Louis Breeden Boulevard, named after the Bengal who went coast-to-coast to make sure the Freezer Bowl wasn't iced on The Coast, just took a detour.

The street where Breeden grew up in the hamlet of Hamlet, N.C., now swings 90 miles to Greensboro and the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame. Breeden is one of 11 to be inducted this spring into a Hall that already has a King (Richard Petty), a G.O.A.T. (Michael Jordan) and a Globetrotter (Meadowlark Lemon).

Tough room.

With Breeden getting the nod at a youthful 72, Johnny Moore, the Hall's executive director says, "That's about right. That's usually when it happens."

Tough room.

Moore recalls what the great Duke wide receiver Clarkston Hines told him after the 1989 ACC Player of the Year had been elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 2010.

"They tell me it's harder to get into your Hall of Fame than the College Hall of Fame," Hines told Moore. The Chapel Hill, N.C. native had it right. It took him 13 more years to get to Greensboro.

"When you look at all the great athletes and coaches in there," Breeden says, "this is an honor. I've been thinking a lot about it."

Which is no surprise to anyone who watched Breeden play during his 10 seasons in Cincinnati or got to know him after he was done and settled here.

A thinking man's player, a protégé of the cerebral Pro Football Hall of Famer Ken Riley. Breeden's 33 interceptions during his career that stretched from a Paul Brown assistant as head coach ( Tiger Johnson) to a Paul Brown player (Sam Wyche) during 1978-87 are second only to Riley in Bengals annals. And the fourth most by any NFL cornerback in that stretch of 160 games, more than Hall-of-Famers Riley and Mike Haynes.

Breeden's biggest pick, as every Cincy school kid of a certain age knows, came in 1981's November to Remember during the Bengals' first trip to the Super Bowl. With the Bengals playing the Chargers for AFC supremacy in San Diego, Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Fouts leered from the Bengals 4 for a touchdown in the last minute of the first half that would cut the Cincy lead to 24-14 with the Chargers' vaunted Air Coryell offense getting the ball to start the second half.

But Breeden caught Fouts' laser to wide receiver Wes Chandler in the end zone for a pick-six, and the consummate 14-point play made it 31-7 at halftime in a 40-17 win that gave the Bengals home field for the postseason. Which meant Breeden's next pick of Fouts came a few weeks later on Cincinnati's minus-9-degree Riverfront Stadium turf as they froze the Chargers in the AFC title game.

"Cover Two. We disguised it as much as possible to make it look like man," Breeden has said of the 102-yarder that is still one of the two longest pick-sixes in club history. "So I kind of lined up inside to make Dan Fouts think it was man coverage. We were in a zone and I was in an area he didn't expect me to be."

But there has always been more to Breeden than one area.

A few years later, he teamed with one of his dearest friends and old Bengals teammate Isaac Curtis to host one of Cincinnati's most popular annual charity golf tournaments. They had to pack two different courses in the morning and afternoon before the banquet at night.

The golf went for about 20 years, and even though the last one was nearly 20 years ago, they're still giving out money from the event. They annually gift scholarships to local educational ventures, such as the School for Creative and Performing Arts and the University of Cincinnati engineering school bridge program that helps minority students make the transition from high school to the rigors of a college program.

Nearly 40 years after that last interception (off Hall-of-Famer Warren Moon in Breeden's last game), the returns are still many. Now, as he savors a trip to the same Hall that houses a legend (Arnold Palmer), an Olympian (Crystal Dunn), and a beacon (Clarence 'Big House') Gaines, Breeden goes back 25 more years from the Moon Ball.

"My childhood athletic influences," are who Breeden has been thinking about. The older kids who played in the neighborhood ringing the part of Highway 38 that is now Louis Breeden Boulevard. He moved there when he was ten and into a three-bedroom house that was the family's first home with indoor plumbing and running water. The Freezer Bowl was nothing. He calls Hamlet "a ghost town," fewer than 6,000 people now after 60 years of getting pummeled as those thriving railroads disappeared.

But he still knows the nicknames of those kids who were gods to him then and now.

McKinley "Teddy" Gaskins. Robert "Mutt" McCaskel. Charles "Bucky Boo" White. Winslow "Boot" Ellerbe. Donald Davis. Billy "Bull" Quick. Nelson David. His own brother, Sam Breeden.

"As a kid, I never thought I could measure up to these guys," Breeden says. "I look back and still put them in a league of their own."

Breeden's childhood straddled Jim Crow to Charlie Scott. Those boyhood heroes went to the black high school on Monroe Avenue. When they watched the white baseball teams play each other in a park they couldn't enter, Breeden and his buddies sat on the left-field fence. The Seaboard Coast Line railroad, where Breeden's father Jack worked his entire life, still was segregated by signs.

By the time the Hamlet schools desegregated in 1969, Breeden was a sophomore and Scott, the first black basketball player in the ACC, was leading the University of North Carolina to back-to-back Final Fours.

"Anytime we'd play basketball," Breeden says, "we'd fight to see who would be Charlie Scott."

Scott, a New York City native, isn't in the North Carolina Hall. The requirements for a candidate are to be born in the state or live in it at one point for ten consecutive years. That's why Christian Laettner isn't in, either.

Tough room.

Mike Quick is in. Class of 2010.

Quick, 66, a wide receiver for the Eagles during most of the '80s, is among that third generation of Hamlet kids. The guy he idolized was Breeden. He may still remember Breeden's football number (42), but what he remembers is baseball.

"He could play anywhere, and he had a big, big bat," Quick says. "A lot of us thought he should have played baseball because he could have made it to the major leagues. He was that good. I mean, I loved watching Louis. You should have seen him. I noticed him more in football as a flanker, not so much on defense."

Breeden has to laugh. When the ballpark became desegregated and he could play there, he was one of the few to hit it over the fence and did it twice. Only a few years later, but an eternity. By then, Quick was there sitting on the fence and then running after the ball because he was a little kid who simply didn't have the money to get in.

Quick was next in in the line of the quiet but thunderous progress. Breeden remembers how Teddy and Mutt and Boot and Bull just didn't get quite get the same chances he did. With the Vietnam War heating up and the post-World War II boom cooling, guys like Sam Breeden signed up for the military before the call came.

Things were better for his younger brother Louis playing for Hamlet's first integrated teams. And, college was an option. But Breeden didn't play much football before his senior year and didn't get one offer. Tiny North Carolina Central gave him a chance and he became one of three from the historically black school to make the North Carolina Hall of Fame.

While Breeden didn't know anyone who had gone to a large university, Quick came out of Hamlet's new consolidated county school a decade after Charlie Scott, and he joined the growing number of black players at North Carolina State. If he had been the age of his hero Louis Breeden?

"I would have gone to an HBCU or been one of the first somewhere else," says Quick, a first-rounder five years after Breeden went in the seventh round who had an astounding 17.8 yards per his 363 career catches.

But Breeden isn't thinking only of his Monroe Avenue heroes. Because the Rockingham Speedway burst on the scene 15 minutes away when Breeden was 12 years old, he fell in love with NASCAR and fervently followed idols like Richard Petty and Cale Yarborough. Petty was "The King," even then.

When a friend invited him to the Kentucky Speedway a few years ago, Breeden, still a race fan, couldn't resist. When they got to the track, Breeden was floored when his buddy drove him up to Petty's mobile home.

"I loved this guy growing up. He was great. We sat down. We probably chatted for about 25, 30 minutes. He signed a hat for me I still have," Breeden says. "We had a conversation like we had known each other because I'm from North Carolina and he's from North Carolina."

Breeden is honored to be walking among a King, but he's bringing those guys into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame who are a lot bigger than that.

Sam. Teddy. Mutt. Boot. Bull.

"I never even thought I'd grow up to be as tall as them," Breeden says. "To me, they're still bigger than me. Giants. I'd never dream I could do what they did."