What ever happened to . . . / Floyd Little

Seahawk fans, beware. There's a Bronco in our midst, dispensing tales of orange and blue, of Haven Moses and Charley Johnson and Randy Gradishar and John Elway.

But hear him out.

To spend two hours with Floyd Little at the Ford dealership he owns in Federal Way is to mine a treasure trove of anecdotal college and pro football history.

Think of it this way, devotees of Seattle blue and green: It can't hurt to research the guy on the other side. Besides, his dealership has four season tickets to the Seahawks, and never mind that he has dibs when the Broncos are in town and makes it known that this is the one Sunday he won't be pulling for Seattle.

Can Floyd Little really be 57 years old?

Wasn't it yesterday that Little was running hard for Denver, making the Broncos, doing what the athlete of today doesn't do: Spend years with weak teams, so they can someday be strong?

When Little retired before the 1976 season, he was the team's career rushing leader with 6,323 yards (since surpassed by Terrell Davis), and a member of the NFL top 10 in rushing. He remains Denver's career leader in kickoff-return yardage.

Then he did some broadcasting work before entering a 26-month training program with Ford. That training took him first to Southern California and, for the past 10 years, to Federal Way, where he finds in the car business a little of the challenge he found in football.

"All the dealers that looked at this store said it didn't have a chance," Little says. " `Market conditions, location - it doesn't have a chance. How does Ford think this guy can make it?' "

Make it he did, just as Little made three-time consensus All-American at Syracuse back in the mid-'60s. He attended Syracuse because the man who recruited him, Ernie Davis, was so impressive.

Before Little could even enter the school, the great Davis, who won the Heisman Trophy in 1961, was dead of leukemia.

There was a time when Little was headed to West Point, perhaps to become a general. He was a coveted running back from New Haven, Conn., attending military school in New Jersey.

"I would have been the first black general, they said," Little recalls. "Colin Powell would have been working for me. I would have graduated first lieutenant, gone to captain so fast. Then I'd have gone to Vietnam, and if I'd survived that, I would have been a lieutenant colonel, soon to be brigadier.

"Until this young man came to visit me."

That was Davis, who showed up at Little's doorstep in New Haven one snowy night with Syracuse Coach Ben Schwartzwalder, impressing the socks off Little and his family. They went out to dinner, and Davis and Little retreated to the men's john, and they stood there for long minutes, and Davis, a chiseled 6 feet 2 and 215 pounds in a camel-hair coat and showing no signs of illness, convinced Little to come to Syracuse.

It must have killed Army.

"I ate several times at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York in the same room with General (Douglas) MacArthur," Little said.

There was an endurance test given to prospective cadets. Little took his the same weekend as a recruit named Dave Rivers, who would play at West Point the same years as Little at Syracuse.

Little says he murdered the test, maxing out on parallel-bar dips, dunking a basketball, scoring high on a shuttle run and a basketball throw on one knee.

Rivers was pitted against him, and they pushed each other ruthlessly. Little says Rivers actually passed out.

"I carried him into the shower and dressed him," Little says.

One autumn day years later, it was captains Little and Rivers meeting at midfield for the coin toss at Yankee Stadium. Saluting Rivers, Little said, smiling, "You made it, sir."

Syracuse remembers Little as its greatest kick returner in history, national all-purpose yardage leader in 1965 and an inductee into the College Football Hall of Fame.

In the first draft after the merger of the American Football League and the NFL in 1967, Little was supposed to go to the New York Jets, who picked 12th. Word was out he had a tentative agreement with them, scuttlebutt Little didn't discourage. The rumor was the Jets might compensate Little in the neighborhood of their top player, and that would mean Joe Namath, whom the Jets had paid $400,000 in the pre-merger days.

But Lou Saban, the Bronco coach, knew about Little as well. Coincidentally, a former Syracuse publicist, Val Pinchbeck - later a communications liaison with the NFL - took a public-relations job with the Broncos, and Saban called him in.

"Tell me a little about this Jets deal," Saban said.

"There's no deal with the Jets," Pinchbeck replied.

So it was the Broncos, picking sixth, who took Little. He was crushed.

"I thought Denver was a place that had stagecoaches and Cone stoga wagons," Little says. But when the Broncos flew Little in, he grew to love the place.

"I took him for a ride up through the mountains," says Fred Gehrke, then the Denver player-personnel director. " `Are those real buffalo?' he asked me.

"He really liked that trip."

Little hardly got Namath money. He still has the contract: a $10,000 signing bonus, $26,000 the first year, $34,000 in year No. 4.

"In those days, I could cash my check at the 7-Eleven, get two Slurpees and the cash in twenties," Little says, laughing.

"They say everything is relative. I say, `No, it's not.' They get an $11 million signing bonus today, and they can retire."

Little was nothing short of heroic in Denver during some lean years: Ken Griffey Jr. to Seattle, without the attitude.

"Floyd Little's nickname was `The Franchise,' " Bronco publicist Jim Saccomano says. "If he were to walk in here today, I'd call him `Franchise.' "

Not that it was all sweetness in Little's time with the Broncos.

"Ask him about the time Saban fired him," said Saccomano, laughing.

Seems that in 1968, the Broncos were trying to run the clock out with a narrow lead and Little fumbled on a sweep left, turning the ball over.

"I want him out of here!" Saban ranted to a Bronco executive on the sideline. "He's done! He's fired!"

Little began a long walk toward the locker room as the Denver opponent booted a field goal for the lead. Then he got mad, thought better of it, and circled back onto the field and into the Bronco huddle, where Saban had replaced him with Little's longtime roommate, Fran Lynch.

"Fran, get out," Little ordered.

Little says he told Marlon Briscoe, then playing quarterback, to fire the ball deep. Little, who had speed enough to average 24 yards on kickoffs in his nine NFL years, hauled down the bomb in a crowd and Denver won on a field goal.

In the locker room, Saban confronted Little.

"I'll give you one more week," he growled.

"One more week," Little says, smiling. "I stayed my whole career there."

Eighteen months ago, when Denver's football future was in question with a vote on a tenth-of-a-percent sales tax to build a new stadium, the backers called in old Broncos, among them Little. The measure passed, and construction is ongoing.

There was a time when Little wanted to own an NFL team, before franchise costs went through the roof.

"I wanted to be the first African-American to sit at a table with the owners," Little says. "Not as a manager, but an equal."

The late NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle put Little in touch with the Nordstrom family in the late '80s, but his group was outbid.

That brought Seattle a new owner, Ken Behring. Eventually that got the Seahawks Paul Allen.

Floyd Little, the would-be Jet who became a forever Bronco, can attest: Life is funny sometimes.