SEATTLE — When Bill Kinnune was a junior in college, he and the other members of the University of Washington football team received a visit from a group of former Huskies.
The visitors were members of the UW’s 1937 Rose Bowl team and they stopped by to see Kinnune and his teammates during their preparations for the 1960 Rose Bowl.
“We were a bunch of 18- and 19-year-old men, and we thought, ‘Wow, how can these old guys be football players, we’re the football players,’” said Kinnune, a 1957 graduate of Everett High School.
Now, Kinnune and his former teammates are the old guys.
On Saturday, the University of Washington plans to honor the 1960 Huskies — a team on which Kinnune was a senior guard — as national champions. The school expects 28 players and possibly head coach Jim Owens to be in attendance. The team will be honored Friday night at a banquet, and at halftime of Saturday’s game against USC. A flag will be raised at Husky Stadium honoring the team as national champion.
Better late than never, right? And just why, one might ask, is a team being honored for a national championship nearly 47 years after it played its final game?
The Huskies were never thought of as national champions before because the major polls at the time held their final votes at the end of the regular season. In the final Associated Press poll, the Huskies were ranked sixth heading into their Rose Bowl showdown with top-ranked Minnesota.
Washington pulled off a 17-7 upset in the 1961 Rose Bowl to finish the year 10-1, but Minnesota (8-2) still went down as the national champion in the history books. However, two polls were conducted after the bowl games: the Helms Foundation rankings and the Football Writers Association of America poll. The Helms Foundation voted the Huskies No. 1 in its final poll, while the Football Writers Association chose Mississippi, which finished 10-0-1.
The members of the 1960 team didn’t seem to worry much about the polls at the time.
“I don’t think we really thought about the national championship,” said Kinnune, now retired and living in Portland, Ore., with his wife, Carole. “The Rose Bowl was the big bowl game, and to win that was exciting.”
To illustrate his point, Kinnune noted the press clipping he saved after the Helms poll came out.
“I think I’ve got it downstairs in the scrapbook somewhere, it was the front page of the paper with ‘Helms Foundation says Huskies No. 1,’” he said. “I thought, well that’s nice, we were rated No. 1. But until recently I never thought about it again. It didn’t bother me and I don’t think it bothered anybody. We won the Rose Bowl, that’s what mattered back then.”
The win over Minnesota was Washington’s second consecutive Rose Bowl victory, one that helped give credibility to West Coast football after years of Big Ten dominance in the Rose Bowl.
“We raised the bar for Husky sports,” guard Chuck Allen said. “West Coast football as well.”
Those Husky teams were known for being tough, hard-hitting groups, something the players still take pride in.
“Hell, we didn’t lose a game all three years we played here,” halfback Don McKeta said. “We just ran out of time. We never really got beat. Maybe on the scoreboard we got beat, but physically we never did.”
Having played at Everett under coach Jim Ennis, Kinnune knew a thing or two about hard-nosed football.
“Jim Ennis was as tough as any of them, I’ll tell you what,” said Kinnune, who also competed in track and was a state-champion wrestler as a senior. “He was a great coach, but he was a disciplinarian and he made you physically tough.”
Toughness could not overcome bad knees, however, and Kinnune’s football career ended after his senior season, despite being drafted by teams in multiple professional leagues. He ended up in Portland, where he worked for Willamette Industries for 40 years. Kinnune retired as an executive vice president after a buyout of Willamette Industries by Weyerhaeuser five years ago. Kinnune has three children and six grandchildren, all living in Oregon. He says he doesn’t spend much time reminiscing about football, preferring to spend his leisure time trout fishing and bird hunting. Kinnune has plenty of fond memories, however, when he does take time to recall his playing days.
“I’m very proud to have been a part of that,” he said, noting that the Huskies were 3-6-1 and 3-7 in the two years prior to the back-to-back Rose Bowls “It was a different era when we started at the University of Washington. We were kind of doormats at the time. We were all sophomores playing in ‘58, and then in ‘59, we came out thinking we could be good. We played tough, we hit with our heads, and we were lean and mean.”
The 1960 team is the only Washington squad to beat a team ranked No. 1 by The Associated Press. Coincidentally, the Huskies play top-ranked USC on the same day that team is being honored. The Huskies will wear throwback uniforms to honor the 1960 team. The jerseys will be navy blue, as they were at the time, and the helmets will be gold with no lettering.
“It will be exciting,” Kinnune said. “It’ll be fun to be back on that field.”
Contact Herald Writer John Boyle at jboyle@heraldnet.com. For more on University of Washington athletics, check out the Huskies blog at heraldnet.com /huskiesblog.
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