Howard Nielsen, owner of Park Avenue's Chester Cab Pizza, spent the last three years collecting photographs and film clips, and compiling the documentary. He went to great lengths to keep the documentary historically correct, even using a former 1947 team member and a resident of Boys Town, Nebraska for one of the voiceovers.

The film, financed entirely by Nielsen himself, was truly a labor of love for the novice filmmaker, but one that he thinks will appeal to sports fans and history buffs alike.

"I don't want the movie to be tagged as just an Aquinas football story, because it's really more than that," he says.

What strikes Nielsen most about the story is the impact coach Harry Wright made in the Rochester community in the three-year span that he coached and the way that people can still recall stories about him even some fifty years after he left the Aquinas program. Nielsen even thinks that Aquinas Institute may have been the first team in the country, college or professional, to use Kodak's Kodachrome color film on a regular basis in filming its games. Carl Heuer, team photographer, seconds that opinion.

In order to appeal to a national audience, Nielsen wove other pieces of history into the story, including a World War II montage played to Kate Smith's rendition of "God Bless America" and scenes of a typical 1940s "Main Street."

The videotape version of "When Football Was Bigger Than Life," a documentary chronicling the heyday of Aquinas football, has been flying off the shelves since going on sale last fall. It can be purchased at Wegman's Video Departments, Border's Bookstore in Henrietta, Parkleigh on Park Avenue, and at Chester Cab Pizza at 707 Park Avenue.

"The tape seems to be a big seller with women who are looking for that hard-to-find gift for the man in the family," says the first-time filmmaker.

In addition to local retail locations, copies of the tape can be ordered by calling Single Wing Productions at 716-271-2135. The tape costs $19.95, plus NY sales tax.

To date, more than 1400 copies of the video have hit the store shelves or have been mailed throughout the country, and that has made local writer and producer Howard Nielsen very happy.