Nick Buoniconti, who anchored the Miami Dolphins' No-Name Defense of the 1970s Super Bowl teams and co-founded The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, died on Wednesday. He was 78.
Buoniconti's football accomplishments would be life-defining for most players, from being inducted into the Hall of Fame to winning two Super Bowls to being inducted into the de facto Hall of Fame of two teams, the Dolphins and New England Patriots.
Yet his life's work, as he defined it, began with the crushing tragedy of his son, Marc, being paralyzed while playing college football in 1985. He sat at Marc's hospital bedside and promised to do everything he could to see him walk again.
That led to founding The Miami Project with Dr. Barth Green, then raising nearly a half-billion dollars over the following decades to fund medical research for a cure to paralysis.
In recent years, Buoncionti went public with his dementia, which he said resulted in chronic tramatic encephalopathy (CTE) from playing football.
