SEATTLE – From the wrestling mat to the basketball court, Frank Furtado was a man of a thousand stories.
 
One of them was about a Seattle Pacific wrestler who was down 14-2 early on, then got an escape and a takedown in the final seconds to win his bout against an opponent from the crosstown rival Washington Huskies.
 
 

"The coaches from each team had to carry the guys off. They couldn't walk," Furtado recalled during a 2016 interview. "It brings tears to me because that's one of those moments when you see two fellas who had extended themselves completely."
 
Another of them was about the "daily doubles" his Falcon wrestlers would do, going upstairs, downstairs, and through Brougham Pavilion.
 
"It was one of the big things the guys hated and I loved," he said, laughing. "I kept a chart of how many laps you made If you didn't' make more than two (in three minutes) you were in trouble."
 
Yet another was from his time as the trainer and traveling secretary with the Seattle SuperSonics, recalling the lowest of lows after losing Game 7 of the 1978 NBA Finals to the Washington Bullets, to the highest of highs just one year later when they beat those same Bullets in five games.
 
"I sat in the locker room afterward, and nobody moved for more than two hours," Furtado said of the Game 7 defeat. "It was like the president had died right in front of us. At the start of (the next) season, there was this ripple like, 'We've got it this year. We have it.'"

 

Give him a couple of minutes or a couple of hours, and Furtado had a story to share.
 
His own life story, intertwined with Seattle Pacific from the mid-1960s through the mid 1970s, ended last Saturday, Dec. 4, when he passed away in Seattle at the age of 90.
 
An announcement on services has not yet been made.
 
Furtado graduated from then-Seattle Pacific College in 1960, then went on to George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon, where he earned his master's in exercise science. While he was there, he coached wrestling and basketball.
 
STARTING FROM SCRATCH
Ironically, Furtado, who was inducted into the Falcons Hall of Fame in 2007,  was not a wrestler as a youth. Instead, he played football at Ripon Union High School in Ripon, California, about 80 miles east of San Francisco.
 
While an undergrad student at SPC, the school had a club wrestling program, and Furtado joined it.

"If you can't play football, wrestling was combative. It took a lot out of you," Furtado said during that 2016 interview. "I just absolutely loved wrestling when I was here."
 
Seattle Pacific started its varsity wrestling program in time for the 1964-65 season. Furtado and wife Sarah moved back to the area, and he built that program from scratch.
 
In short order, he built that program into a regional power. His teams finished in the top 20 at the NCAAs five times, and two of them were among the top 10. He coached 11 wrestlers who became All-Americans.
 
But Furtado was more than just a coach. He also was a teacher, and one of the classes he taught was athletic training, as he shared his knowledge of the many medical and nursing skill he learned in the Navy as a medic during the Korean War in the 1950s.
 
When the wrestling program was discontinued after the 1974 season, Furtado had to decide what was next.
 
"Next" became the head trainer position with the Sonics. Furtado started with the team in 1974 when legendary Bill Russell was the coach and general manager.
 

Furtado stayed in that capacity for the next 26 season, retiring in 2000. But new trainer Mike Shimenski asked Furtado to stay on for a couple seasons as his assistant.
 
Those "couple seasons" lasted until 2008 when the team relocated to Oklahoma City.
 
Furtado also was the trainer for the North American Soccer League version of the Seattle Sounders in the 1970s – and, naturally, that job also produced its share of stories.
 
"My wife said, 'All summer long, you came home with an English accent,'" Furtado said, as the players on those teams were primarily from Great Britain.
 
Furtado is survived by Sarah, to whom he was married for 68 years, three children, three grandchildren, and one great grandchild.
 
And of course, he is survived by all of those anecdotes.
 
"When I think of him, he was a great storyteller," his grandson Robbie said in a story published on Tuesday by Seattle Times reporter Percy Allen. "He would talk to you for three hours if you let him."