Forde Started By Stopping

Looking back to Sept. 7, 1985.

Now the scrapbook only gets opened at Mom’s house.

Maybe when the kids want to see it. Or when there is company over. That’s when Theresa Forde brings out the book Beulah Blankenship gave her son, Brian, 12 years ago.

And while there are plenty of pages and plenty of memories, there’s one - Sept. 7, 1985 - that stands out. Washington State against Cal, Brian Forde’s first game in the Crimson and Gray.

“It was one of those games when you don’t know what you are doing,” said Forde. “All I knew was to tackle the guy with the ball.”

He did. Again and again and again. When it was over, Forde had 28 tackles. Fifteen years later, that still stands as the Washington State school record.

“I had a lot to live up to after that,” Forde said.

Twice Forde topped the 20-tackle mark before his Cougars career was over in 1987. The linebacker then went to the New Orleans Saints.

“For me, that was tremendous,” said Brian. “Here is this kid from Montreal and first getting a chance to play in the Pac-10 and then in the NFL. All I was looking at was maybe getting a shot at playing in the Canadian League some day.”

But there he was in New Orleans on a Monday night, looking across the field at Tom Landry.

“That hat, the Dallas Cowboys, the whole thing,” said Brian. “That was when it really struck me where I was.”

Forde played four years in the NFL. Eventually, an injured anterior cruciate ligament was his downfall.

“You can fake a lot of things in life, but you can’t fake it in the NFL,” he said.

From there, Forde went back to Canada and bounced around until he got a call from the Montreal Alouettes, telling him not to come back.

“I made a couple of calls and was hearing thanks but no thanks, so I stopped playing,” he said.

“That first year I was out I didn’t watch any football. It’s still hard. There are guys that I played with who are still playing. Maybe when they quit, it will get easier to watch.”

Forde his wife, Tracey, who is a former WSU student, and their two children - 8-year-old Maxx and 6-year-old Alexx - now live on the West Side.

Following the end of his career in the mid-‘90s, Forde went to work in sales for Pacific Office Automation. He’s still with the company. And he’s still running into people who knew him in his college years.

“I talk to people all the time about the Cougars,” he said. “We’ve got some Huskies and some Cougars that I work with and we are always giving each other a hard time. Now, with things that are going on and the loss to Idaho that makes it a little tougher.”

“But I’ll always be a Cougar in my heart. Always.”