Catching Up With ...
        Father-son soccer duo Mark and Jeffrey Collings (June 17)
        Track record holder and longtime SPU leader John Glancy (June 24)
        U.S. Olympic Track Trials competitor Jessica Pixler Tebo (July 1)
        State championship gymnastics coach Kathie Cradduck Koch (July 8)
        First-ever women's soccer signee Jennifer Hull (July 15)
        Gymnast and charitable fundraiser Mindy Lee Ferguson Irvine (July 25)
 
 
By MARK MOSCHETTI
Seattle Pacific Sports Information
 
SEATTLE – He's 85 now. He left Seattle Pacific 42 years ago. And he'll say more than once that his memory isn't quite what it used to be.
 
Don't buy into that last one, though. Frank Furtado's memory is plenty sharp.

 

Just let the 2007 Falcon Legends Hall of Fame inductee get started on a story-telling spree, and that will become abundantly clear.
 
So clear, that the man who built a regional-power wrestling program from scratch still gets a bit choked up as he vividly describes one bout in particular.
 
"One night, we were the preliminary to a varsity basketball game, and we wrestled UW," he said in recalling the match against the crosstown Huskies. "It was Sam Myers for Seattle Pacific against this kid I had tried to recruit. This kid's performance on his feet was so much better than Sam's, and next thing I know, it's 14-2 for the UW."
 
But in the two remaining rounds, Myers clawed his way back into it, getting within two points as the clock wound down, and … well, Furtado picks it up from there.
 
"Finally, with about 15 seconds left, Sam escaped (for one more point), and they were hanging onto each other. Sam just bull-rushed him, knocked him down, got on top of him, and the match was over. He got the got the two points (for the takedown) and won. The coaches from each team had to carry the guys off. They couldn't walk.
 
"It brings tears to me," Furtado continued, pausing momentarily, "because that's one of those moments when you see two fellas who had extended themselves completely."
 
Furtado is full of similar anecdotes. From his time in the U.S. Navy when he developed his interest in medicine. From his 35 years with the Seattle SuperSonics (26 as trainer, nine as assistant trainer) when he helped keep the players healthy and fit, including the group that won the 1979 NBA championship.
 
But even now, some of most memorable favorite stories are from the wrestling mats.
 
NOT HIS SPORT AS A KID
Frank Furtado didn't grow up as a wrestler. Football was his primary game; he was a guard at Ripon Union High School in Ripon, Calif., about 80 miles east of San Francisco.
  
He got acquainted with it while a student at Seattle Pacific. It wasn't a varsity sport at the time, but the Falcons did have a club team, and Furtado says the man who taught it was a volunteer whose full-time job was as a dentist.
 
"I was trying to learn against guys who were experienced – and you take a lot of beating," said Furtado, who still lives near SPU with Sarah, his wife of 63 years. "If you can't play football, wrestling was combative. It took a lot out of you.
 
But, "I just absolutely loved wrestling when I was here."
 
Eventually, the sport loved him back.
 
FROM NOTHING TO NATIONAL-CALIBER
After graduating from then-SPC in 1960, Frank and Sarah had moved to Oregon so he could pursue his master's degree in exercise science at the University of Oregon. Eventually, he coached wrestling at George Fox University – and basketball, too.
 

When the decision was made to start a varsity program at Seattle Pacific for the 1964-65 season, Furtado became the coach. (Sarah, meanwhile, became office manager in the Athletic Department.)
 
"Almost every one of them hadn't wrestled before," Furtado said of his first team. "Some had (wrestled) a tiny bit."
 
The Falcons had just five matches that season, winning two, both against Puget Sound.

Things started getting better as Furtado gradually added more quality into the program. The team not only began winning more dual meets, but also doing well in tournaments.
 
"We started knocking Pacific Lutheran and UPS over pretty easy. Then we started knocking over Western Washington," he said. "We entered every tournament we could in preseason. We beat UW in tournaments. I loved tournaments, because if you had three or four good guys, you could beat all the rest of the schools."
 
Win or lose, Furtado's wrestlers were in shape. Part of that was his famous (or infamous, depending on one's perspective) "daily double." From the wrestling room on the top floor of Brougham Pavilion (which today is the Hendricks Falcon Club) the athletes would run down to the ground floor at one end, across the building, all the way back upstairs at the other end, through the wrestling room – and keep going.

 

They would do that for three minutes, take a one-minute break, do another three minutes, break for one minute, then do a final three minutes.
 
"It was one of the big things the guys hated and I loved," Furtado said, laughing. "I kept a chart of how many laps you made. If you didn't make more than two (during a three-minute period), you were in trouble."
 
Like most everyone whose work world was in Brougham Pavilion, Furtado was influenced in a significant way by Dr. Ken Foreman, considered the founding father of Falcon athletics.
 
"He had the ability to inspire like no one else I knew," he said. "I never felt I was a fellow teacher with him. He was always my mentor. I never saw a man who could inspire like he could."
 
WINDOW CLOSED, DOOR OPENED
All of that work his team put in – which also would include runs around Green Lake, regardless of weather – paid off, as Furtado's wrestlers began qualifying for nationals. Beginning in 1968 and every winter thereafter until the program was discontinued in 1974, the Falcons sent at least four and as many as nine to the NCAA college division meet. Of those, 11 became All-Americans.
 
But when scholarship funds for the wrestling program were withdrawn, Furtado, who also taught various classes (including an athletic training class), had some decisions to make.
 
"I loved teaching – I was so turned on by teaching," he said. "But I loved the wrestling program, as well. The guys who came here in the first four or five years became leaders on campus. They were leading chapels. And we were drawing big crowds."
 
Right about then – and right across town – a possibility arose when Seattle SuperSonics trainer Jack Curran left the team.
 
Furtado got the job, allowing him to practice the many medical and nursing skills he learned in the Navy as a medic during the Korean War. He said he didn't grow up with an inclination toward medicine, "but I absolutely gravitated toward it. When athletic training came, that's as close as I can get to it."
 
A LEGEND, A HEARTBREAK, AND A TITLE
It was a heady time to be part of the Sonics – and besides, Sarah was there, too, having joined the team as an executive assistant in 1970 and staying for the next 26 years.
 
Legendary Bill Russell was the team's head coach. Furtado remembers Russell being quite knowledgeable about way more than hoops.

 

"He was not your classic coach," Furtado said. "He's very bright, and was as interested in international affairs as he was in basketball. He was always OK with me."
 
Russell resigned in 1977. The following season, the Sonics recovered from a 5-17 start to reach the NBA Finals, eventually losing Game 7 to the Washington Bullets in the Seattle Center Coliseum, 105-99.
 
"I sat in the locker room afterward, and nobody moved for more than two hours," Furtado said. "It was like the president had died right in front of us. It was terrible."
 
Just a year later, Furtado got to experience the other side of it, as the Sonics beat the Bullets in five games for Seattle's first – and only – NBA championship.
 
"At the start of that season, there was this ripple, like, 'We've got it this year. We have it,' " Furtado recalled. "It wasn't blustery. They went through and did it pretty easily."
 
RETIRED, BUT STILL STAYED
Furtado retired in 2000. But new trainer Mike Shimensky asked him to stay on for a couple more years as a full-time assistant.
 
The two-time NBA Trainer of the Year wound up staying until the team left for Oklahoma City in 2008.
 
"The worst day of my life was when I went upstairs and the general manager came out of his office," he said. "I turned in my keys and told him, 'I want to thank you. I've been hanging around, helping out as much as I can. Thank you for letting me work here.'

 

"But I said, 'I have to leave because I'm not able to control my emotions.' "
 
Furtado also was trainer for the North American Soccer League version of the Seattle Sounders in the 1970s ("My wife said, 'All summer long, you come home with an English accent.'")

Now, he is officially, fully retired. He deals with a couple physical issues, as do most octogenarians.
 
But even through an hour and a half of storytelling on a summer afternoon, one won't hear Frank Furtado complain about anything.
 
"I lucked into the best woman in the world," he said. "I have been the luckiest man in the world."
 
And his memory is still pretty sharp, too.