Don James statue unveiled; players remember legendary UW football coach

Don James – coach of the University of Washington Husky football team from 1975 through 1993 – was a legend.

To Joe Kelly, Jimmy Rodgers and Phil Foreman, James was a tough-as-nails task disciplinarian.

“He was intimidating,” Kelly told KIRO 7.

“Very militant coach,” said Rodgers. “Very difficult coach.”

“They would play the best players,” Foreman said of James and his staff. “They weren’t friends with you."

All three played for James in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and they gathered at Husky Stadium on Friday for the unveiling of a statue honoring him.

Foreman was recruited while James was still at Kent State but followed him to Seattle.

“Don James got the job out here right in the middle of the recruiting season and he brought me out. I loved the place,” Foreman said.

Rodgers and Kelly were captains on the national championship Orange Bowl team of 1985.

“Special team, special team,” Kelly, a linebacker for the Huskies, said. “It culminated with us whipping some Sooners.”

Kelly was drafted 11th overall in the first round of the 1986 draft and went on to play 11 years in the NFL.

He flew in from his home in Cincinnati for the unveiling of the statue -- a project that happened because of the once-young and still-young men who battled for James on the football field every Saturday for 18 seasons.

All $150,000 needed to fund the statue came from player donations.

“We didn’t want it to say ‘Mr. & Mrs. So-and-So Don James statue,' or 'a company name Don James statue,'” former strong safety Rodgers told KIRO 7 on Friday. “It was very important to us that it just said ‘Don James’ and the only way to get that done was to have the players pay for it.”

“We know that if coach James were still living, we would probably raise the money, but we’d have to wait until he passed to put it up,” Kelly said. “He wasn’t a guy that looked for attention or wanted attention, but this is something that is well-deserved.”