July 16, 1970 - Brian Piccolo, 26, Chicago Bears RB:
WAKE FOREST MAGAZINE, July 1970
BRIAN PICCOLO
Brian Piccolo, one of the greatest athletes in Wake Forest history died of cancer June 16 in New York's Memorial Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases. He was buried three days later in Saint Mary's Cemetery in Chicago after a requiem Mass at Christ the Ring Roman Catholic Church.
The 26-year-old football star is survived by hits wife, Joy, and three young daughters. He is also survived by lingering admiration for hits courageous spirit, which was evidenced even more in his final battle against death than in his life's many contests on the football field. The University athletic department plans to establish some sort of memorial, although the details hate not get been worked out.
To an Athlete Dying Young
FROM THE WINSTON-SALEM Journal JULY 17, 1970
The death of young athletes carries an added burden of grief – that one so young, so full of vitality and strength loses in the struggle for life.
Brian Piccolo, who was a football player of All-American stature at Wake Forest, is dead at the age of 26. Piccolo was the tougher-than-nails back, the gutsy player who faced a line which towered over him, and ground out the yardage time and time again. The greatness of his playing dramatizes the irony of his death: young Piccolo seemed so durable, so sturdy that he was the man invariably called on to get the first down.
When Brian was a senior he led the nation in scoring as a back and in rushing. He was voted ACC Player of the Year. In this past decade when football success was at low ebb for Wake Forest, the name and record of Brian Piccolo almost alone added victory and lustre. After graduation he broke into the pro line-up signing as a free agent with the Chicago Bears.
Fans watched him on and off the football field. On Saturday afternoons he brought crowds to their feet with his runs. But all during the week at Wake Forest he was admired and loved by his classmates, some of whom admitted to outright hero-worship.
He was an immensely popular student, an outstanding speaker; his appearance in theatre productions always gave audiences the special pleasure of seeing a fine athlete become a real artist. A classmate recalls with particular tenderness Piccolo's being moved almost to tears by a reading of Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality Frorn Recollections of Early Childhood."
Piccolo's Bear teammate, Gale Sayers, perhaps voiced the most fitting epitaph last month when he was presented an award as pro football's most courageous player by the New York Football Writers. The trophy should not have gone to him at all, Sayers said, it should have gone to Brian Piccolo. "Compare his courage with that I am supposed to possess." Sayers told the writers, then later gave the trophy to Piccolo.
Brian Piccolo lost the final battle to cancer, but throughout his young life he played the classic role of a winner. His immortality is etched in the memories of those who cheered him, of his wife and young children who survive, in the records he established for the school he loved, and in the strength and character of all young athletes who are brave both in victory and in loss.