Legend of Sixkiller: In 1971, He Was Captain Sonny of the Huskies

Coach Jim Owens went against his traditional ways and named his first underclassman as one of his season co-captains.

On the eve of the 1971 season, the big news surrounding the University of Washington football team was, no surprise, all about Sonny Sixkiller.

Another Husky norm came crashing down as coach Jim Owens, a big proponent for football tradition, showed a willingness to change.

First he scrapped the ground game in favor of a pass-happy attack, one that amazingly ranked the UW fourth in the nation as a team the season before and Sixkiller No. 1.

Now Owens was letting his leaders lead, no matter where they ranked in class standing. 

Meet Captain Sixkiller. 

Owens revealed his four captains for the '71 season, which began with the opener against UC-Santa Barbara at Husky Stadium, and, for the first time in his 15 years at Washington, he picked a non-senior to join everyone at the middle of the field for the coin toss.

This was Sixkiller, the junior.

The second-year starting quarterback from Ashland, Oregon, was joined by linebacker Rick Huget, defensive end Al Kravitz and offensive tackle Steve Anderson, all seniors. Anderson, a junior-college transfer, had played all of nine minutes previously for the Huskies, idled by injuries, but was highly thought of.

For Sixkiller, no matter how you spun it, was a natural progression for him to receive this honor. 

"You can see the maturity of Sonny," Owens said. "He had to have it to live through what he did the past year. It's great in one sense to have that exposure but there are hectic moments and very trying moments for him, and I think he handled himself extremely well. He's certainly more of a leader than last year."

The UW coach shared this with the Skywriters tour of 40 newspaper reporters and radio/TV broadcasters who descended on campus before the season began. These same guys had picked the Sixkiller-led Huskies to finish last in 1970, only to see them rise to second in the conference standings. 

These West Coast scribes now took the Huskies and their confident quarterback a lot more seriously, though their prose still leaned to the silly side.

"Sonny Sixkiller may change his name to Sonny Eightkiller if he takes the Washington Huskies to the Pacific-8 championship and the Rose Bowl," wrote one California newspaper guy.

The Huskies weren't shy about this either. No one had to tell them how good they were.

"We think we're going to the Rose Bowl," Sixkiller said matter of fact to the large media audience. 

Teammates such as senior offensive tackle Rick Hayes were very protective of their young leader who wasn't always universally revered around town. 

"I hated the racist (expletive) he went through and what (expletive would say to him when we were out together," said Hayes, who was actually shot and wounded outside a Bellevue, Washington, nightspot in 1980. "I heard horrible things said and ended up in several knockout fights protecting him and his reputation." 

Sonny had become such a national phenomenon, he turned up on the cover of several college football preview magazines, most notably Street and Smith's. 

Owens allowed himself to caught up in the excitement of his 1971 Huskies team, thanking the Skywriters for their last-place pick 12 months earlier while suggesting his players had used it as motivation.

The rangy 6-foot-4 coach, whom his players referred to as "J.O." or "the Big Man," wasn't afraid to reference Pasadena either.

"We think we can win every Saturday we go out there," the Huskies coach said. "We really feel we can go to the Rose Bowl with the personnel that we have."

And that included having Sixkiller, just a junior, serve as co-captain.