With Adriano Belli's retirement, the CFL and its Argos are losing one of the great characters.
There are character people and people who are characters.
Adriano Belli is a bit of both.
The burly defensive lineman announced his retirement on Wednesday, 10 years after he began his Canadian Football League career in 2001.
You’ve heard of 2001: A Space Oddity? Belli was just an oddity.
"He's a little misunderstood like a lot of us," Rob Murphy, a teammate of Belli, said.
Who else would announce his retirement aboard a tall ship, dressed like a sailor in blue and white togs and shoes? Afterall, he was a proud member of the Boatmen.
Family members, friends, teammates, cheerleaders and even the mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, came on board to give him a sendoff as he sets sail on a new journey in his life.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my new replacement," he said to the mayor, who is a huge football fan.
Then he began his speech.
"All this for a defensive tackle," he said. "For the preservation of quarterbacks across the league, I'm stepping down from my duties of defensive tackle and I'm glad to do so as a Toronto Argonaut in my hometown. Absolutely."
He then saluted the cheerleaders, asking the crowd to give them a round of applause. He was in his element.
"You can do better than that, boys," he said to prompt greater applause.
"Only Adriano Belli can get away with what he says," teammate Jeff Johnson said to me.
"Today is not about Adriano Belli," Belli began, sounding a little like Gary Cooper playing the role of Lou Gehrig, but in the uniform of a deckhand instead of the New York Yankees' pinstripes.
"It's about the Toronto Argonauts and the Canadian Football League and how proud I am to have been part of this league and how proud I am to have crushed quarterbacks. But proud to be Canadian as well. I got a chance to experience all of Canada from the Rockies in British Columbia to the smoked meat in Montreal. I've enjoyed all the great things of this great league. It has given me so much.
"This is about our league," referencing the CFL slogan. "It's about our league and what we can do to preserve it. I'm very proud to have been a CFL player and we as Canadians need to preserve our game and realize that it's better than any game out there."
I first met Adriano in the year 2000. He had just been drafted by the B.C. Lions out of the University of Houston and stopped by the Toronto Argonauts’ football operation office, wondering how he could play for the team. I told him the Lions had his rights, and wondered what he was thinking about showing up another team’s headquarters.
The resident of Mississauga had grown up in Toronto and lived and worked near the Argos’ training base, so his desire to play for the team, notwithstanding that he had just been drafted by another team, was understandable, albeit a bit odd.
But that about sums up Belli.
He was -- and always will be -- a different kind of guy, except now he won’t be playing football.
So that means he won’t be able to tug away at the nether regions of opposing players underneath a mass of humanity on the field or trash talk them at the line of scrimmage. He seemed to enjoy directing comments at Hamilton centre Marwan Hage, who happens to be one of his closet friends. But that didn’t stop him from once getting into a physical tussle with Hage.
Hage was at the gathering, proof that Argos and Ticats occasionally get along.
Belli took his fair share of penalties, usually for undisciplined play, costing his team valuable yardage. One coach took him to task, likening what Belli did to professional wrestling, and put him on notice. Belli did his best to control himself. The coach, meanwhile, lasted only a year.
Belli was kicked out of numerous games, and was suspended by the CFL -- the very league he saluted with his words -- from the first game of the 2010 regular season for charging into the Montreal Alouettes’ dressing room after a tough playoff loss -- the previous fall!
But he had a side to him that you couldn’t help but admire. He liked to laugh at himself and his body frame. Let’s just say he wasn’t a slave to exercise.
He became known as The Kissing Bandit early in his career, for giving grandmothers, kids, teammates, members of the media and just about everyone else a friendly peck on the cheek. He said it was because of his Italian background and he was just a big, loveable guy. Few people had any issues with it, although at least one coach who liked to exude a macho image seemed to tense up when Belli offered him a peck.
Belli once sang the Canadian national anthem in uniform before an Argo home game. He had a smile on his face the whole time, so proud of what he had done but more about being a proud Canadian. . He raised money for the SickKids Foundation through his Big Kiss Fund, which consisted of various initiatives.
This past off-season he wrestled with arguably the biggest decision of his life. The wear and tear of football had worn down his body and he wanted to retire. And when he didn’t sign a contract with Toronto and became a free agent on February 16, the Tiger-Cats, with whom he played before, showed serious interest. He gave it some thought, but in the end decided that he wanted to retire an Argo.
"This was all his idea," Argo president Bob Nicholson told me when I asked him if the team helped to co-ordinate the event. "He wanted to have a party."
And it was.
The ship that he did his farewell speech aboard was called Kajama. It could have just as easily been called the Love Boat.
