Kevin DiCicco, Owner of Buddy, the Canine Star of ‘Air Bud,’ Dies at 63

Kevin DiCicco with one of his golden retrievers. Acey Harper/Getty Images

Kevin DiCicco, who as the owner of the basketball-playing golden retriever named Buddy helped tip off the lucrative, long-running Air Bud franchise, has died. He was 63.

DiCicco, who suffered from respiratory issues and had a recent bout with homelessness, died Saturday in hospice care in San Diego, his brother Mark told TMZ.

DiCicco adopted Buddy after finding him near his Sierra Nevada cabin in 1989. He trained the dog to play basketball, baseball, football, soccer, etc., and they appeared on America’s Funniest Home Videos and on installments of David Letterman’s “Stupid Pet Tricks.”

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“My obsession with sport, and his obsession with ball playing, the combination of the two, created this tremendous canine athlete,” DiCicco said of Buddy in a 2024 interview.

He launched Air Bud Productions, and the first film, 1997’s Air Bud, directed by Charles Martin Smith, features Buddy as a circus dog who escapes his cruel clown master (Michael Jeter) and leads Josh Framm’s (Kevin Zegers) school basketball team to a championship.

The family-friendly movie, from Keystone Entertainment and Disney’s Miramax label, grossed $23 million on a $3 million budget and was followed by a big-screen sequel, Air Bud: Golden Receiver (1988), and direct-to-video releases in 2000, ’02, ’03, ’06, ’08, ’09, ’11 and ’12 (featuring such titles as Air Buddies, Snow Buddies and Santa Buddies). And another Air Bud film is on the way.

Buddy died in February 1998 at age 9 — he only appeared in the first film — but DiCicco bred and trained three of his offspring to keep things going.

‘Air Bud: Seventh Inning Fetch’ was released straight to video in 2002. Buena Vista Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

Even though the films by some estimates have raked in more than $200 million, DiCicco said he didn’t receive much of the profits.

“They are so cleverly crafted to make sure that these films don’t really ever receive the big money,” he said. “That’s why we now find ourselves in a position of instead of enjoying those twilight years and sliding into retirement, we’re almost having to start over.”

DiCicco said he lost his job as a property manager during the pandemic, became homeless and clinically depressed and developed COPD from using medical marijuana, forcing him to use an oxygen tank to help him breathe. Money from a GoFundMe page helped him keep going.