In the heights: Denis Frisoli and the ‘Tower of Death’
Home News Tribune
13 May 2009
Home News Tribune
You might be forgiven for believing Denis Frisoli is touching the sky. He is drifting, drifting, a tiny white figure planted atop a unicycle more than 35 feet tall, balancing above the ground, threading through eight orange cones.
He is a natural.
Thirty-five feet above the ground, Frisoli was in his glory.
On the ground, things were more complicated.
As a young man in the early 1980s, the Edison native whipped up a daredevil unicycling act. The newspapers called him the “cyclist of death” and the “Evil Knievel” of unicycling. Reporters referred to his unicycle as the “Tower of Death.”
Frisoli teetered high above the ground, performing during halftime at New York Cosmos soccer games at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, entertaining fans during a break in the action at Philadelphia 76ers basketball games at the Spectrum. Frisoli presented his act at Old Bridge Township Raceway Park, got his picture in The New York Post, nabbed local and national TV gigs.
But in June 1982, the “Tower of Death” became too dangerous, even for Frisoli: As his brothers tell it, Frisoli got the wheel stuck and tumbled to the AstroTurf at Giants Stadium, fracturing his pelvis and suffering broken bones in his arm, back, foot and legs. Family members say doctors predicted Frisoli would never walk again, but he did.
Two of Frisoli’s older brothers say now that Denis never recovered emotionally from that injury all those years ago. Bob and David Frisoli say Denis was on the cusp of something big, and he couldn’t let go.
On New Year’s Day 2009, Bob found Denis dead in the basement of the family home in North Edison, where they lived together with their mother, Louise. A police investigation determined that his death was a suicide. Frisoli was 49.
“He was different from the rest of the people in the world,” says David Frisoli, 66. “He never showed (any) fear. It should have been a signal.” Still, David says, Denis “had all the courage in the family. . . . He was depressed. He came close to being a star, and it never came to realization.”
Frisoli did not touch the sky alone; the Frisoli family helped him. David was a whiz at designing unicycles; Bob, now 58, promoted the act, and Mark, now 53 and living in North Brunswick, helped finance it. (Brother Patrick, 71, lives in Alabama.) The family ran DMF Cycles in Avenel until about five years ago.
“I worried about him,” Bob says. But Denis “wanted to do it. We made sure he could do it.”
Shortly after Frisoli’s death, I observe him on a DVD recording of a television show called “You Asked For it,” hosted by Rich Little.
“It’s amazing to see what people will do to get up in the world,” Little wisecracks, commenting on Frisoli’s 1981 “Tower of Death” demonstration at Old Bridge Township Raceway Park.
“I want to do something no one else in the world is doing,” a handsome, curly-haired Denis says to the “You Asked For It” reporter. The reporter tells the TV audience the feat is so perilous the “Guinness Book of World Records” (now known as Guinness World Records) refuses to record it.
David and Bob claim their brother set the world record for riding the tallest unicycle unassisted, at 35 1/2 feet, in 1981, when he was 21 years old. An article published at the time in the Courier News details the controversy, stating: “The Guinness Book will not recognize Frisoli’s feat because the stunt was performed without the use of safety belts or harnesses.”
Bob and David say their younger brother went on to try his hand at professional kickboxing in the 1990s, then taught karate in South River. But he was never the same.
David likens his little brother to big-screen boxer Rocky Balboa.
“Denis was the real Rocky Balboa because he had courage and nerves of steel,” David tells me. “He wasn’t afraid of injury or death. It should have been a signal.”
Laurie Granieri: 732-565-7333; lgranieri@MyCentralJersey.com