On an August night in 2001, two people who had never met—each of them unaware that the other existed— Bianca was in Homestead, about 30 minutes from Miami, a mom, homeowner and holder of two jobs, she had been single for a year after ending a five-year relationship with the father of her 3-year-old son, D’Aundre Holmes. Wilfork was at the University of Miami. They saw each other for the first time in mid-October, and the relationship continued to accelerate. It couldn’t go too fast, though, because of D’Aundre. He still hadn’t met Vince. When it happened, the kid, who had just turned 4 in September, stared down one of the biggest and baddest 300-plus-pound linemen in the state.
“What’s up, li’l man?” Vince said.
“Wassup?” replied the boy, still not sure what to make of Vince’s presence.
The hesitation lasted hours, if that long. The next few times they saw each other it was, “Where we goin’ today, Vince?” Soon after, in December, Vince had moved off campus and into Bianca’s house in Homestead. He told his father, to whom he told everything, and he thought it was cool. The person Vince didn’t tell, out of fear, was his mother. He knew Barbara Wilfork, a 90-minute drive away in Boynton Beach, wouldn’t be happy with the living arrangements nor the relationship itself. So he didn’t tell his mom, which in turn annoyed his new girlfriend.
“Look, dude. This is ridiculous,” she fumed one day. “You have two choices: Either you make your lies your truth or you make your truth your lies. If you tell your mama you stay on campus, go take your *** back to the dorms. Or you live here and, you know, be a man.”
He nodded, but he didn’t have the conversation. And then one day the cell phone Bianca bought for him rang. But Vince was in the shower, so his girlfriend answered.
“Who’s this?” asked the surprised female voice on the other end of the line.
“This is Vince’s girlfriend. Who’s this?”
“This is Vincent’s mom. Can I talk to him?”
Bianca happily walked into the bathroom and put the phone to Vince’s ear.
While three-quarters of the Wilforks—Vince and his father and brother, both named David—didn’t have an issue with Bianca, Barbara did. The men loved Bianca’s food, her knowledge of sports, and her affinity for the soulful Luther Vandross. Barbara, though, had concerns. She didn’t like that there was a “baby’s daddy” who factored into the relationship, and she wasn’t crazy about the age difference. Bianca assured her that her son’s father wouldn’t be a problem. She also pointed out that Vince had a 3.4 grade-point average while living with her, partly because she forced him to do his work so he could set an example for young D’Aundre.
Things were better after the talk. Briefly. The new concerns were more serious. David Wilfork, who was dad to all of them, Bianca included, was not doing well. It was early 2002. The elder Wilfork was in his late 40s, but he had diabetes and walked with a cane. His engaging personality sometimes hid how he was feeling. Asked how he was doing, he was likely to say, “If I was any better I’d be perfect.”
He was a man who caught, cut and cleaned fish with his boys; who taught his younger son, Vince, to love the number 75 and appreciate the techniques of the defensive line; a father and friend who had so much respect from his then-20-year-old son that the son once said, “Everything he said to me, I believed every bit of it. My daddy was everything. He’d tell me to run through a brick wall and I’m asking him how hard? Which one? How do you want me to do it?”
David Wilfork passed in June. Before he died, Vince slipped a University of Miami championship ring—won during Vince’s freshman year—onto his finger.
“When I lost my father, everything stopped,” Vince recalled recently. “I was devastated. It was kind of expected. He had been sick. When he told me he was dying, I kind of felt that it was time. It hurt me, but I kind of prepared. Still, I lost the best friend I had in life.”
It was a sad time and an awkward one. Although Barbara obviously knew about Bianca, she hadn’t met her in person. The first time she did, funeral arrangements were being made. Mr. Wilfork and Bianca had grown into friends in less than a year, just like Vince and Bianca.
“When it came time for Vince and his brother and his mom to go to the funeral home, they took me with them and I hated every second of it,” Bianca said last month. “I was thinking, ‘I shouldn’t be here. It’s private.’ It was very uncomfortable. So for the first time in my life, I didn’t say anything. I just sat there and listened.”
She heard about insurance policies, wills, burial arrangements. And if it was already a difficult time to begin building something with Barbara, the news she had was going to complicate things further. On the same day Mr. Wilfork was buried, Bianca got back home and took a pregnancy test. Positive.
“Well, I’ll help y’all with this one,” Barbara said when she got the news, “but no more after that.”
Something transformative was happening with Barbara and Vince. They always had similar personalities, so similar that they often found themselves going round and round in hopeless arguments. But when Vince lost his best friend, he discovered a new one in his mother. They’d talk, go to the grocery store together, discuss games, and bounce around baby names. In fact, Barbara was going to have the honor of naming the child Bianca was carrying.
Everything was put on hold in November 2002 when Barbara had a stroke. She was taken to Bethesda Memorial Hospital, the same hospital her husband was in earlier that year, in the same room.
“I’d walk in the room and look at her and it was like I was looking at my daddy all over again,” Vince said. “Same hospital. Same room. Bethesda Memorial; I hate that place. I hate it to this day. I don’t know why they did it that way. When I walked in there it was mama there, but I was seeing my daddy. It freaked me out.”
By this time, with one national championship on his résumé, Vince was one of the best defensive linemen in the country. He was instinctive and smart, deceptively tall and fast. He was also heartbroken. Despite having the talent to play in the National Football League one day, he was losing interest. He was told that his mother was getting better and in line for a release from the hospital. And then she passed in mid-December.
Bianca suddenly understood why it hadn’t been wrong for her to be in the funeral home with the Wilforks six months earlier. She took over the job of separating insurance policies and getting affairs in order for Barbara, who was so focused on arrangements for David that she hadn’t planned for herself. Vince was 21. As he thought about where to go next in the new year, a baby girl arrived.
“When she was born, that outweighed everything,” Vince said. “It took a lot of weight off our shoulders and we said, ‘We have our own family now.’ I think she basically overpowered everything. It went from ‘Why this?’ and ‘Why that?’ to moving forward.”
They saw their baby girl, innocent, alert and healthy, and they were reminded of how all things, joyful and sad alike, had unfolded in their lives. They thought of the lives lost as well as their expanding young family. So they named the baby Destiny Barbara.
Marriage, at that point, was anticlimactic. They considered themselves married when they moved in together in late 2001. Still, one month before the 2004 NFL draft (3-3-04, which Bianca has tattooed on her fingers) they decided to get married in Vegas. Bianca interrupted a magical run at roulette, exchanged vows with the man she loved and then returned to her hot table. It was such a bizarre trip that even the Patriots called during it and asked Vince if he wanted to take part in a predraft workout.
He chuckled. “I said, ‘I’m in Vegas. Plus, y’all don’t draft players from Miami, no way. No thanks.”’
He went back to gambling, they returned to Miami with a profit, and a month later the Patriots drafted him. They were growing as a couple, too, learning to define their roles as husband and wife as well as mommy and daddy. They were so good at both that when Kennard McGuire first met them, he thought, “They’re too good to be true.”
McGuire, an agent who now represents Vince and about 30 other pro athletes, considers the Wilforks family. They vacation together every year, and his kids refer to the Wilforks as Aunt Bianca and Uncle Vince. All say they’d list each other on their emergency contact list.
Of all his clients, McGuire was asked, how many had wives and girlfriends as vocal as Bianca?
“None at all,” he said with a laugh. “It’s refreshing from the standpoint that she has awareness and knowledge. I encourage them to be involved.” Bianca’s involvement entails informing the agent (and team) what the couple would and would not like to see.
“Whenever I’d speak with Patriot management, I’d inform them that she would be taking part in the call as well,” McGuire said. “The first time I told them, they said, ‘Really?’ I’ll say that it was never speaking out of turn. Her style can be intimidating. The delivery is not the delivery you would expect on those types of calls.”
So, in other words, she wasn’t opposed to calling “bull****” on executives? “I think that’s the exact word,” he agreed.
It was the Wilforks who encouraged McGuire to pursue his dreams, leave his old firm, and start his own agency. He did, and he’s grateful for their advice. Of course, they would know about dreams. They tried for months to have a third child. Bianca experienced multiple miscarriages before she had a successful pregnancy. They were so thankful for the fulfillment of their wish that they named their son, now 14 months old, David Dream-Angel. It’s a name that acknowledges fathers, best friends, family and possibility.
