooding back. The Demon Deacons were Piccolo’s team after he left Fort Lauderdale’s Central Catholic High and before he signed with the Chicago Bears. He’s Wake Forest football’s favorite son, too.
Hanna’s mind races back to images still fresh and delicate despite the passing of nearly four decades. That’s how long he has lived in his house in northeast Fort Lauderdale. He remembers how fiercely proud Brian made this community. He also remembers how his death in 1970 tore a hole in the heart of it.
“Brian’s father, Joe, was a typical Italian guy who loved to talk,” Hanna says. “After Brian’s death, there was a sadness about him that never went away.”
A testament to Piccolo’s life is how profoundly he touched so many of the communities he called home. His legacy endures from Fort Lauderdale and St. Thomas Aquinas (formerly Central Catholic) to Winston-Salem, N.C., and its Wake Forest campus and up into Chicago.
The Piccolo story still has such an overpoweringly sad dimension to it. A rare form of cancer robbed his wife and three young daughters of their future with him. He was only 26 when he died.
Stricken in the prime of his NFL career as a running back, Piccolo’s death seemed to make an entire nation cry with the release of Brian’s Song. The 1971 made-for-TV movie documenting his friendship with fellow Bears running back Gale Sayers made millions of viewers feel the deep loss.
Yet even today it’s as if the determined spirit of the man lingers to demand that more is remembered than the hurt. His closest friends feel the force of his personality still resonating that way, uplifting and inspiring.
That’s what they loved about Brian’s Song, which swept the Emmy Awards in 1971. The movie captured the essence of the good-natured fight in Piccolo and his unrelenting devotion to family and friends.
“When I think of Brian, I think of his great determination and his tremendous perseverance,” says U.S. District Judge William Zloch, the former Notre Dame quarterback who played in the same Central Catholic backfield with Piccolo. “Brian was an underdog, and that drove him. There were people who thought he was too small, not fast enough, and that drove him up a wall. It made him try a thousand times harder. He had a heart as big as the world.”
Piccolo would have loved this year’s Demon Deacons. They’re so much like him: The little school beating the odds stacked so formidably against it.
This season Wake Forest claimed its first ACC title since 1970, the year Piccolo died.
“There wasn’t anybody I knew who faced more bumps in the road than Brian,” says Dan Arnold, a close friend and fellow running back at Central Catholic who still makes his home here as a pediatric dentist. “All through his life, he’d recover from these different things and go right on. He kept this great sense of humor through it all.”
Bears fans of the time can attest to that. While undergoing cancer treatment, Piccolo made several speaking engagements around Chicago. He would often take his friend, Morey Coletta, who happened to be a mortician. Piccolo liked to tell the crowd that while other athletes traveled with personal assistants, agents and attorneys, he brought his own undertaker.
“Pic never bad-mouthed anybody,” Sayers told ESPN’s Sports Century. “They say that people who like themselves like other people, and Brian was never short on self-confidence. He truly liked people.”
Piccolo and Sayers were the first black and white men to room together on the road in the NFL, a significant move at the height of the civil rights movement.
What stays with Piccolo’s friends is how he refused to allow anger and bitterness to be the fuel he used to conquer all the obstacles in his life.
As a boy, Piccolo watched his father endure personal and financial strife amid legal complications over the family’s driving school business. The pressure brought stress on the entire family.
Piccolo might have been a star running back at Central Catholic, but he was overshadowed in the county by the brilliance of South Broward’s Tucker Frederickson and Stranahan’s Russell Smith. Frederickson went on to star at Auburn before the New York Giants made him the first pick of the 1965 NFL Draft. Smith played for the Miami Hurricanes and San Diego Chargers.
No major colleges wanted Piccolo coming out of high school except Kentucky and Wichita State, but his scholarship offer to Kentucky fell through when a new coach was hired and didn’t want him.
Wake Forest showed late interest, but that opportunity was nearly lost with Piccolo struggling to meet the school’s lofty academic requirements. He failed the entrance exam more than once before finally qualifying.
Though Piccolo went on to lead the nation in rushing and scoring as a senior, every NFL team passed on him through all 20 rounds and 280 picks of that draft. The Bears signed him as a free agent, and he spent his rookie year in 1965 on the practice squad without dressing for games. He ultimately proved himself and took over as starter when Sayers tore ligaments in his right knee in ’68. After devoting himself to helping Sayers rehabilitate, Piccolo worked his way into the starting lineup alongside Sayers as a 5-foot-11, 190-pound fullback.
“Brian never gave up, that was his way,” says his brother, Joe, who’s retired from the CIA and living in Tampa. “He might have been beat to pieces, but he’d keep plugging away, hitting that line as hard as he could every time he carried the ball. That was our nature as a family.”
Piccolo was born in Pittsfield, Mass., but his family moved to Fort Lauderdale when he was 3. His mother, Irene, is 97 and lives today with Joe. Piccolo’s father died in 1986.
Piccolo’s wife, Joy, was his high school sweetheart, a cheerleader at Central Catholic. They married three days before he signed with the Bears and have three daughters: Lori, Traci and Kristi. The oldest, Lori, was 4 1/2 when her father died.
Three years after Brian’s death, Joy married Rich O’Connell, the owner of ready-mix concrete companies. Today, they go back and forth from their homes outside Chicago and Marco Island. Joy remains active as an officer with the Piccolo Foundation, which has raised millions of dollars for cancer research.
Joy has plans to attend the Orange Bowl game, but the family had a setback last week that threatens to prevent it. Through a friend, she passed on apologies for not being able to do an interview for this story after her husband was hospitalized with two ruptured discs that may require surgery.
Brian has eight grandchildren with a ninth on the way.
Like their father, Traci and Lori graduated from Wake Forest.
“Growing up without knowing him was hard, because I don’t have any memories of my own,” said Traci Piccolo Dolby, 39, who also resides in suburban Chicago. “I was 3 when he died, and all my memories of him were given to me by other people. I loved listening to stories about him, because that’s all I really had.
“It’s a hard thing, but the flip side is I know the reason he was taken from us was that so much could be accomplished for others in his name.”
Piccolo died of embryonal cell carcinoma.
Frank Torti, the director of the Wake Forest Cancer Center, reminds students before they begin the annual Brian Piccolo Cancer Fund Drive how their efforts have helped advance the fight against cancer. He reminds them that Tour de France legend Lance Armstrong recovered from the same type of cancer that killed Piccolo. Virtually incurable when Piccolo died, the cancer’s recovery rates are high today.
“My father’s lasting legacy is his character and how it drew people to him,” Traci said. “His legacy is everywhere.”
St. Thomas plays its games at Brian Piccolo Stadium, where the school band still plays the theme to Brian’s Song. There’s a county park named for him in Cooper City.
The Atlantic Coast Conference recognizes its “most courageous player” annually with the Brian Piccolo Award. The Bears give out an award with the same name each year to a rookie and veteran.
At Wake Forest, there’s a residence hall and an endowed scholarship named for him.
“Older players were always hard on the freshmen in college,” said Bill Salter, who knew Piccolo since they were together in the first grade at St. Anthony’s. They were friends and teammates at both Central Catholic and Wake Forest. “Brian made a point to support and encourage the freshmen, always picking them up. The rest of us didn’t have that kind of sense. He was like that in so many ways with people. He didn’t run in cliques like so many did. He just liked people for who they were.”
And people love him back for it.
Randall Mell can be reached at .
