Mike Pringle found his fame in the Canadian game
CROWE'S NEST
The former Cal State Fullerton running back retired in 2004 as the leading rusher in the history of the Canadian Football League.
Life, as the late John Lennon famously put it, is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
Witness Mike Pringle.
While focused on impressing the NFL, the former Granada Hills Kennedy High and Cal State Fullerton running back just happened to run for more yards than any other player in Canadian Football League history.
He set records.
He won championships.
He twice was named the CFL's most outstanding player.
He had his number retired.
Pringle never did make it back to the NFL -- as a rookie, he'd played in three games with the Atlanta Falcons in 1990 -- but Saturday in Hamilton, Canada, the greatest runner in CFL history will be inducted along with four others, among them Doug Flutie, into the Canadian Football Hall of Fame.
"It's a tremendous honor," Pringle, 40, says from his home outside Atlanta. "I wrote down a lot of my goals when I was younger and I achieved a lot of them, but I was never bold enough to write down 'Hall of Fame.' "
Of course, neither did he write, "Play in CFL," but the Sylmar native says the NFL's tepid interest only fueled his drive through 13 CFL seasons.
"I always had a chip on my shoulder," says Pringle, a married father of two. "I was always trying to get back down to the NFL."
Instead, he wound up running for a CFL-record 16,425 yards and scoring a record-matching 137 touchdowns while playing for the Sacramento Gold Miners, Baltimore Stallions, Montreal Alouettes and Edmonton Eskimos. In 1998, he rushed for a league-record 2,065 yards. He was a six-time CFL rushing champion, a seven-time all-star and won Grey Cup titles with the Stallions, Alouettes and Eskimos.
He retired in 2004 and in 2006 he finished fourth -- one spot ahead of Warren Moon -- in a survey to determine the top 50 players in CFL history.
It was a glorious run.
"A lot of people don't know about the CFL," says Pringle, a businessman whose holdings include an AAMCO transmission-repair franchise in Snellville, Ga. "But the players, the competitive aspect of the game, it's quality football. A lot of the former NFL players that go up there, they find that out very quickly."
Of course, Pringle had no clue before he arrived.
Though it would be inaccurate to say he had never even heard of the CFL before actually playing in it, it wouldn't be far from the truth.
