The last rodeo for Doug ‘Cowboy’ Little: ‘A colossal loss for a lot of people’

Little came into his own after Coach Dick Harter arrived on the scene in 1971 (courtesy Little family)

Updated 9/24/2023 9:10 AM

When friends and family gather in Aurora on Sunday to celebrate the life of Doug Little, there will be stories and recollections about the initial ringleader of Oregon basketball’s “Kamikaze Kids.”

There will be one central theme:

Tough guy, soft heart.

Little took his final breath on June 29 at Meridian Park Medical Center. Kidney failure, after years of dialysis, struck the fatal blow. He was 72.

There were other health issues in recent years, but Little had fought them off in the way he battled with adversaries on the hardcourt.

“Over the last couple of years, there in the back of your head, we were bracing for (his death),” says Kendra Little, Doug’s daughter and youngest of his three offspring. “But even then, when it happened, it was a shock. We’re still reeling from that whole experience.”

To Kendra, “Dad was one of a kind,” she says. “He was a big guy, but he was a gentle giant. Deep down, he was a teddy bear.”

To his wife of 45 years, Carla Little, Doug was “a fighter. But he was also a super nice guy. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body.”

To his friends and former teammates, he was … well, read on.

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Little spent much of his childhood in Las Vegas, but after his parents divorced, he moved with his mother to Santa Barbara, Calif., before his junior year in high school. Doug made an immediate impact on the basketball court at San Marcos High.

During that season, Little was asked to speak to the junior high team about playing at San Marcos the following year. One of the ninth-grade squad members was Dave Christiansen, who would become a close friend.

“When he spoke to us, it was like having Kobe Bryant speak to a group of young people,” says Christiansen, who now divides his time between homes in Santa Barbara and Reno. “To me, he was Superman.

“Before my sophomore season, he told me, ‘You’re going to make varsity.’ I said, ‘I hope I can, but I’ll play wherever.’ He said, ‘No, you’re going to play with me.’ ”

Christiansen wound up starting at point guard that season, a season in which the 6-3, 200-pound Little — he would weigh considerably more than that in college — averaged 25.3 points and 19.2 rebounds. Despite being on a team with an 11-13 record, Little was named CIF Division Player of the Year and conference MVP.

“My job was to get the ball to Doug so he could shoot it,” Christiansen says. “He was a man among boys that season. Not an ounce of fat on him, and he played so aggressively. Years later, I would get after his ass a little, saying, ‘You were Moses Malone before Moses. You’d shoot the ball into the bottom of the rim just to pad your rebound total.’

“He took me under his wing and taught me some lessons. The most important one was to play as hard as you possibly can. He was a tremendous role model and a great friend.”

At one point during that season, Little was caught forging a hall pass at school. A vice principal suspended him from playing in a game against crosstown rival Dos Pueblos.

“We lost the game 60-59 at their place,” Christiansen recalls. “Doug was not too pleased. He said, ‘It will be a whole different story when they come to our place.’ ”

When Dos Pueblos’ players came calling, they were greeted by a sign through the gym that said they “had Little to worry about” that night. Indeed, San Marcos rolled 102-60.

“Doug had 39 points and 33 rebounds, and I gotta believe he had a quadruple double — let’s say with 12 assists and 10 blocked shots,” Christiansen says. “As great a game as I ever saw him play. He put the cape on that night.”

Little wasn’t tall or quick by college basketball standards, which may have turned off potential suitors such as UCLA or Southern Cal. Oregon’s Steve Belko, however, offered a scholarship, and Little was off to Eugene.

Little was a stalwart on a 1969-70 Frosh team that went 22-2 and included Walt Reynolds, Clyde Crawford and Al Carlson. The other starter on that team was Dave Roberts, also a baseball player destined to be the No. 1 pick in the 1972 major league draft. He says he remembers his first look at Little “like it was yesterday” during the fall of ’69.

“I walked into (McArthur Court) and saw this guy out on the floor playing a pickup game with Stan Love and Billy Gaskins and Larry Holliday, knocking people around like they were on a JV team,” says Roberts, who would go on to a 10-year major league career. “Doug looked older. I thought he was some guy who was 30 years old. He was 18. He was so intense and aggressive.”

The 6-3 Roberts, a good physical match for Little, would often guard him in practice.

“He was like a rock to run into,” Roberts says. “His muscles were so tight. His bones seemed like they were made of iron. He had the most imposing physical presence of anybody I ever played with or against in basketball. We scrimmaged against the varsity and played pickup games with them, so I got to play against the good players. Everybody kept their distance from him.

“What he did as a varsity player at 6-3, the space he created around himself because of his physical play, was incredible. Doug played like a charging buffalo on offense and defense. You either gave him some space or he would run right over you. He was Dennis Rodman before Dennis Rodman.”

Dave’s younger brother Dean played one season at Oregon with Little in 1972-73 before turning to baseball full-time.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anybody who played harder than Doug did on a daily basis,” Dean Roberts says. “But off the court, his personality was the opposite — kind and soft-spoken.”

Dave Roberts and Little weren’t close, but “he was a great guy,” Roberts says. “He could laugh. We had a good time.”

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As a sophomore on the Oregon varsity in 1970-71, Little was a little-used reserve behind starters Love, Holliday, Rusty Blair, Bill Drozdiak and Ken Strand on Bello’s final team. Little was the seventh-leading scorer at 2.7 points per game and averaged 2.2 rebounds per outing.

It was during this time, however, that Little picked up the moniker he would carry for the rest of his days. I always figured it was because of his gunslinger attitude and rough-and-tumble style of play. Not even, says former teammate Paul Halupa.

“I was there the day Coach Belko nicknamed him the Cowboy,” says Halupa, a reserve guard who was a year behind Little in school.

After freshman practice was over, Halupa stayed over at Mac Court and watched varsity practice from the stands. Belko was installing a new offensive series and first sent the players through a dry run, with no defense.

“Then he decides, ‘Let’s give this a shot against a live defense,’ ” Halupa says. “Doug happens to be on the offense on the first go. He is lined up at left forward. Doug gets all confused and goes to the wrong spot — blatantly off the railroad tracks. Coach Belko is distraught. He is just tongue-tied that Doug gets it all wrong. He has a whistle on a chain around his neck and he’s so mad, he tries to throw it down, but it’s still around his neck and it smacks him in the face, which makes him madder.”

Then Belko delivered the phrase that will live in infamy: “Little, you remind me of a cowboy coming out of chute seven.”

Blair confirms Halupa’s account, but remembers it another way.

“I remember Coach Belko getting all upset, but I think he was yelling at Stan Love,” says Blair, who was a year ahead of Little in school and played two varsity seasons with him. “Coach Belko didn’t know anyone’s name. Every single person was ‘young fella.’ On that day, he was watching from the second tier in the Pit and when he yanked the whistle, he almost fell over. We were afraid he was going to make a 60-foot drop.”

Blair recalls another practice later in the year when, in the days before the 3-point line, Little launched a shot from way out.

“Take that shot back to the rodeo,” Belko barked.

Ride ‘em, Cowboy. And it stuck.

Little didn’t ride horses, but he saddled up many competitors on the basketball court while at Oregon (courtesy Little family)

“He was aggressive, he was tough, he was intense, and pretty ferocious,” says Halupa, who played two seasons at Oregon with Little.

Though he was not a major factor with the Webfoots as a sophomore, “he was going to be ‘The Cowboy,’ I could tell,” says Love, who played four NBA seasons with the Baltimore Bullets and Los Angeles Lakers, averaging 6.6 points and 3.9 rebounds despite playing only 14.7 minutes a game. “People speak about his grit. I used to say to myself when we were practicing, ‘Who is this guy?’ He knocked me into the uprights a time or two. He wasn’t afraid of anybody.

Doug “Cowboy” Little as a sophomore at Oregon in 1970-71 (courtesy Little family)

“Doug was a great competitor, a terrific teammate and a wonderful guy. We got to know each other better over the years. What I remember most about our conversations was how enamored he was of his family. That’s all he talked about. He was a good man.”

Blair was Little’s roommate at Oregon.

“He was my best friend up there,” says Blair, now in his 32nd year as head coach at Cuesta JC in San Luis Obispo, Calif. “We spent a lot of time together in the offseason. He was a fun guy. Liked to do fun things. At the same time, he was serious about basketball.

“He was off the charts as far as being crazy, and he didn’t know he was crazy. He’d ask, ‘Did I go too far?’ I’d say, ‘Yeah you went too far.’ He was completely wild on the floor. That’s why he got the nickname ‘The Cowboy.’ It was like a rodeo, him roping cows. He went to the boards. If you were in his way, he ran you over. He was the right guy for Dick Harter’s Kamikaze Kids.”

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Though Belko’s final team went 17-9 overall and 11-7 to tie for third in the Pac-8 in 1970-71, he was essentially forced out after his 15th year at Oregon. On came Harter, a grizzled Marine who ran his program like a boot camp.

It was the perfect scenario for tough-guy Doug Little to shine. The Cowboy became leader of the brand that became the Kamikaze Kids during Harter’s second season, when Wichita State coach Harry Miller vented to a reporter, “They play more aggressive than Kamikaze pilots did during World War II … that type of play puts basketball back where it used to be 25 or 30 years ago. If we keep messing with it, it will be a game we’re not very proud of.”

Little ended the season as Oregon’s leading scorer (15.2) and rebounder (8.2) on a team alongside starters Blair, Strand, Carlson and Billy Ingram. The Ducks suffered through a 6-20 record overall and were 0-14 in conference play.

“I was scared to death thinking that Doug might not play with us the next year,” says Gerald Willett, a freshman in 1971-72 but starting center on the varsity the next three seasons. “He almost quit. He was so discouraged from (the 1971-72) season. To go winless (in league play) just devastates you. But we would have been deer in the headlights if we didn’t have Doug that next season. He was real determined not to have that happen again.”

Ken Stringer was on the UO Frosh team that season. All the freshmen were on the bus headed for Corvallis for a season-ending Civil War matchup with Oregon State. Little told Harter and Larry Standifer he thought he had the flu (“It was the brown bottle flu,” Stringer says) and wasn’t scheduled to start.

“On the bus, Rusty and Ken start talking baseball, and Harter has a cow,” Stringer recalls. “He yells, ‘You’re supposed to be thinking about the game. You guys aren’t starting. Cowboy, you’re starting at center.’ ”

The 6-3 Little was matched up against Steve Ericksen, the Beavers’ 6-11 sophomore.

“We lost the game, but Doug torched Ericksen,” Stringer says. “Steve had no chance against him. Doug ran rings around him.”

Little played his senior season, but not before giving Harter and his staff apoplexy.

“Dick was known as a fairly hard coach — the hardest in the country,” says Stringer, a reserve forward who played at Oregon from 1972-75 and was a close friend to Little. In October 1972, “We were scheduled for a double practice the first day. Doug and I were having a beer the night before and he asks me, ‘Do you think practice is going to be tough?’ I said, ‘Cowboy, you know it’s going to be.’ ”

Little skipped the double practice sessions the following day. He didn’t alert any of the coaches that he wouldn’t be there.

“He had a hangover,” says Mark Barwig, a freshman guard on that team. “Harter was pissed.”

“The coaches didn’t know whether he was in an accident or was gone or had quit the team,” Stringer says. “He decided to have a few beers and didn’t show up.

“Now they were in a quandary. They needed him. It was, ‘How do we deal with disciplining him without kicking him off the team?’ ”

The punishment was harsh. For six weeks, Little was tasked with extra conditioning before and after practice. In addition, every morning he was supposed to run from his apartment to Harter’s home on the top of Hendricks Hill, check in and then run back down, “and they’d see him at practice,” Stringer says.

Little outfoxed the coaches.

“Doug had his girlfriend drive him close to Dick’s house,” Stringer says. “He’d douse himself with water to make it look like he was real sweaty. Then he’d ring the doorbell and say, ‘I’m here, Coach.’ He’d run two blocks, get back in the car and head home.”

“That’s pretty smart, isn’t it?” Barwig says, laughing at the thought. “It was amazing, really. At the time, I asked him, ‘How the hell you doing this, Doug?’ And he said, ‘I have my ways.’ ”

Little was the only senior, the captain and floor leader of the 1972-73 team that featured freshman guard Ronnie Lee. Lee led the team with an 18.7-point scoring average and also averaged 6.6 rebounds and 4.3 assists, but Little had an excellent season, too, averaging 17.7 points and 6.1 rebounds. Nobody else averaged scoring in double figures. The other starters were Barwig, Willett and freshman forward Bruce Coldren. The Ducks enjoyed a successful season, going 16-10 overall and 8-7 to finish third in the Pac-8 behind UCLA and Southern Cal.

“Doug was probably the most underrated player in the Pac-8 that year,” says Stringer, a Theta Chi fraternity brother of Little and Lee. “He could score on anybody in any circumstance. He was as tenacious as could be. The coaches knew Ronnie was going to be great, but Doug was still the core of the team. He was necessary for the team to improve. He was the mainstay.”

Little showed Lee the ropes in helping him earn first-team All-Pac-8 honors as a freshman.

“He was my mentor,” says Lee, who is still Oregon’s career scoring leader with 2,085 points in his four seasons. “He took me under his wing. He was the catalyst to what the program was. The Kamikaze Kids wouldn’t be what they were without him. He was the beginning of it.”

Lee loved diving on the floor for a loose ball, even if there weren’t a chance he could come up with it. Little didn’t love diving on the floor, but he did it when necessary, as required in Harter’s system.

“He wasn’t a big guy to dive on the floor,” Barwig says, “but he would when he saw the cameras there.”

Harter and I became good friends when he served as an assistant with the Trail Blazers from 1994-97 and kept in touch regularly until his death from cancer at age 81 in 2012. Lee might have been the favorite player Harter coached at Oregon, but he had a soft spot for Little, who played the way Harter wanted him to play.

“Doug was an all-out hustler,” says Lee, now retired and living in Eugene. “He reminded me of one of those rabbits that keeps going … oh yeah, the Energizer Bunny. It was like, ‘This guy is running all over the place. He’s not going slow; he’s going full speed. He’s going as hard as he can.’

“The two of us probably had the basic same talent. I wasn’t a great basketball player, but (the coaches) got everything out of me. Same with Doug. He hustled his butt and he scored his points.”

Though he was only 6-3 battling in the trenches, Little was an excellent rebounder at Oregon.

“He did the basic basketball; turn and block out,” Lee says, invoking the Rodman theme again. “His hustling helped a lot. You got a guy who hustles, it’s like Dennis Rodman. Doug got every rebound there was.”

Little was more, shall we say, social than Lee was that season.

“We had fun doing stuff, like if we went out sometimes,” Lee says. “I was the type of person who liked solitude. I liked being quiet. He helped me a little with that.”

Lee bellows a big laugh.

“Maybe I wanted to stay home sometimes, but he’d say, ‘Let’s go out,’ ” Lee says. “That was nice knowing he cared my first year there. He showed me the most respect when I was a freshman. No quarrels.”

It was the first year of freshman eligibility in basketball since the early ‘50s, and three rookies — Lee, Barwig and Coldren — started for the Ducks.

“I played point guard with Ronnie that year,” says Barwig, retired and living in Stuart, Fla. “I’d bring the ball downcourt and Doug would say, ‘Run double on my side.’ That was so he could get a shot. He liked to have the ball. So did Ronnie. And they were both good at it.

“Doug was a little crazy. A unique individual. Tough as hell. Always had your back if there was a skirmish on the court. He was a wild guy, but a dear friend.”

Barwig coached on Harter’s staff for a couple of years after his playing days were over. He heard inside stories about his former teammate.

“Doug really was a cowboy,” Barwig says. “He and Harter would go at it all the time — not so much in front of anybody, but behind the scenes. He would come in after practice and offer suggestions. He was a contrarian, let’s just say that. … Cowboy took the spotlight our year together, and he enjoyed it.”

Willett says he roomed often with Little on the road the only season they played together.

“Doug gave me confidence,” says Willett, retired and living in Eugene. “He wasn’t scared of anything. Great guy, good teammate, played hard, shared the ball. Lots of guys didn’t like to; he didn’t have a problem with that. Took us from 0-14 to a winning team. That’s saying a lot. He was the main guy.

“Doug played big. He played 6-5, 6-6 easy. He was real strong in the upper body. Didn’t have a problem banging inside. Ronnie and Doug and I, we didn’t mind banging in there.”

The players had a midnight curfew on the road. One night a few minutes after curfew, Little told Willett he wanted to get something to drink — a soft drink, not alcohol — from the hotel concessions.

“Our coaches partied a bit, and they hadn’t come back yet,” Willett recalls. “I told Doug, ‘They’re going to see us.’ He said, ‘They’re out drinking. They’re not going to be back for another hour or two.’

“We go out in the hall. I’m standing watch at the door of our room. He’s across the hall and going to where the concessions are. He’s getting something to eat and drink. Next thing I know, the coaches are coming. He jumps behind the candy machine. I slide the door shut and listen to them walking by. They go into their rooms. And Doug zips into our room, laughs and says, ‘God, what a bad idea.’ ”

In those years, Pac-8 games were scheduled on Friday and Saturday nights. When Oregon was at home, the players would stay in a local hotel on Friday nights. Little and Halupa sometimes roomed together in the hotel. Halupa remembers a particular weekend during the 1972-73 campaign.

“It’s hard for outsiders to understand how much fear and pressure there was daily in basketball operations at Oregon during our time there under Coach Harter,” says Halupa, now retired and living in Springfield after teaching high school English for 40 years, the last 29 years at Thurston. “The severity of the pressure all of us were under to behave in certain ways, to act serious at all times — nobody would believe it.

“I want to say we were playing USC the next day. I’m trying to sleep. Doug is watching TV. They’re showing some Frankenstein movie. Can’t remember exactly the lines, but Frankenstein is saying stuff like, ‘Food good. … fire no good.’ Doug starts mimicking Frankenstein. ‘Made shots, good. Missed shots, no good.’ We eventually go to sleep.”

The next day, the Trojans take a big lead into halftime. The Ducks go to their locker room expecting the worst from their coaches.

“We know it’s going to be terrible,” Halupa says. “They’re going to throw things, yell, scream and threaten us with unbelievably hard practices, which is what we had, anyway. We’re all tense. There’s a clock in our heads about how much time we have in the locker room by ourselves before the coaches make their angry entrance.”

The team manager had left cups of Gatorade on the bench by each locker.

“When we sat down, I’m sitting next to Doug,” Halupa says. “I hadn’t played the first half, and Doug had played the whole half. He downs the cup of Gatorade in a hurry, and I wasn’t thirsty, so just about the time we know the coaches are going to come in, I decide Doug could use my drink a whole lot more than me. I hand it to him — ‘here, Cowboy.’ And he says, ‘Drink, good,’ just like Frankenstein. I mean, it was perfect timing.

“Just as he says that, the coaches break through the door in a steam and a hiss. I’m on the verge of complete laughter, which is not a good thing. I grab a towel and start faking like I’m coughing. The coaches are screaming too much to notice.”

Little scored 28 points in the final game of his senior year in a victory over Oregon State at Mac Court. He was drafted both by the NBA (Buffalo Braves, fourth round) and the American Basketball Association (San Diego Conquistadors, third round of the supplementary draft) but never played professionally. He did play in an All-Star game featuring former college players, from which Stringer recalls details.

“It was staged in like June, well after his senior season,” Stringer says. “The top two players who received the most fan votes to make the game got to play a one-on-one contest at halftime. His dad (Norm Little) hired four guys to fill out ballots. At some point, the guy running the tournament calls Norm and says, ‘He’s going to be the top vote-getter. You can call off your guys filling out the ballots.’

“Doug could play one-on-one against anybody, but he was terribly out of shape — smoking cigarettes all the time. In the halftime game, he was killing the other guy early. He was up 7-1 or 8-1 but then ran out of gas.”

► ◄

Little made the most of his life after basketball. For 35 years, Little worked as a lumber broker. Later, he sold real estate for about a year and then worked part-time as a logistics salesman for a shipping company.

“Doug was very smart,” says Stringer, who lives in Medford and operates Siskiyou Sports, which makes licensed merchandise. “He was successful in everything he did.”

He and Carla — a Eugene native — were married in 1978.

“Doug was hard to keep up with,” Carla says with a chuckle. “I just counted it up. In 45 years of marriage, we moved 22 times. We would buy or build something and sell it, and then do it again.”

They always stayed in the state of Oregon, generally living either in Eugene or Wilsonville. The kids stayed close to home, too. Son Scott lives in Wilsonville. Daughter Kelly lives in Aurora with husband Kery and their three children — daughters Charlie and Westley and son Tryg. Kendra, a fine golfer at Oregon who played professionally for two years, lives in Portland.

Family was very important to Doug Little (courtesy Little family)

“Doug loved his kids, loved the family,” Carla says.

Says Stringer: “I used to kid Doug about Kendra being so good in golf, and she sure didn’t get it from him.”

When I ask Kendra about her father, she replies, “He’s hard to summarize in a few sentences, honestly.”

“He was someone who would always give anyone the time of day, no matter what,” says Kendra, now working as creative director for a small golf start-up in North Carolina called Lie and Loft. “Whether it was random people he would meet on the street, one of my friends or anyone, he would always try to find common ground. It doesn’t matter what color you are, where you’re from, what you believe in — he was always willing to give people the time of day.

“Dad and I had a lot of opportunities to spend time together my way of my golf career. I feel very similar to my dad in a lot of ways. He’d get on my nerves a lot, and we’d go back and forth, but five minutes later we’d be fine.”

Carla and Doug made it work, too.

Carla and Doug Little (courtesy Little family)

“He was an easy person to live with,” Carla says, “the kind of guy who let you do your thing and didn’t try to control. He was easy-going. As aggressive as he was on the court, he was that way in business, for sure, but he wasn’t that way in his personal life.

“He enjoyed a lot of friendships. He was in touch with guys he went to junior high with in Canada. He had all kinds of friends in Santa Barbara, and people in business. He was well-loved by a lot of people.”

“Doug had a very sarcastic sense of humor,” Stringer says. “He was a lot of fun. He was one of the most loyal people you’d ever want to meet. He was truly a great friend.”

Barwig, too, kept in touch with Little through the years.

“He started calling me ‘Boo Boo,’ like the character in Yogi Bear cartoons,” Barwig says. “Every time I’d see him, he’d go, ‘Hey, Boo Boo.’ That’s what I thought about when we talked after he got sick. I’d go, ‘Hey Yogi,’ and he’d just giggle. He was dear to my heart.”

Lee lost touch with Little for many years after college. Then when Lee returned to Eugene in 2017, they reconnected.

“There was a bond between us,” Lee says. “I don’t care if we didn’t speak for years, he was part of my life. We’d go to lunch. We’d split it — ‘You pay; I pay.’

“Doug will always be my teammate and my friend. Those are the type of people where you don’t have to always keep in touch. You appreciate the moments you have with them.”

Little and Christiansen, too, lost touch for a long while.

“There was a time there where you get out of each other’s orbit,” Christiansen says. “But these last 10 years, we became a whole lot closer and talked about a whole bunch of different things.”

After high school, Christiansen turned to football, playing at San Francisco City College and then Southern Idaho.

“I never went to see Doug play at Mac Court,” he says. “That still eats at me.”

Christiansen remembers most that Little cared about him.

“He would always asks how I’m doing, how Kris my wife is doing, how the kids were doing,” he says. “And that has helped me in my relationships with other friends, to know how important it is to find out how they’re doing. “Doug wouldn’t talk about himself until I asked him. He was proud of his children, and I’d ask how Carla was doing. We’d talk about family and then we’d talk about the Ducks, whether it’s football or basketball. We’d talk sports and tell stories.”

When their high school coach, Maury Halleck, died in 2016, Little flew to Santa Barbara for the service and stayed with Christiansen.

“That was a turning point, where we started to talk more often,” Christiansen says.

By then, though, Little’s health had begun to fail. He had quadruple bypass surgery in 2012. He developed diabetes, though he never took insulin. He was diagnosed with kidney disease in 2018. Then he went on dialysis three times a week.

“He never complained, but he gradually lost his strength,” Carla says. “His heart wasn’t real strong. Kidney dialysis keeps you alive, but it’s really hard on the heart. His last year and a half was so rough.”

Little underwent three amputations on a leg — first a toe, then half of the foot, then below the knee — a result of the diabetes. “His quality of life,” Carla says, “was not good.”

“It was awful,” says Stringer, who kept close tabs on his friend. “I can’t imagine the last few years for him. But Doug handled it as well as anyone could.”

Little had been on a kidney transplant list for 2 1/2 years, but in his final months, “they worried that he might die in surgery,” Carla says.

In March, Little had an attack of sepsis, a condition in which the body responds improperly to an infection.

“We thought we were going to lose him that night,” Carla says. “He had a 50-50 chance. He made it through but he never came out of the hospital after that.”

“It was remarkable after that period of time that he came out of it,” Stringer says. “He was confused for a couple of weeks, but he got back his normal cognitive abilities.”

In his final months, Little and Stringer talked on the phone three to four times a week.

“I drove up to see him three days before he passed,” Stringer says.

Christiansen knew Little was ill, but word of his friend’s death shook him.

“He’s still my Superman,” he says. “I never thought there was any Kryptonite that could get him.

“I loved playing with him. I got to play only one year with him, but it was the highlight of my career. I’m so glad to have been able to continue our friendship through the last few years. He had a heart as big as all outdoors. He was a good man.”

The family has come to grips with its loss, “but it has been a difficult couple of months without him for all of us,” Kendra says. “We miss him dearly every day. Hearing from a lot of his friends, it’s been a colossal loss for a lot of other people, too.”

Leave it to Ronnie Lee to find goodness in the moment.

“It’s a sad story, but for me, inspiration,” he says. “I think it was part of Doug’s nature to never give up, no matter what. No matter what was happening in his life, he still moved forward and didn’t have any excuses, which I loved about him.

“The motivation for me is, if something goes wrong, why am I worrying about that? He had complications and was still in the greatest of spirits. He taught me things right to the end.”

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