Courtesy Regina Leader Post:

We all say family is important and nearly all of us take it for granted.

Wally Buono doesn’t.

Even before his friend Bob Ackles died Sunday of a heart attack, Buono’s family values — not a euphemism for bigoted conservatism, but fierce affection and appreciation for those nearest him — were unassailable. He knows what he has, and what he could lose.

Buono’s father, Michele, died when his youngest boy was eight and not long after the family moved to Montreal from Potenza, Italy. Buono’s mother, Carmela, with neither of our official languages nor means to support her two sons, sent Wally and his older brother Rocco to live in a boys reformatory in the Laurentian Mountains.

They were there 3 1/2 years — a family of two among the orphans and delinquents and the abandoned. Tell me you wouldn’t appreciate family after that.

Four years ago, Wally signed a death waiver and underwent triple by-pass surgery. Carmela Buono is stricken with Alzheimers back in Montreal. So Buono knows about family. He gets it.

And for two days he has been unable to speak about Ackles, the B.C. Lions’ president, without emotions surging like a tidal wave from that rebuilt heart and swamping him.

Buono briefly walked away from a drill during the Lions’ practice Monday in Surrey to speak with his grown daughter, Christie, who handed her dad a note and gave him a hug amid the sweating, grunting players who count on Buono for leadership and stability.

“I’m here for moral support,” Christie said. “My dad is my rock, so it’s hard to see him like this.”

Sunday, B.C.’s head coach could barely choke out a few words at a hasty press conference to talk about losing Ackles, his partner in saving the Lions after Ackles hired Buono from the Calgary Stampeders 51/2 years ago.

Monday, after practising for a Friday game in Winnipeg that would seem irrelevant if it hadn’t been so damn important to Ackles that the Lions win, Buono tried to downplay his personal grief in what must be the toughest work week of his life.

“I’ve never been a coward,” he said. “It’s not going to make me go hide because you could be in bed sleeping.”

But after the television cameras and microphones were withdrawn, Buono allowed himself to cry a little, the small price for speaking about his friend.

“You know what it does? It shows again how vulnerable we all are,” he said. “You think: I’ve got a three-year contract. I’ll do that, then do this. I’ve got to get ready for next week’s game. There’s never a pause to think something like this could happen.

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