BY GREG COTE
MIAMI HERALD
At Wake Forest University around 1964, a student better known for his football prowess showed his softer side in campus theater productions. He was recalled later as having been moved nearly to tears by a reading of the 19th century English poet, William Wordsworth, titled, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.
Barely beyond a child himself, the young man on stage could not have known then that he had only a handful of years yet to live. Or that his own immortality would follow.
This is a story about Brian Piccolo.
For most of us the name resonates, to this day, as the subject of Brian's Song, the wrenching TV movie from 1971 that told a tragic but uplifting story -- his story. It was the tale of a courageous Chicago Bears running back who succumbed to cancer at age 26, and who left such an imprint that a school in Chicago is named for him, and the Bears retired his number.
Piccolo was ours before that, of course, raised in Fort Lauderdale and a sports hero at St. Thomas Aquinas High (then Central Catholic), where today the school's football stadium is named for him, as is a popular Broward County park. The school band plays the theme from Brian's Song at every home game.
In between, though, he was Wake Forest's. On that campus in Winston-Salem, N.C., he still is.
Wake Forest is where Piccolo parlayed what he'd learned on local fields to make it, against the odds, and too briefly, in the NFL. It was at Wake Forest that he led the nation in rushing as a senior and became Atlantic Coast Conference Player of the Year, and where he grew to become an enduring campus legend.
Now it is Piccolo whose name floats like an angel above this Tuesday's Orange Bowl Classic vs. Louisville, as his college alma mater prepares to play in its biggest football game ever, just minutes from where its former star grew up.
"We're awfully proud of Brian Piccolo," Wake Forest coach Jim Grobe said this week, alluding to the many lean years when the memory of the man was the main thing WFU fans could be proud of. "He's been great for our program as far as recruiting and tradition."
INSPIRED STUDENTS
The Brian Piccolo Cancer Fund Drive still thrives as the premier charitable event every year at Wake Forest, remarkable because it is student-initiated and run, sustained now by a generation of kids born many, many years after Piccolo's death in 1970.
The fund has generated some $750,000 in its 26 years, at the grass-roots level, from the likes of bake sales, not corporate coffers, with every penny going for cancer treatment and research at the university's Bowman Gray School of Medicine. Millions more for cancer research have been raised in Piccolo's name through a fund established by the Bears and through annual donations by the NFL, partly through player fines. But the campus donations are what strike you. These aren't big checks written for tax write-offs. These are dollars and dimes fished from students' pockets and hearts.
The first check, in 1980, was for a modest $3,500. Now the annual checks top $50,000, presented during halftime of an ACC basketball game on campus. Fraternities, sororities and other campus groups join forces throughout the fall to stage fund-raising golf tournaments, dance-a-thons, silent auctions and so forth. This year, fundraisers included a football team strength contest called "Pump Up for Piccolo," a walk-a-thon called "Hit the Bricks for Brian," and a showing of Brian's Song, of course.
A campus residence hall bears Piccolo's name, and all incoming freshmen are shown Brian's Song.
"It's a live presence," Wake Forest administrator Kevin Cox says of Piccolo. "He's still a strong figure on campus."
FAMOUS FRIENDSHIP
Piccolo had been undrafted by the pros despite his Wake Forest stardom (too small, they said; too slow), then was signed by the Bears as a free agent -- and thoroughly overshadowed by young superstar Gale Sayers. But it was his friendship with Sayers that would become the basis of the movie. The two, in 1967, had become the first white and black teammates in the NFL to room together on road trips.
A year later, Sayers suffered a serious, career-threatening knee injury, and Piccolo nursed his spirits through the long rehabilitation.
A year after that, they discovered the tumor in Piccolo's chest. There was nothing Sayers could do.
It began in November 1969 with a cough that wouldn't go away.
A sudden onset of embryonal cell carcinoma, rare and then almost always fatal, was attacking Piccolo, and it would not stop.
Even near the end, though, the sense of humor had not left the man.
Once, at a speaking engagement following his initial surgery, Piccolo brought along a friend who happened to work in the funeral business -- and delighted to tell his audience that, while star athletes traveled with lawyers and agents, he brought along his personal undertaker.
Bears owner Ed McCaskey visited days before he died, but it was Piccolo consoling McCaskey, saying: "Don't worry, Big Ed. I'm not afraid of anything. Only [Packers linebacker Ray] Nitschke."
In May 1970 Sayers gave a speech in acceptance of an NFL courage award given to him for battling back from that knee injury. His friend Brian was near death.
'I LOVE BRIAN PICCOLO'
"I love Brian Piccolo, and I'd like all of you to love him," Sayers said that night. "And when you hit your knees to pray tonight, please ask God to love him too."
Sayers accepted the award in Piccolo's name, saying, "Compare his courage with what I am supposed to possess." He taped his friend's name over his own on the trophy.
The open-hearted absence of prejudice that fostered the friendship with Sayers was something that friends at Wake Forest had observed years earlier.
Ross Griffith, then a tennis player, classmate and friend, recalls that when Wake Forest was between head coaches following the 1963 season, Piccolo had taken it upon himself to help recruit black players. Griffith recalls that Piccolo inviting local black high school athletes to visit campus led directly to three entering in the fall of '64 -- and making Wake Forest only the second racially integrated football team (after Maryland) in the ACC.
The Piccolo legacy embraced with equal pride in Chicago, in Winston-Salem and in Fort Lauderdale glows and grows too in the loved ones he left behind: In Joy Piccolo O'Connell, his widow, a nurse; in three now-grown daughters and eight grandchildren; in his mother, now 97, and in two older brothers.
CONSTANT REMINDERS
"Each day, every single day, something happens," Piccolo's former wife said Thursday of his legacy and the funds it generates for cancer research. "The tributes have been incredible, and it continues. The money raised in his name is unbelievable. We never dreamed it would have gone on this long -- never, ever. We have a young man who donates $41 every year in the name of his brother. We have children who have a lemonade stand and send us $12. Brian was a good person. He cared about people. He couldn't do enough for people. I think it comes back to you."
Joy Piccolo O'Connell told a story she hadn't told before. Her young husband had a receding hairline, was growing bald prematurely and it drove him crazy. He wore a toupee for a while, once to visit a seriously ill child in a hospital -- a child whose own hair was lost to chemotherapy.
"After that, he threw the toupee in the garbage,'' Joy said. 'He said `How could I be so vain?'"
Traci Piccolo Dolby, 39, their middle daughter, was a toddler when her father died. Her memory of him is a warm quilt of others' recollections.
"His personality was such that he drew people to him. He considered you a friend because of who you were, not what you looked like," says Dolby. "Nobody ever thought my dad was good enough to do anything he accomplished. He was the consummate underdog. So many of us can relate to that and are inspired by it."
'IT MAKES ME SO PROUD'
Traci, who also is a Wake Forest grad, spoke Thursday from the den of her home north of Chicago, a framed No. 41 Bears jersey on the wall, the trophy Sayers accepted in his name on the mantle, her young father frozen in black and white in a photo on the desk.
"People only have the most wonderful things to say about him. It makes me so proud, and at the same time a little envious," Traci says. "You can feel like you were cheated. I do have those woe-is-me moments, typically like at Christmas time. I look at my kids, especially my boys, and think how neat it would be to have his influence in their lives. But my mom says there was a reason, and to look at everything we've been able to accomplish in his memory. He lives on through so many people and things. He's all around us."
Traci goes to Bears games and sees a few No. 41 jerseys among the myriad ones bearing the names of Payton and Sayers, Urlacher and Butkus. She always makes a point to walk up to the person and say, "Nice jersey." She always walks away smiling.
This Christmas she received a card from an old family friend who wrote on it, "You remind me so much of your Dad." She cried.
"It was almost like having a little bit of his approval," she said.
What was it about this man that made him so magnetic? Wasn't he just a football player who had a modest NFL career (927 yards rushing in four seasons) before happening to die of cancer? Certainly his relationship with Sayers that spawned the TV movie is a part of the answer.
But there must be more.
Go back, then, to his early childhood, in search of intimations of immortality.
Speak to the people who knew him before Chicago did, and before Wake Forest did. Speak to friends from the Fort Lauderdale days. Folks who remember the deli roast beef specials from the long-disappeared Piccolo's Sandwich Shop near the corner of Broward and Andrews.
When you know the boy before the man, when you know the man before the fame -- then you know somebody.
Dan Arnold, a dentist in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, was Piccolo's teammate at Central Catholic, the last year before it became St. Thomas. He remembers Brian's 1957 Chevy, a glinting metallic green, and "how happy I was just to be ridin' around with him." He remembers a kid "who was friendly to people who weren't the stars, or the handsomest, or the smartest. He was just nice to everybody."
Arnold saw Piccolo's artistic side.
"He was gonna be Frank Sinatra. I'd go over to his house and he'd always have Sinatra or maybe a Ray Charles record on. He'd like to be a performer. He ended up performing on a football field."
His friends have spent years pondering Piccolo's lasting fame. Why it happened.
"The timing of the black and white issue in America, the Bears putting Gale and Brian together," says Arnold. "But also it was Brian finally getting to the pinnacle he was striving for, and having it jerked away from him. It's such a classic tragedy. It will last forever."
Bill Slater may have been Piccolo's best buddy growing up in Fort Lauderdale. They knew each other since first grade at St. Anthony's. Played ball together in high school and at Wake Forest. Bill was there when Brian met future wife Joy in the ninth grade. They would ride motorcycles together, back when you could, legally, at age 14.
'HELL OF A PERSON'
Slater recalls that Piccolo never was a running back until his senior year in high school, and even then he was overshadowed by South Broward's Tucker Fredrickson across town. People didn't like Piccolo because he was a football star; they liked him because he never acted like he was.
"Brian was a nice athlete but a hell of a person," says Slater, now of Wilmington, N.C. "That's what people remember. There were cliques then, but Pic didn't care if you were popular or not, dressed nice or not. You'd ask, 'Why are you running around with so and so?' He'd look at you like you were dumb. It didn't resonate with him. He just never got too enamored with himself. His success in football was far outweighed
by the person he was. He always had a pat on the back for you, and a smile. He didn't have any bad days."
Slater remembers watching Brian's Song on TV.
"I could never watch it again," he says.
Intimations of immortality do not begin with talent or fame. Sometimes they are first seen in one's smile or in a simple kindness we can never forget.
MIAMI HERALD
At Wake Forest University around 1964, a student better known for his football prowess showed his softer side in campus theater productions. He was recalled later as having been moved nearly to tears by a reading of the 19th century English poet, William Wordsworth, titled, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.
Barely beyond a child himself, the young man on stage could not have known then that he had only a handful of years yet to live. Or that his own immortality would follow.
This is a story about Brian Piccolo.
For most of us the name resonates, to this day, as the subject of Brian's Song, the wrenching TV movie from 1971 that told a tragic but uplifting story -- his story. It was the tale of a courageous Chicago Bears running back who succumbed to cancer at age 26, and who left such an imprint that a school in Chicago is named for him, and the Bears retired his number.
Piccolo was ours before that, of course, raised in Fort Lauderdale and a sports hero at St. Thomas Aquinas High (then Central Catholic), where today the school's football stadium is named for him, as is a popular Broward County park. The school band plays the theme from Brian's Song at every home game.
In between, though, he was Wake Forest's. On that campus in Winston-Salem, N.C., he still is.
Wake Forest is where Piccolo parlayed what he'd learned on local fields to make it, against the odds, and too briefly, in the NFL. It was at Wake Forest that he led the nation in rushing as a senior and became Atlantic Coast Conference Player of the Year, and where he grew to become an enduring campus legend.
Now it is Piccolo whose name floats like an angel above this Tuesday's Orange Bowl Classic vs. Louisville, as his college alma mater prepares to play in its biggest football game ever, just minutes from where its former star grew up.
"We're awfully proud of Brian Piccolo," Wake Forest coach Jim Grobe said this week, alluding to the many lean years when the memory of the man was the main thing WFU fans could be proud of. "He's been great for our program as far as recruiting and tradition."
INSPIRED STUDENTS
The Brian Piccolo Cancer Fund Drive still thrives as the premier charitable event every year at Wake Forest, remarkable because it is student-initiated and run, sustained now by a generation of kids born many, many years after Piccolo's death in 1970.
The fund has generated some $750,000 in its 26 years, at the grass-roots level, from the likes of bake sales, not corporate coffers, with every penny going for cancer treatment and research at the university's Bowman Gray School of Medicine. Millions more for cancer research have been raised in Piccolo's name through a fund established by the Bears and through annual donations by the NFL, partly through player fines. But the campus donations are what strike you. These aren't big checks written for tax write-offs. These are dollars and dimes fished from students' pockets and hearts.
The first check, in 1980, was for a modest $3,500. Now the annual checks top $50,000, presented during halftime of an ACC basketball game on campus. Fraternities, sororities and other campus groups join forces throughout the fall to stage fund-raising golf tournaments, dance-a-thons, silent auctions and so forth. This year, fundraisers included a football team strength contest called "Pump Up for Piccolo," a walk-a-thon called "Hit the Bricks for Brian," and a showing of Brian's Song, of course.
A campus residence hall bears Piccolo's name, and all incoming freshmen are shown Brian's Song.
"It's a live presence," Wake Forest administrator Kevin Cox says of Piccolo. "He's still a strong figure on campus."
FAMOUS FRIENDSHIP
Piccolo had been undrafted by the pros despite his Wake Forest stardom (too small, they said; too slow), then was signed by the Bears as a free agent -- and thoroughly overshadowed by young superstar Gale Sayers. But it was his friendship with Sayers that would become the basis of the movie. The two, in 1967, had become the first white and black teammates in the NFL to room together on road trips.
A year later, Sayers suffered a serious, career-threatening knee injury, and Piccolo nursed his spirits through the long rehabilitation.
A year after that, they discovered the tumor in Piccolo's chest. There was nothing Sayers could do.
It began in November 1969 with a cough that wouldn't go away.
A sudden onset of embryonal cell carcinoma, rare and then almost always fatal, was attacking Piccolo, and it would not stop.
Even near the end, though, the sense of humor had not left the man.
Once, at a speaking engagement following his initial surgery, Piccolo brought along a friend who happened to work in the funeral business -- and delighted to tell his audience that, while star athletes traveled with lawyers and agents, he brought along his personal undertaker.
Bears owner Ed McCaskey visited days before he died, but it was Piccolo consoling McCaskey, saying: "Don't worry, Big Ed. I'm not afraid of anything. Only [Packers linebacker Ray] Nitschke."
In May 1970 Sayers gave a speech in acceptance of an NFL courage award given to him for battling back from that knee injury. His friend Brian was near death.
'I LOVE BRIAN PICCOLO'
"I love Brian Piccolo, and I'd like all of you to love him," Sayers said that night. "And when you hit your knees to pray tonight, please ask God to love him too."
Sayers accepted the award in Piccolo's name, saying, "Compare his courage with what I am supposed to possess." He taped his friend's name over his own on the trophy.
The open-hearted absence of prejudice that fostered the friendship with Sayers was something that friends at Wake Forest had observed years earlier.
Ross Griffith, then a tennis player, classmate and friend, recalls that when Wake Forest was between head coaches following the 1963 season, Piccolo had taken it upon himself to help recruit black players. Griffith recalls that Piccolo inviting local black high school athletes to visit campus led directly to three entering in the fall of '64 -- and making Wake Forest only the second racially integrated football team (after Maryland) in the ACC.
The Piccolo legacy embraced with equal pride in Chicago, in Winston-Salem and in Fort Lauderdale glows and grows too in the loved ones he left behind: In Joy Piccolo O'Connell, his widow, a nurse; in three now-grown daughters and eight grandchildren; in his mother, now 97, and in two older brothers.
CONSTANT REMINDERS
"Each day, every single day, something happens," Piccolo's former wife said Thursday of his legacy and the funds it generates for cancer research. "The tributes have been incredible, and it continues. The money raised in his name is unbelievable. We never dreamed it would have gone on this long -- never, ever. We have a young man who donates $41 every year in the name of his brother. We have children who have a lemonade stand and send us $12. Brian was a good person. He cared about people. He couldn't do enough for people. I think it comes back to you."
Joy Piccolo O'Connell told a story she hadn't told before. Her young husband had a receding hairline, was growing bald prematurely and it drove him crazy. He wore a toupee for a while, once to visit a seriously ill child in a hospital -- a child whose own hair was lost to chemotherapy.
"After that, he threw the toupee in the garbage,'' Joy said. 'He said `How could I be so vain?'"
Traci Piccolo Dolby, 39, their middle daughter, was a toddler when her father died. Her memory of him is a warm quilt of others' recollections.
"His personality was such that he drew people to him. He considered you a friend because of who you were, not what you looked like," says Dolby. "Nobody ever thought my dad was good enough to do anything he accomplished. He was the consummate underdog. So many of us can relate to that and are inspired by it."
'IT MAKES ME SO PROUD'
Traci, who also is a Wake Forest grad, spoke Thursday from the den of her home north of Chicago, a framed No. 41 Bears jersey on the wall, the trophy Sayers accepted in his name on the mantle, her young father frozen in black and white in a photo on the desk.
"People only have the most wonderful things to say about him. It makes me so proud, and at the same time a little envious," Traci says. "You can feel like you were cheated. I do have those woe-is-me moments, typically like at Christmas time. I look at my kids, especially my boys, and think how neat it would be to have his influence in their lives. But my mom says there was a reason, and to look at everything we've been able to accomplish in his memory. He lives on through so many people and things. He's all around us."
Traci goes to Bears games and sees a few No. 41 jerseys among the myriad ones bearing the names of Payton and Sayers, Urlacher and Butkus. She always makes a point to walk up to the person and say, "Nice jersey." She always walks away smiling.
This Christmas she received a card from an old family friend who wrote on it, "You remind me so much of your Dad." She cried.
"It was almost like having a little bit of his approval," she said.
What was it about this man that made him so magnetic? Wasn't he just a football player who had a modest NFL career (927 yards rushing in four seasons) before happening to die of cancer? Certainly his relationship with Sayers that spawned the TV movie is a part of the answer.
But there must be more.
Go back, then, to his early childhood, in search of intimations of immortality.
Speak to the people who knew him before Chicago did, and before Wake Forest did. Speak to friends from the Fort Lauderdale days. Folks who remember the deli roast beef specials from the long-disappeared Piccolo's Sandwich Shop near the corner of Broward and Andrews.
When you know the boy before the man, when you know the man before the fame -- then you know somebody.
Dan Arnold, a dentist in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, was Piccolo's teammate at Central Catholic, the last year before it became St. Thomas. He remembers Brian's 1957 Chevy, a glinting metallic green, and "how happy I was just to be ridin' around with him." He remembers a kid "who was friendly to people who weren't the stars, or the handsomest, or the smartest. He was just nice to everybody."
Arnold saw Piccolo's artistic side.
"He was gonna be Frank Sinatra. I'd go over to his house and he'd always have Sinatra or maybe a Ray Charles record on. He'd like to be a performer. He ended up performing on a football field."
His friends have spent years pondering Piccolo's lasting fame. Why it happened.
"The timing of the black and white issue in America, the Bears putting Gale and Brian together," says Arnold. "But also it was Brian finally getting to the pinnacle he was striving for, and having it jerked away from him. It's such a classic tragedy. It will last forever."
Bill Slater may have been Piccolo's best buddy growing up in Fort Lauderdale. They knew each other since first grade at St. Anthony's. Played ball together in high school and at Wake Forest. Bill was there when Brian met future wife Joy in the ninth grade. They would ride motorcycles together, back when you could, legally, at age 14.
'HELL OF A PERSON'
Slater recalls that Piccolo never was a running back until his senior year in high school, and even then he was overshadowed by South Broward's Tucker Fredrickson across town. People didn't like Piccolo because he was a football star; they liked him because he never acted like he was.
"Brian was a nice athlete but a hell of a person," says Slater, now of Wilmington, N.C. "That's what people remember. There were cliques then, but Pic didn't care if you were popular or not, dressed nice or not. You'd ask, 'Why are you running around with so and so?' He'd look at you like you were dumb. It didn't resonate with him. He just never got too enamored with himself. His success in football was far outweighed
by the person he was. He always had a pat on the back for you, and a smile. He didn't have any bad days."
Slater remembers watching Brian's Song on TV.
"I could never watch it again," he says.
Intimations of immortality do not begin with talent or fame. Sometimes they are first seen in one's smile or in a simple kindness we can never forget.
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