Before the classic 1971 TV movie about his life, before his brief career with the Chicago Bears and before the cancer that killed him, Brian Piccolo was just a Fort Lauderdale kid who loved football and the beach.
Here, he cruised A1A in his ’57 Chevy and hung with friends at the old Jerry’s Drive-in on Sunrise Boulevard.
Here, he fell in love with a cute cheerleader, his future wife, Joy, at Central Catholic High School, now called St. Thomas Aquinas.
Here, he was a big man on campus, lettering in four sports and forever filling the locker room with laughter.
Now 30 years after the poignant Emmy-award winning TV movie Brian’s Song introduced a nation to Fort Lauderdale’s favorite son, a new Brian’s Song will air at 7 p.m. Sunday on ABC.
The movie remake tells the story of the affable athlete with more drive than talent, who, with black teammate Gale Sayers, broke racial barriers during the turbulent ’60s. Like the original, the new movie delivers a timeless message about the incredible power of determination, family and friendship.
It’s been 31 years since Piccolo’s death in 1970 and 40 years since he left Fort Lauderdale for college, yet his legacy remains.
“In checkout lines, in airports, where people see my name, they ask me, “Are you related?” says Joe Piccolo, one of Brian’s brothers, who now lives in Tampa. “They still know about his life through that movie.”
Today, hundreds of kids play ball on the vast green fields of Brian Piccolo Park in Cooper City. And when the St. Thomas Aquinas Raiders score a touchdown, cheers ring out in Brian Piccolo Stadium.
Then, at the end of every football game, the band plays the haunting melody from the ’71 movie, in memory of the man who once called Fort Lauderdale home.
“It’s emotional, very emotional,” says Joy Piccolo O’Connell, 58, speaking from her home near Chicago. “It’s hard to relive it all.”
But she did, by acting as a consultant for this movie, a role she wasn’t offered in the first.
“It’s a beautiful story, a story about a family,” she says. “I don’t think there’s anybody who hasn’t been affected by cancer, and that includes us. It changed our lives and made us start all over again.”
O’Connell, who remarried in 1973, wants a new generation to know about how her husband played the game and lived his life: at full speed, with a smile on his face and never, never giving up.
Growing up in Fort Lauderdale, Pic, as he was known to his friends, was a super jock. A standout in four sports, he lettered in football, baseball, basketball and track.
After graduating in 1961, he played college football at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, leading the nation in rushing and scoring his senior year. But when he wasn’t drafted — a stunning disappointment — he signed with the Bears as a free agent.
Piccolo and Sayers were running backs when they met at Bears training camp in the mid-’60s. Polar opposites, Piccolo was outgoing, Sayers was shy.
During their rookie season, Sayers was named NFL Rookie Player of the Year while Piccolo warmed the bench. Then, the Bears management told the competing duo they were to room together on the road because, for the first time, the Bears weren’t pairing players by race.
A turning point came when Sayers suffered a potential career-ending injury. But Piccolo pushed him hard during his rehabilitation. Sure, he wanted to beat Sayers for the starting position, but only if Sayers was playing at 100 percent.
At a time when race riots made headlines and destroyed cities, a colorblind friendship formed between them. And, ultimately, both were named to the Bears’ starting backfield.
At the top of his game, Piccolo was diagnosed with a malignant tumor. Though surgery and chemotherapy followed, seven months later, on June 16, 1970, he died of a rare form of cancer, embryonal cell carcinoma.
Piccolo was only 26 and left behind his wife and three daughters, ages 18 months to 41/2 years.
But when people speak of him today, they don’t dwell on how he died, but how he lived.
Mr. Popular
Pic was a good-hearted guy, with a teasing sense of humor, his friends remember. Wildly popular at school, he was also incredibly kind, at an age when kids aren’t always so kind.
“Pic was nice to everybody,” says Dan Arnold, a Fort Lauderdale dentist and one of Piccolo’s best friends. That included the football team’s manager, whom some guys bullied. But not Pic, who came to his rescue.
“He was as big a star as we had in my class, but I don’t remember him picking on anybody,” Arnold says.
Bill Salter, now a retired Sears executive in North Carolina, met Piccolo in first grade at St. Anthony School. They stayed good friends through high school and during their college days at Wake Forest.
Pic didn’t judge people by the “in-crowd” standards, Salter says. If he liked someone, that’s all that mattered.
“He had the strangest group of friends and never cared what anybody else thought about that,” he says. “If they had a sense of humor and could make him laugh, that’s what he cared about. He never allowed himself to get caught up in what other people thought he should be doing. He was his own man.”
Like Arnold and Salter, Frank Walker, a Fort Lauderdale attorney, played on the high school football team with Piccolo. He remembers asking to trade hubcaps when Pic sold his ’57 Chevy before leaving for college. The hubcaps were three-pronged spinners, very cool at the time.
“He kept saying, ‘no, no, no,'” says Walker, past president of the Broward County Bar Association. “After I said goodbye to him before he left for school, I looked around and saw that he’d left those hubcaps in my car.”
Lauderdale days
Piccolo came from Massachusetts to Fort Lauderdale with his family, including two older brothers, Joe and Don, in 1946. His parents, Irene and Joseph Piccolo, opened a driving school, sold it, then opened Piccolo’s Sandwich Shop, at the corner of Andrews Avenue and Broward Boulevard.
“We’d go there after football practice and his father would make us roast beef sandwiches and milkshakes to build us up, so we could block for Brian,” says Walker, who keeps a photo of Piccolo in his office.
Joy and Brian met as freshmen in school, when cruising Jerry’s Drive-In and hanging at the beach were popular pastimes. Brian was smitten. Joy wasn’t.
In her high school yearbook, he wrote:
When I think back on the most wonderful memories I have had in high school the only thing that ever comes into my mind is these three letters: J-O-Y. You have made high school the most wonderful time of my life
Joy did like how he showered attention on her younger sister, Carol, who has cerebral palsy. He’d take her into the swimming pool, because she couldn’t go in alone. He’d even take her to rock concerts, maneuvering her wheelchair through the crowds.
Joy’s parents also loved the boy who spent as much time at their house as his own. At his own home, the atmosphere could be tense with friction between two strong-willed parents. But at Joy’s house, life was peaceful and calm.
Joy and Brian dated in high school and college, and Salter recalls how Brian opted out of fraternity life at Wake Forest to be “true to Joy.”
“I was in nursing school in Atlanta and at one point — I can’t really explain it — I knew we were going to be together,” she says. “Everyone loved him. I was the only one holding back.”
They married after Joy’s graduation in 1964, and three children followed. But their fairytale life was quickly shattered by his illness.
“I’m a survivor,” she says. “As he got sicker, I got stronger.”
Too young to remember
Today, Joy Piccolo O’Connell splits her time between her home near Chicago and Marco Island. The Piccolo children, Lori, Traci and Kristi, are now 35, 34 and 32. O’Connell is grandmother to six, and another is on the way.
The girls were too young when their father died to remember much about him. But over the years, he’s come alive to them through people’s stories.
It was difficult for them to watch the movie, O’Connell says, “because it was hard for them to see him so sick.”
O’Connell says she sees Brian in her children and grandchildren. Kristi has the strongest resemblance, she says. She has Brian’s nose and his smile.
O’Connell laughs softly when she tells about a young real estate agent who recently asked if she were Brian Piccolo’s mother. Time moved on for her, but not him. “He’ll always be 26,” O’Connell says. (As their lives went in different directions, she also lost touch with Sayers, now a Chicago businessman.)
Three years after her husband’s death, Joy married Rich O’Connell, who owned ready-mix concrete companies. The family expanded to five children, with the birth of two sons, Mike and Tom.
Over the years, she brought the kids to Fort Lauderdale to visit her late husband’s parents. (Piccolo’s father died in Fort Lauderdale in 1986 and his mother, now 92, lives with son, Joe, in Tampa, where they moved a year ago. )
O’Connell recalls visiting Brian Piccolo Park during one of her visits and finding it “impressive.”
But Piccolo’s most far-reaching legacy is the Brian Piccolo Cancer Research Fund, which began as an impromptu fund-raising group of Piccolo’s friends, family and National Football League teammates.
That turned into a nonprofit organization, which has raised more than $6 million for cancer research. O’Connell is the fund’s chairwoman, and her daughters are involved, too. Piccolo’s children also started a popular Chicago road race, known as Brian’s Run, to raise money. In addition, a family friend, Jeannie Morris, contributes proceeds from her 1971 best-selling book Brian Piccolo, A Short Season, to the fund.
The research supported by the fund has made a difference, O’Connell says. The cancer that killed Piccolo, once virtually incurable, now has a cure rate of better than 50 percent. Testicular cancer, which is related to the disease that took his life, now has a 95 percent cure rate.
“Now I see that so much good has come of this,” O’Connell says. “It tells you, you can keep going forward. It tells you, you can make something good out of something tragic.”
Liz Doup can be reached at or 954-356-4722.
