Montlake Memories: The 1970s
Husky Stadium Centennial Celebration
Jeff Bechthold
11/2/2020
With 2020 marking the 100th anniversary of the first football game at what is now called Alaska Airlines Field at Husky Stadium, GoHuskies.com is marking the milestone with a decade-by-decade look back at some of the big events that have taken place –football games and otherwise – at the Greatest Setting in College Football.
September 19, 1970 – Washington 42, Michigan State 16
The 1960s, tumultuous in all sorts of ways large and small, wrapped up on a low note for the Washington football program.
The 1969 Husky football season was beset with controversy, largely around coach Jim Owens' suspension of four Black players and the subsequent boycott of a road game at UCLA by eight more of their teammates. Things had already been dire enough as that team, mostly relying on a ball possession, grind-it-out style, finished the year 1-9, the only victory coming in the Apple Cup over a WSU team that also finished 1-9.
In the spring, however, the tide began to change, at least on the field, thanks to a sophomore from Ashland, Ore. Having spent the previous fall on the freshman team, Alex "Sonny" Sixkiller was an unknown, one of a long list of quarterbacks on the Husky roster.
However, helped along at least a little by injury to veteran QB Gene Willis, Sixkiller rose to the top of the quarterback competition, slinging the ball all over in the place in a manner never before seen in Seattle.
At the spring game in May, against a team of alumni players, Sixkiller connected on 24 out of 50 passes for 389 yards. By contrast, for the entire 1969 season, the Huskies had only attempted 162 passes, and completed only 58 – an average of about 16 attempts and 6 completions per game.
If the spring game hadn't been enough to convince the UW faithful that a new era had begun, the season opener did. On Sept. 19, 1970, in front of 52,240 fans at Husky Stadium, Sixkiller and the Huskies beat Michigan State, 42-16.
In the 50 years since that game, things have changed. Teams throwing 40 passes in a game are the norm, and some attempt many more on a weekly basis. But in 1970, Sixkiller's prolific numbers were a sensation.
Against the Spartans, who had beaten the Huskies in the season-opener in East Lansing the year before, Sixkiller completed 16 of 35 pass attempts, compiling 276 yards, three interceptions and three touchdowns, in just three quarters. Just one minute and 51 seconds into his career as a varsity quarterback, on his fourth play from scrimmage, Sixkiller connected with Ira Hammon for a 59-yard touchdown pass. A legend was born.
Later in the first, he threw an interception that was returned for a touchdown to tie the game at 7-7, but he was undeterred. In the second quarter, Sixkiller connected with Bo Cornell on a five-yard TD pass, and early in the third quarter, made it 21-7 thanks to a 37-yard connection with Hammon. Seattle Prep product Mark Wheeler provided another highlight, running for a 48-yard score.
Most of the press coverage the following day unsurprisingly focused on Sixkiller, a member of the Cherokee Nation who was born in Tahlequah, Okla., and raised in southern Oregon.
On page one of the Sunday Seattle Times, the headline read, "Go, Huskies, go and go and go," followed by "It's Christmas in September for U.W. fans."
"It's funny what a little thing like six touchdowns can do," Times writer Bryon Johnsrud wrote. "Nobody knows the joy they knew last night. Nobody know but the tail-between-the-legs Husky fan who hasn't tasked such opening-game sweets since ...
"Well, perhaps not really since we used to open against the likes of Whitman or a team off some visiting battleship. It only seems that way after the dark and joyless pit of last year's 1-9 season."
The newspapers had a great deal of praise for Sixkiller's individual performance as well, but writers nearly all relied so heavily on Native American stereotypes when describing him that it made most such stories unrepeatable now.
Incidentally, another story getting coverage in the sports sections that week was that UW hosted a professional tennis tournament inside of Hec Edmundson Pavilion. About 6,100 fans watched the championship match between Arthur Ashe and Tom Gorman, a Seattle University graduate.
Sixkiller, of course, went on to become one of the all-time Husky greats. His fearless style on the field and his outgoing nature off of it made him a fan favorite, inspiring a kids' fan club and a song named "The Ballad of Sonny Sixkiller," written by a local radio deejay, and landing him on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine. He started for three seasons (missing several games due to injury in '72), and led the Huskies to a 6-4 mark in 1970 and back-to-back 8-3 finishes the next two seasons.
Undrafted by the NFL, Sixkiller played in the World Football League for the Philadelphia Bell and the Hawaiians. He appeared in an episode of "Hawaii Five-0" (uncredited) while residing in Honolulu and was also in the cast of Burt Reynolds' hit football movie, "The Longest Yard," for which he still receives small royalty checks.
A former television commentator for UW football games, he has remained close to the Husky program as the assistant general manager of Huskies Sports Properties, the UW athletics rights-holder, having held a similar role for the various rights-holders for many years.
October 26, 1974 – Washington 66, Oregon 0
By 1974, the fate of the UW football program had taken another turn. In '73, Washington finished with a record of 2-9, including a winless 0-7 run in Pac-8 play. The 1974 campaign started on a high note with non-conference wins over Cincinnati and Iowa State, though both by closer margins than one would have expected.
The Huskies then suffered a home loss to Texas A&M and a road loss at Texas, where UW coach Jim Owens squared off with his former mentor and one-time UW head coach Darrell Royal.
Losses at Oregon State and Stanford ran Washington's conference-game losing streak to 10, a run that included a stunning, 58-0 loss the previous season at Oregon.
The coverage of that '73 beating had been brutal. In the Seattle Post Intelligencer's game story, Phil Taylor opened with:
"The Huskies really put it all together yesterday – fumbles, penalties, intercepted passes, dropped passes, atrocious punt coverage, wobbly secondary and complete disintegration of the offensive line."
It was the widest margin in the 73-year history of the UW-Oregon game.
A year later, things hadn't gotten much better for the Dawgs when Oregon traveled north for another late October meeting. The previous year's lopsided score notwithstanding, the Ducks were in no better shape than the Huskies – both 2-4 overall and 0-2 in the conference. Oregon head coach Don Read buttered the Huskies up in the newspapers, calling the Huskies "one of the strongest teams we've faced. Not any tougher than Nebraska or USC, but comparable."
That Saturday, the Huskies got their revenge, smashing the Ducks, 66-0, an incredible 124-point swing from the previous year's score – the largest such turnaround over back-to-back seasons ever in major college history.
Remarkably, Washington scored just a field goal in the first quarter, before the floodgates opened. The Huskies scored 21 in the second, 28 in the third and 14 more in the final quarter, shutting out the Ducks along the way.
"Sixty-six points, and we held 'em scoreless," defensive back Steve Lipe told the Seattle Times. "It seemed like a high-school game, everything went so well."
The notion of a revenge factor came up throughout the news coverage, from both sides – with some agreeing it played a big role and others not.
"That must've had a lot of effect on them," Ducks quarterback Norv Turner (who would go on to serve three NFL teams as a head coach) told the Seattle P-I. "I thought we were ready, but I guess we weren't.
The Sunday Seattle Times' top sports headline read: "Huskies: 66 BIG ONES; Ducks: ZIP." Under that headline, longtime Husky beat writer Dick Rockne's recap began:
"With adding-machine efficiency and vengeful resolve, the University of Washington yesterday re-joined the Pacific-8 Conference. Matching tremendous offensive output with an incredible defensive effort, the Huskies rolled to a 66-0 plucking of the bewitched, bothered and bewildered University of Oregon Ducks."
Rockne's story noted that the UW's points total was its highest since the Huskies dropped 66 on West Seattle Athletic Club in 1932. Washington out-gained Oregon, 508 to 55, limiting the Ducks to just 27 passing and 28 rushing yards. Oregon managed just two first downs in the game; UW had 30.
There was a downside. UW quarterback Chris Rowland and tailback Wayne Moses (who would later work as a Husky assistant coach) were both lost for the rest of the season. The Times included a photo of Rowland, lying shirtless in a hospital bed, smiling and pointing to his broken ankle.
As a side note to the game itself, another story regarding Husky football made news that week as the athletic department was left to figure out what to do about a woman reporter – new Daily sports editor Chris Swanson – needing access to the locker room like the rest of the press corps, an issue that came up all across the U.S. from the 1970s through the 1990s, and probably beyond.
Initially, it was determined that Swanson would conduct her interviews in a separate room, with players brought to her. After consideration and consultation with various rights groups, though, she demanded the same access as the rest of the press corps. Despite the protestations of at least one Seattle Post-Intelligencer writer, the end result was that the locker room was closed to everyone, and that all interviews would take place in another room.
The P-I story on the matter, written by that male sports writer, included this bit of indignation: "Male reporters will now be kept from doing properly a job for which they are paid. " Coincidentally, Swanson went to work for the P-I after graduation.
To be fair, the Times carried a story the next day, essentially saying that the entire story was much ado about nothing, and that conducting interviews in the locker room was no different than in the adjacent room.
The other big news in the sports section that week was the "The Rumble in the Jungle," one of the biggest heavyweight boxing matches of all time. The fight took place four days after the Husky win, in Kinshasa, Zaire, where Muhammad Ali, employing his "rope-a-dope" strategy, took the championship from George Foreman with an eighth-round knockout.
November 22, 1975 – Washington 28, Washington State 27
There are great Apple Cup moments sprinkled throughout the history of Washington's historic series with its cross-state rival, but perhaps no UW-WSU game so consistently rises to the top (at least for UW fans) as the 1975 game – for good reason.
The 1975 season was the first for head coach Don James, an Ohio-born former quarterback at Miami (Fla.) who had spent the previous four seasons as head coach at Kent State. The press reporting around his hiring indicated he had been athletic director Joe Kearney's fourth choice for the job. As anyone reading this will know, it worked out pretty well.
Faced with a tough schedule, James' first Husky team had gotten out to a slow start, going 1-3 vs. a non-conference schedule that included Alabama, Texas, Arizona State and Navy, sandwiched around a win over Oregon. From the 2-3 start, the Huskies slalomed through the season, with an 8-7 win over USC in Seattle in the penultimate game providing the biggest highlight to that point.
The Huskies entered the Apple Cup with an even 5-5 record, needing a win over a 3-7 Washington State team to earn a winning season.
In the Saturday Seattle Post-Intelligencer, longtime writer Royal Brougham included this quote from the Cougar head coach:
"'We're the best 3-7 football team in the country,' says genial Jim Sweeney, who predicts his revamped, revised and rejuvenated Cougars are every bit as good as the Huskies, inch-for-inch, pound-for-pound, guts-for guts."
The Saturday edition of the Seattle Times carried this interesting tidbit, nearly unfathomable today:
"The winner of today's Washington-Washington State football game will earn custody of the Apple Cup Trophy – or most likely a reasonable facsimile. 'We haven't been able to locate the original trophy,' UW assistant athletic director Don Smith said. 'We even called WSU to see if it was left there after last year's game (won 24-17 by the Huskies). The last anybody can remember about it was Jim Owens posing for pictures and holding the trophy following the 1974 game.' So a substitute trophy has been acquired pending the solution of this puzzling case."
The Cougars, 11-point underdogs, were the better team in the first half and took a 24-14 lead into the locker room at halftime. In the third, the only score was a WSU field goal, stretching the edge to 27-14, a lead that held until there were less than three minutes to go.
That's when the improbable happened. The Cougars, who had already missed two field goals in the fourth quarter alone, faced a fourth-and-one on the UW 14-yard line. Another field goal would surely put the game out of reach, but WSU chose to go for it. Improbably, the Cougars opted to pass, with quarterback John Hopkins dropping back for his first pass attempt of the entire second half.
The pass found the waiting hands of UW safety Al Burleson at the seven-yard line. Burleson sprinted 93 yards for the score, bringing the Huskies within a touchdown with 2:47 left on the clock.
WSU went three-and-out on the following drive and the Huskies, after a punt, took over on their own 22 with 2:10 left. As unlikely and thrilling as Burleson's play had been, the next snap of the ball provided what might be the most famous play in UW football history – or at least one of only a handful in the argument.
On first down, Husky quarterback Warren Moon, a sophomore JC transfer in his first year at UW, threw the ball down the field towards receiver Scotty Phillips. The ball went in and out of the hands of Cougar DB Tony Heath, up into the air, and right to Robert "Spider" Gaines, who was the farthest player downfield. Gaines, also a hurdler on the track team, would not be caught, gliding down the wet, shiny AstroTurf and into the end zone to tie it at 27-27.
Steve Robbins' PAT kick barely made it between the uprights to put the UW in front and, after holding the Cougars on fourth down, Moon took a knee three times and the celebration began.
In the following day's papers, Sweeney took the blame for the decision to throw the ball, but Hopkins also admitted that he'd talked his coach into it.
The Tacoma News Tribune's top headline on the sports page read "Gambler Jim Sweeney Rolls Snake Eyes," above a story from editor Earl Luebker, that included this quote from Coach James, referring to all the fans who had left early due to both the score and the rain. "I got tired of seeing all those people leaving early, so I decided to do something about it," James quipped.
Later in the same story, Luebker wrote: "Asked when he thought he had the game won, James replied, 'When I found myself on somebody's shoulders.'"
That win was the Huskies' second of eight straight vs. the Cougars. James would finish his career with a 13-5 record in Apple Cups. The game was Sweeney's last at WSU, as he resigned a week later. He quickly got the head coaching job at Fresno State, where he would spend 19 seasons over two stints, winning eight conference titles.
Moon didn't start the '75 Apple Cup at quarterback, as he'd spent the season sharing time with Chris Rowland. Rowland, however, had been ill that week, and also took a hard hit in the game, leaving Moon to take the majority of snaps. Moon went on to win Pac-8 Offensive MVP in 1977 before embarking on a 23-year professional career in the CFL and NFL, which earned him a spot in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Burleson was drafted by the Rams, but played professionally in the Canadian Football League, for Calgary, and in the USFL. He had four sons, including Alvin Jr. (who played football at UW), Lyndale (basketball at Nevada), Nate (football at Nevada, as well as an 11-year NFL career), and Kevin, who played basketball at Minnesota and in the NBA, and is now an assistant coach with the Timberwolves.
Gaines, who was drafted by the Chiefs in the sixth round of the 1979 Draft, never played in the NFL and his hopes of competing in the 1980 Olympics as a hurdler were dashed by the U.S. boycott of the Moscow Games. After struggling with addiction and criminal activity, Gaines eventually turned things around, returning to the UW to complete his degree in 2006. He now lives in his childhood home in Richmond, Calif., where he works with kids in his old neighborhood.
November 19, 1977 – Washington 35, Washington State 15
The record books show that the Washington football team finished the 1977 season with a 10-2 overall record. In actuality, the Huskies opened that season, Don James' third as head coach, with one win and three losses through their first four games
The Huskies lost their opener to Mississippi State. After a win over San Jose State, the Dawgs suffered back-to-back, two-point losses to Syracuse and Minnesota. At 1-3, James' tenure at Washington was starting to look at least a little tenuous.
If you're wondering how a team with three losses finished 10-2, it's because two of the Husky defeats – vs. Mississippi State and later in the year at UCLA, were retro-actively forfeited to the UW by the NCAA, as those two teams used ineligible players.
Regardless, after that 1-3 start, Washington turned it around, fueled by star quarterback Warren Moon, receiver Spider Gaines, center Blair Bush and tailback Joe Steele, as well as defensive stars like Michael Jackson, Nesby Glasgow and Doug Martin.
Washington opened Pac-8 play ('77 was the final season of the Pac-8, as Arizona and Arizona State joined before the following season) with a 54-0 win over Oregon and a 45-21 victory over Stanford. A 20-12 loss at UCLA (eventually overturned) was the only blip on a run that had the Huskies headed into the annual Apple Cup battle with WSU with a conference title still in sight. WSU came to Seattle for the Nov. 21 game 6-4 overall, 3-3 in the conference, while Washington was 7-4, 5-1.
The Tacoma News Tribune called the game the "most important clash since 1936," and further explained that the UW needed a win, and a USC win over UCLA the following week, to earn the conference's Rose Bowl berth. A UCLA win would likely land the Huskies in the Bluebonnet Bowl in Houston.
The hubbub the morning of the game revolved around the contention from WSU athletic director Sam Jankovich that the Cougar faithful had not been allocated enough tickets. He pointed out that WSU had been given just 4,400 reserved seats and another 1,000 for students, but that they were all in the west end zone. "It's ridiculous for our 16,000 students to have 1,000 seats," he told the Associated Press. "Somewhere down the road we can reciprocate. This thing is going to wind up in the hands of the presidents and the board of regents.
The game was a rout, as the Huskies scored the games first five touchdowns, taking a 21-0 edge after the first quarter, a 28-0 lead at half and a 35-0 advantage until the Cougars got two late scores in the final quarter.
Steele led the way for the Huskies, rushing for three touchdowns in the first half. Moon passed for 159 yards and a TD on 12-for-19 passing. WSU stars Dan Doornick (104 rushing yards) and Jack Thompson (17-for-38, 178 yards) turned in solid performances, but it wasn't nearly enough.
The Sunday papers covered the game, of course, but also focused on where the Huskies would go bowling.
On the front page of the Seattle Times, the headline read: "Rose Bowl: Huskies are near; Wolverines in" over a photo of Rollen Stewart, a Cle Elum, Wash., man who became a pop-culture icon in the 1970s and 1980s by attending big sporting events with his hair dyed in the colors of the rainbow, usually seated in a place where he was consistently in view of the television cameras. Stewart, incidentally, is currently serving three life terms in a California prison after being convicted of kidnapping in 1992.
On the Times' sports page, beat writer Dick Rockne's game recap opened with:
"Before the largest crowed ever to watch a football game in Husky Stadium, 60,964, the University of Washington clinched a tie for the Pacific-8 Conference championship and became assured of a bowl bid by rolling to a surprisingly easy, 35-15 victory over Washington State. Led by Warren Moon, Joe Steele and Mike Jackson, the Huskies, considered just seven-point favorites, rushed to a 21-0 lead after one quarters and literally coasted to the lopsided decision in frigid weather on a frozen field."
Speaking of frozen, the Times also carried a small item that four individuals had been hired to spend all of Friday night and Saturday morning flushing every toilet in Husky Stadium once every 30 minutes to prevent the pipes freezing.
USC beat UCLA the following Saturday, and Washington went on to the Rose Bowl, the first of six trips to Pasadena for James. On Jan. 2, 1978, the Huskies led 24-0 and held off a 10-1 Michigan team to win, 27-20. Moon, in his final college game, was named MVP.
Several stars from the '77 UW team aside from Moon went on to pro football success. A first-round draft pick, Bush spent 17 years in the NFL. Martin, the ninth overall selection in the 1980 NFL Draft spent 10 years with the Minnesota Vikings and led the league in sacks in 1982. Jackson played eight seasons with the Seattle Seahawks while Glasgow played 14 years in the NFL, finishing his career with the Seahawks in 1992. Glasgow passed away due to cancer just this past February and was laid to rest in Renton, in the same cemetery as Jimi Hendrix.
Many consider Steele, from Seattle's Blanchet High School, the most important recruit James ever signed, given that he was one of the most-highly rated high school prospects in state history and attended a school only a couple of miles away from the UW campus. The thinking was that if Steele decided to stay home, others would follow.
Steele finished his outstanding career at the UW with the school records for both single-season and career rushing yards, but a devastating knee injury his senior season derailed his professional aspirations. He was drafted by the Seahawks, but never played in the NFL. Steele, who married his high school girlfriend and saw both his son and daughter graduate from his alma mater, earned his degree and has worked in commercial real estate in the Seattle area for decades.