The morning after Gale Sayers accepted the George S. Halas Award, the trophy with Brian Piccolo’s name taped over his own, he brought it to the hospital and asked Joy Piccolo if he could have it buried with her late husband. Joy refused. She wanted to keep it.
That trophy, with another man’s name pasted over the one that was supposed to be his, remained in Joy Piccolo’s home for the rest of her life. Most people believe the story ended with that famous award speech. It did not. What happened in the eight months between Piccolo’s diagnosis and the morning Sayers could not speak is a part of the story that is rarely told.
It is not the story of a friendship, which is already well known. It is the story of what that friendship cost: phone calls from hotel rooms that were never really about football, a promise made to three daughters too young to understand it, and a morning in June 1970 when Sayers sat alone in a Chicago hospital room with a trophy he no longer wanted. In November 1969, the Chicago Bears were on the road. Gale Sayers was in a hotel room after a game.
He picked up the phone and called Brian Piccolo at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Piccolo had been there for less than two weeks. He had just come out of a four-and-a-half-hour surgery to remove a tumor from his chest. Doctors had estimated the tumor to be baseball-sized.
When they removed it, it was closer to a grapefruit. Piccolo was 26 years old. He had begun recording his thoughts on a tape recorder because he had plans to write a book. When he answered the phone, he wanted to know about the game.
Not about the surgery. Not about what the doctors had said. He asked how the offensive line held up. He asked whether Sayers found the cutback on third down.
He asked what Sayers thought about the next opponent. Sayers answered every question. He did not ask about the pain. He did not ask about the prognosis.
Piccolo never brought those things up, and so Sayers never brought them up either. The call lasted as long as it lasted. Then Sayers hung up in whatever city he was in that week and went back to being a professional football player. This happened again the following week and the week after that.
For eight months, every road trip followed the same ritual. The Bears played in Detroit, Minnesota, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Every time the team left Chicago, Sayers called. Every time, Piccolo ran the conversation.
He asked about field conditions, about which defensive backs were giving Sayers trouble, about whether the line opened the holes the way they had drawn them up. By every account of people who knew him, Piccolo was still thinking about the next season. Still talking about coming back. Sayers described these calls in his autobiography, “I Am Third.
” What he wrote about was not the grief. It was the humor. Piccolo always had a joke, always had a dig. He was the same as he had been in the locker room before any of this started.
When Piccolo was first diagnosed, his stated concern, the thing he kept coming back to, was not himself. Sayers wrote about this directly. Piccolo’s only concern from the very first conversation after the diagnosis was his wife Joy and his three small daughters: Lori, Tracy, and Kristi. The youngest was barely old enough to form clear memories.
The oldest was seven. Piccolo had been a football player long enough to read a game plan and understand what it said. He read this one too. What he came back to in those months of surgeries, chemotherapy, and phone calls about football that were never really about football was not what was going to happen to him.
It was what was going to happen to his family after he was gone. He asked Sayers to watch over them. Sayers said yes. Not a speech.
Not a long moment of silence. Just yes. The way he answered any question Piccolo ever asked him. Directly and without performance.
The same way he had answered every question since they had been put in the same hotel room in 1967 and figured out how to be friends. By April 1970, Piccolo had been through three major operations at Sloan Kettering. The second had been a radical mastectomy, an operation so extensive that Jeannie Morris, the journalist documenting Piccolo’s illness for what would become “Brian Piccolo: A Short Season,” described it as extremely mutilating. Piccolo felt very frustrated and extremely mutilated afterward, Morris reported.
The third operation removed his left lung and left pectoral muscle entirely. After the third, the doctors determined the cancer had continued spreading to his liver. There was no fourth surgery to schedule. The surgeons had done everything they could.
Less than five percent of patients with Piccolo’s cancer lived five years. His surgeon, Dr. Edward Beatty, had told him after the first operation that it had been a success. Piccolo spent weeks telling friends he was cured.
He died six months later. Piccolo came home from New York and spent his final weeks in Chicago, rarely leaving the house, in pain that Morris described without euphemism. The phone calls from hotel rooms kept coming until they could not anymore. On the morning of June 16, 1970, Gale Sayers was in a hospital in Chicago.
He was not visiting Piccolo. He had been admitted himself, being treated for strep throat. His wife Linda called him that morning. She told him that Brian Piccolo had died early that morning at Memorial Hospital in New York.
Joy was with him. Sayers wrote that he could not speak, not for the rest of that day. He was discharged from the hospital that afternoon. He went home and found that the George S.
Halas Award trophy had arrived from New York, the one with Piccolo’s name taped over his. He sat down and wrote Brian’s name again on a fresh piece of paper and pasted it over his own name on the trophy. The next morning, he went to the wake and brought the trophy with him. He told Joy he wanted it buried with Brian.
Joy said no. She wanted to keep it. That was her answer for the rest of her life. The funeral was held on June 19 at Christ the King Catholic Church in Chicago.
Six of Piccolo’s Bears teammates served as pallbearers: Sayers, Dick Butkus, Ed O’Bradovich, Mike Pyle, Randy Jackson, and Ralph Kurek. Sayers went through the entire service, by his own account, like a sleepwalker. The only line he could clearly recall afterward was one sentence from the mass. “The virtuous man, though he dies before his time, will find rest.
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Piccolo was buried at Saint Mary Catholic Cemetery in Evergreen Park, Illinois. He was 26 years old. His daughters were 7, 5, and 3. In the months that followed, Sayers finished writing “I Am Third.
” The chapter on Piccolo was 18 pages. He described the hospital visits, the phone calls from hotel rooms, the way Piccolo talked about football until he could not anymore. He described what it had meant to be his roommate, his competitor, his friend. The book was published that same year.
The following year, ABC turned it into “Brian’s Song. ” Fifty-five million Americans watched it. They cried at the ending. Sayers did not need to watch it to know how it ended.
He already knew exactly how it ended. He had been there. Gale Sayers was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1977 at the age of 34, the youngest inductee in its history. He died in 2020 at 77.
Joy Piccolo kept the trophy. She kept it with his name on it, the name that was not supposed to be there, in her home, exactly where she said it would stay.