Kevin DiCicco, as the owner of a basketball-playing golden retriever named Buddy, helped hint at the profitable, long-term venture Air bud Franchise, is dead. He was 63 years old.
DiCicco, who had respiratory problems and had recently experienced homelessness, died Saturday at a nursing home in San Diego, his brother Mark told TMZ.
DiCicco adopted Buddy after finding him near his cabin in the Sierra Nevada in 1989. He trained the dog to play basketball, baseball, American football, etc., and they appeared on America’s funniest home videos and parts of David Letterman’s “Stupid Pet Tricks.”
“My obsession with sports, his obsession with playing ball, and the combination of the two created this tremendous athletic dog,” DiCicco said of Buddy in a 2024 interview.
He launched Air Bud Productions and the first film in 1997 Air buddirected by Charles Martin Smith, features Buddy as a circus dog who escapes his cruel clown master (Michael Jeter) and leads Josh Frahm’s (Kevin Zegers) high school basketball team to the championship.
The family-friendly film, produced by Keystone Entertainment and Disney’s Miramax, grossed $23 million on a $3 million budget, and was followed by a big-screen sequel, Air Bud: Golden Recipient (1988), and direct-to-video releases in 2000, ’02, ’03, ’06, ’08, ’09, ’11 and ’12 (featuring titles such as Air buddies, Snow buddies and Santa friends). And another Air bud The movie is on the way.
Buddy died in February 1998 at the age of 9 – and only appeared in the first film – but DiCicco raised and trained three of his sons to keep things going.
Although the films have grossed more than $200 million by some estimates, DiCicco said he hasn’t made much money.
“It was very cleverly designed to make sure that these films would never get a lot of money,” he said. “That’s why we now find ourselves in a situation where instead of enjoying those twilight years and sliding into retirement, we almost have to start over.”
DiCicco said he lost his job as a real estate manager during the pandemic, became homeless, suffered from clinical depression and developed chronic obstructive pulmonary disease due to medical marijuana use, forcing him to use an oxygen tank to help him breathe. Money from the GoFundMe page helped him keep going.
