The oldest football fans at the University of Washington will tell you pretty emphatic that the greatest husky player they’ve ever seen was Hugh McElhenny. Not the immensely talented Steve Emtman, Napolean Kaufman, or Bob Schloredt. There was no comparison to these others.
Undoubtedly, it was the tall, explosive Southern California running back who influenced UW football like no other player before or since.
It was this man named McElhenny who became a mythical football figure throughout Seattle and much later admitted that all the secret stories about him were true.
On Friday, the Pro Football Hall of Fame announced that McElhenny, 93, had died on June 17, effectively ending an unforgettable era of husky football (1949-51) that was fun to watch but not always enjoyable to keep the rules.
So exciting was McElhenny that he had a tendency to knock husky fans out of their seats every Saturday. In his second UW game, he returned a kickoff 96 yards for a touchdown against Minnesota. He scored on a 91-yard punt runback against Kansas State. And on his most memorable breakaway, he rushed 100 yards to score on a punt return against USC and ended up feigning the great Frank Gifford.
He left the school as an Associated Press All-America first-team pick, finishing as the school’s all-time leading rusher with 2,499 yards, a standard that has since been broken numerous times.
With the interest he sparked in UW football, McElhenny was instrumental in building the first upper deck of Husky Stadium on the south side to accommodate the rush of fans wanting to see him play.
Alums have been known to dub the expanded football facility “the house that Hugh built” afterward.
At a time when almost all college programs were paying players under the table while trying to regroup after the disruption of World War II and the tragic loss of football personnel, UW President Raymond B. Allen dismissed his athletic department officials from behind closed doors blatantly promising to give McElhenny whatever it took to get him to Seattle.
Donors had threatened to withhold $35 million in funding for UW medical school unless the football program was repaired, and Allen would not allow it.
From then on, it was hinted by others and later confirmed by McElhenny that he was so well compensated that he had to take a pay cut to get into the NFL. He was a player of name, image and likeness waiting to happen just seven decades too soon.
All of this came to light in 2004 when I was sent to the Las Vegas suburbs by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to interview McElhenny about his health. He was partially paralyzed and nearly died from Guillain-BarrĂ© syndrome, also known as “French polio,” and eventually recovered. He suspected he contracted the disease during a trip to China.
I spent a whole day with McElhenny at his Henderson apartment, which he shared with his wife, Peggy. He chain smoked during our hours of conversation and took me out to the swimming pool for frequent cigarette breaks and new revelations.
Peggy McElhenny had worked with my grandfather at a health insurance company in Seattle, where he was an executive. The position was offered to her by the school. My grandfather, while not an alum, served as one of the people overseeing game day at Husky Stadium, hence the connection.
Over the course of the several hours in Nevada, McElhenny turned away from talking about his struggle with death and went into the details of the performance agreement he had with UW.
He told how the school and his father agreed on a deal that included a stipend, paying for the couple’s honeymoon, providing the McElhennys with a furnished apartment, paying an additional monthly stipend and providing some new cars. It was fascinating and far more than I expected when I showed up to speak to him.
Scroll to Next
As a professional courtesy, I asked McElhenny if, with his blessing, I could write about this side of his UW football career, something he has hinted at but never publicly revealed. His response: “I’m too old to give a shit.”
Tuition fees were nothing new to him. He had spent a year at USC as an unauthorized player (he had no foreign language) and left school when that school stopped giving him extra monthly money as promised. He had a bogus job allegedly watering the grass at the base of the Tommy Trojan statue.
After playing a season and hitting big numbers for Compton Junior College in his neighborhood, McElhenny had a multitude of teams like Alabama and Georgia all lining up and offering to pay him on top of a stipend. The UW made him the best offer.
When the PI story, titled “The Untold Story of Hugh McElhenny, King of Montlake,” came out, people across the country came out to say they were entertained by the idea that the great running back got away with it was something of being a Siberian Husky Outlaw. This long-ago McElhenny article for a Seattle newspaper that closed in 2009 can be accessed here.
Four years after leaving school, UW football eventually collapsed and went on parole. What was then the Pacific Coast Conference was dissolved and reorganized into several iterations and what is now the Pac-12 Conference. McElhenny was always one step ahead of the football attorneys.
Two of the aforementioned Husky Sporting Department officials, now males in their late 80s, read the story and called me to reveal Allen’s involvement in the McElhenny purchase.
A family member of Hugh’s main UW benefactor shared how she would watch her father withdraw several bills and hand them to Hugh on a stoop at their Montlake home after every home football game.
The new details led to another McElhenny story, published in my 2015 book How Seattle Became a Big-League Sports Town: From George Wilson to Russell Wilson.
As a senior, McElhenny pocketed more than $10,000 from UW donors, which was $3,000 more than his original NFL salary the following year as a first-round pick for the San Francisco 49ers and the eighth player drafted overall.
He would become an NFL Hall of Famer, certainly his proudest football moment, but McElhenny’s pro football money never quite matched what the Husky donors made available to him at the time.
“What they did to me was illegal,” McElhenny said 18 years ago. “I know it was illegal to receive cash and every month I received cash. I know it was illegal to get clothes and I got clothes from stores all the time. I got a check every month and it was never signed by the same person, so we never really knew who it came from. They invested in me every year. Peg and I made more in college than I did in pro ball.
“Looking back, it was funny. I was a movie star up there. People made you feel like it went to my head. I don’t know if I took advantage of it or not enough.”
Considering how the game has changed, that last statement has never been truer.
Go to si.com/college/washington to read the latest Husky FanNation stories as they are released.
Not all stories are published on the fansites.
Find Husky FanNation on Facebook by searching: Husky Maven/Sports Illustrated
Follow Husky FanNation’s Dan Raley on Twitter: @DanRaley1 and @HuskyMaven