When Chris Mello '98 hustled down the playing field during one of his many football and rugby games, he was a brute force to be admired and feared. As the 1993-94 co-captain of his Rye High School football team in Westchester County, New York, he led his team to the Class C State championship game, a first for the school.
During his four-year rugby career at the University, the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Mello also proved unafraid to fight his hardest and to persevere until the game clock ran out, even in the face of bloody noses and torn-up skin.
"I saw my sons [Mello and brother, J.D. '98] play over 200 football games. I had my heart in my mouth a thousand times," mused Mello's father, Doug, who recalls escorting Chris and his teammates to the emergency room after a close game against the University of Pennsylvania.
Even as Mello wowed spectators with his versatile offensive and defensive skills, often winning against players almost a full hundred pounds larger than he, to his friends and family, Mello remained their good-natured "Fuzzy," the nickname his father bestowed upon him shortly after his birth.
"Only his father called him that. Nobody else would cross that bridge," Doug Mello chuckled.
Chris Mello, 25, died this past Tuesday on American Airlines Flight 11, when the plane smashed into the World Trade Center almost an hour after taking off from Boston en route to Los Angeles.
But even at this difficult time, Mello's friends and family stress that Mello, who was just beginning to pursue an M.B.A., would encourage his loved ones to celebrate his life and the close relationships he was fortunate to have formed.
"He would not want anybody moping around and mourning," said Chris Halpin '98, one of Mello's best friends and roommate, first at Princeton and later in Boston, where Mello worked for Alta Communications.
"He would want people laughing and having a good time, just as if he were there and as if nothing had ever changed," Halpin added assuredly.
Throughout his short lifetime, Mello — a psychology major and president of Cottage Club at the University — indeed possessed a genuine thirst for life, which he shared wholeheartedly with his friends, family and girlfriend of two years, Kristy Walsh.
"He was a person of high character and high energy," said University Trustee Janet Morrison Clarke '75, who interviewed Mello when he was a high school senior and remained in contact with him once he was accepted early decision to the University.
"He wrote me a beautiful note after he got in and stayed in touch. That's not usual," Clarke added, with a definite sadness in her voice. "He would want us to live the way he lived — to be a leader, to do what's right and to be as good a person as you can be."
Mello's friends and loved ones cherished this sense of profound generosity and excitement that Mello embodied.
"He loved Princeton and he had extraordinary friendships," said Halpin, who recalled the exciting days he and Mello spent at the University's reunions celebrations, which the two attended each year since they were freshmen.
Mello also kept in touch with his high school and college friends through yearly gatherings such as New Years black-tie brunches and golf trips to Hilton Head, including one scheduled for just three weeks from now.
"It's painful to know he won't be there in the future — at reunions, weddings," Halpin said. "He was as great a guy as you'll ever meet. I was proud to be his friend."
Mello's parents share a similar loss — not only have they lost a child, one of the "greatest sons in the world," but they have also lost a dear friend.
"I don't think about him as a son, I think about him as a buddy," said Mello's father. "He would have traded everything for the opportunity to be a father," he said of his son, who loved children.
The Mellos plan to establish a fund in Chris' honor to benefit the local Rye YMCA, where Chris served as a youth advisor and summer camp counselor during high school and where his mother, Ellen, served as president for the past three years.
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