Gale Sayers, one of the greatest running backs in NFL history, died on September 23, 2020, at his home in Wakarusa, Indiana, from complications of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. He was 77 years old. The man who once stood on a stage in New York and moved a room full of professional football players to tears with four words spent his final years unable to remember the speech, the stage, or, on some days, the friend he had begged the world to love. That friend was Brian Piccolo.
Sayers first made his name in Omaha, Nebraska, where he grew up as the son of a mechanic in a deeply athletic family. His older brother was a world-class runner, and his younger brother would go on to play professionally as a defensive back. In his senior year of high school, Sayers broke the state record in the long jump. At the University of Kansas, he became a two-time All-American and once returned a kick 99 yards against Nebraska.
There, he earned the nickname “The Kansas Comet,” because “fast” was not a sufficient word for what he could do on a football field. The Chicago Bears selected Sayers with the fourth overall pick in the 1965 NFL Draft. In his rookie season, he scored 22 touchdowns, a rookie record that still stands more than 60 years later. He scored six touchdowns in a single game, a feat no one in NFL history has matched or surpassed.
Before he turned 23, he had amassed more than 2,200 all-purpose yards. Dick Butkus, the legendary linebacker drafted one spot before him, spent the next several years trying to stop him in practice and later admitted that seeing him in person was even more impressive than watching his highlight films. For three seasons, no one could touch him. That changed in November 1968, when San Francisco 49ers defensive back Kermit Alexander hit Sayers low on a wide running play at Wrigley Field.
Sayers suffered torn ligaments in his right knee. His season ended, and with it went the elusiveness that had made him unstoppable. He spent the entire winter rehabilitating, supported daily by his roommate, Brian Piccolo, who refused to let his friend give in to the injury. Remarkably, the comeback worked.
In his first preseason game back, Sayers returned a kickoff 94 yards against the Washington Redskins in Vince Lombardi’s first game as head coach. During the regular season, he led the NFL in rushing again, not with his old style but by running between tackles as a completely different kind of back. He was named the league’s Comeback Player of the Year. That season remains one of the most remarkable in NFL history, yet almost no one remembers it because of what happened next.
That same year, Brian Piccolo was diagnosed with cancer after leaving a game gasping for breath. Sayers stayed by his side through surgeries and bad news and donated blood for his friend. In May 1970, Sayers stood at a dinner in New York to accept an award for his own courageous comeback from the knee injury. Instead, he gave the moment to his dying friend.
“I love Brian Piccolo, and I’d like all of you to love him too,” he said. What most people forget is what also happened to Gale Sayers that same brutal year. In a preseason game, his left knee gave out. He tried to play through it, limped through the season opener, and then injured himself again chasing a fumble in Week Four.
Surgery ended his season after just two games. The miracle of 1969 would not repeat itself. He attempted one final comeback in 1971, but it failed. After fumbling twice in three carries during a 1972 preseason game, he retired days later.
He was 29 years old, an age when most elite running backs are just beginning their prime. Within about two years, Sayers had watched his closest friend die and his career end quietly, all while the country was still applauding him for a speech about another man’s courage. After retirement, Sayers did not dwell in nostalgia. He worked in the athletic department at the University of Kansas, served as athletic director at Southern Illinois University, worked as a stockbroker, and built a computer supply company from scratch that eventually became a technology consulting firm serving Fortune 1000 companies.
He and his wife, Ardie, spent decades funding a cause that had nothing to do with football: an adoption center in the Chicago suburbs built specifically to find homes for African American children no one else was reaching, plus an after-school program on Chicago’s West Side for kids who needed tutoring and mentoring. The same man who once said, “I am third, the Lord first, my friends second, and myself last,” spent the next four decades of his life quietly proving the truth of that statement. Then, in September 2013, at age 70, while still in good health, Sayers was diagnosed with dementia. A doctor at the Mayo Clinic determined, according to Sayers’s wife, that football was the likely cause.
It was not the dramatic concussions people usually imagine but something quieter and more persistent, repeated thousands of times over seven professional seasons and a college career before that. Ardie later explained that it was not about blows to the head but about the brain shaking when the body hit the ground. The same hits that made the legend were, according to his doctors, the ones slowly unraveling the man beneath the helmet. That same month, Sayers did something almost no legend of his generation had dared to do: he sued the NFL.
The lawsuit alleged that the league had negligently handled head injuries, that he had been sent back into games after concussions, and that the sport knew more than it told its players. Months later, he joined six other former players in filing another suit. Whatever the courts ultimately decided, the message had been sent. His family kept the diagnosis private for four years.
When Ardie finally spoke openly in 2017, she said she was not asking for sympathy but correcting rumors about her husband’s condition and shedding light on what families like hers endured behind closed doors. By that time, Sayers could no longer sign his name steadily. His brother Roger put it plainly: “It’s hard to spend your whole life building memories, and then one day you realize you don’t remember any of them. ” Ardie used old game films and photo puzzles, trying patiently day after day to bring back fragments of her husband’s history.
Some days it worked, barely. Most days it did not. Roger also admitted that as his brother’s memory faded, some people found ways to quietly take advantage of him. The fastest man the NFL had ever measured, the man who was impossible to catch, had become, in the cruelest way possible, one of the easiest people in the world to ambush.
In 2019, at the Chicago Bears’ 100th anniversary celebration, Sayers appeared in public one final time, arriving in a wheelchair. Former teammates and fans who had not seen him in years said goodbye without a single word. When he died a year later, Dick Butkus, the man who spent his career trying to stop him in practice, offered a simple tribute: they had lost one of the greatest Bears players ever and, more importantly, a great human being. What makes this ending so difficult to accept is not just that a legend forgot his own legend.
It is what the forgetting could not touch. Long before the diagnosis, before the cameras and the awards and the banquet halls, Sayers had written the one sentence that mattered most to him, the sentence that named his memoir and that he lived by since he was old enough to understand the cost of losing a friend: “The Lord first, my friends second, and I am third. ” Dementia could erase the speech that made him famous. It could erase his name from his own hand.
But it never touched the ordering he had placed at the center of his life for decades.