Hugh McElhenny (1928-2022) Was UW's Greatest and Best Compensated Football Player
The oldest University of Washington football fans will tell you rather emphatically the greatest Husky player they ever saw was Hugh McElhenny. Not the supremely talented Steve Emtman, Napolean Kaufman or Bob Schloredt. There was no comparison to those others.
Hands down, it was Hurryin' Hugh, a tall, explosive running back from Southern California who influenced UW football like no player before him or since.
It was this man named McElhenny who became a mythical football figure across Seattle and much later admitted that all of the clandestine stories about him were true.
On Friday, the Pro Football Hall of Fame announced that McElhenny, 93, had died on June 17, which effectively ended an unforgettable era of Husky football (1949-51) that was fun to watch but didn't always play by the rules.
McElhenny was so exciting, he had a propensity for bringing 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 run, he raced 100 yards to score on a punt return against USC, faking out the great Frank Gifford at the end of it.
He left the school as a first-team, Associated Press All-America selection who finished as the UW's all-time leading rusher with 2,499 yards, a standard since broken multiple times. He still holds the single-game rushing record of 296 yards against Washington State.
With the interest he created in UW football, McElhenny largely was responsible for the building of the first upper deck of Husky Stadium on the south side, to accommodate the rush of fans who wanted to see him play.
Alums thereafter were known to call the expanded football facility "The House that Hugh built."
At a time when nearly all college programs were paying players under the table while trying to regroup from the interruption of World War II and an oftentimes tragic loss of football manpower, UW president Raymond B. Allen blatantly instructed his athletic department officials behind closed doors to give McElhenny whatever was necessary to get him to Seattle.
Donors had threatened to withhold $35 million in funding for the UW medical school if the football program wasn't fixed, and Allen wasn't going to let that happen.
From then on, it was insinuated by others, and later verified by McElhenny, that he was compensated so handsomely he took a pay cut to go to the NFL. He was a name, image and likeness player waiting to happen, only seven decades too early.
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 had become partially paralyzed and nearly died from Guillain-Barre Syndrome, also known as the "French polio," and finally recovered. He suspected he had contracted the illness while on a trip to China.
I spent an entire day with McElhenny at his Henderson condo, which he shared with his wife Peggy. He chain-smoked throughout our hours-long conversation, leading me out to the swimming pool for frequent cigarette breaks and new revelations.
Peggy McElhenny had worked with my grandfather at a Seattle medical insurance company where he was an executive. The job was provided to her by the school. My grandfather, though not an alum, served as one of the people who oversaw Husky Stadium game-day operations, hence the connection.
Through the course of several hours in Nevada, McElhenny veered away from talking about his brush with death to detailing the benefits arrangement he had with the UW.
He told how the school and his father had settled on a deal that involved a scholarship, paying for the couple's honeymoon, supplying the McElhenny's with a furnished apartment, paying him an extra monthly stipend and providing a couple of new cars. It was fascinating and far more than I bargained for when I showed up to speak with him.
Out of professional courtesy, I asked McElhenny if I could write about this side of his UW football career with his blessing, something hinted at but never revealed publicly by him. His response: "I'm too old to give a sh*t."
College payments were nothing new to him. He had spent a year at USC as an ineligible player (he had no foreign language on his transcript) and left when that school quit giving him extra monthly money as promised. He had a bogus job where he supposedly watered the grass at the base of the Tommy Trojan statue.
After playing a season and running up big numbers for his neighborhood Compton Junior College, McElhenny had a host of teams such as Alabama and Georgia all get in line and offer to pay him over and above a scholarship. The UW made him the best deal.
Once the P-I story came out — titled "The Unknown Story of Hugh McElhenny, the King of Montlake" — people reached out from all over the country to say they were entertained by the idea that the great running back had gotten away with being somewhat of a Husky outlaw. That long-ago McElhenny article for a Seattle newspaper that closed in 2009 can be accessed here.
Four years after he left school, UW football finally came crashing down and went on probation. The then-Pacific Coast Conference was disbanded and reorganized into several iterations and what today is the Pac-12 Conference. McElhenny always remained one step ahead of the football lawmen.
Two of those aforementioned Husky athletic department officials, now men in their late 80s, read the story and called me to reveal Allen's involvement in the purchase of McElhenny.
A family member of Hugh's main UW benefactor shared how she watched her father peel off several bills and hand them to Hugh on a stairway at their Montlake house following every home football game.
The new details led to another McElhenny story that was 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 the UW donors, which was $3,000 more than his original NFL salary the following year as a San Francisco 49ers' first-round pick and the eighth player drafted overall.
He would become a Hall of Fame player in the NFL, his proudest football moment for sure, but McElhenny's pro football money never really matched what the Husky donors made available to him back then.
"What they did with me was illegal," McElhenny said 18 years ago. "I know it was illegal for me to receive cash, and every month I received cash. I know it was illegal to receive clothing, and I got clothing all the time from stores. I got a check every month, and it was never signed by the same person so we never really knew who it was coming from. They invested in me every year. Peg and I made more in college than I made in pro ball.
"When I look back it was funny. I was a movie star up there. The people made you feel that way. It got to my head. I don't know if I took advantage of it or didn't take advantage of it enough."
Considering how the game has changed, that last statement has never been more true.
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