Back To The Future -- The Evolution Of The Husky Uniform

Tradition.

Jim Lambright is growing tired of the word.

"The only tradition at Washington," he said, "is that each new head coach changes the uniform."

Lambright let the word out a few weeks ago that he was going to make the first substantial changes to Washington's football uniforms in 20 years.

His phone hasn't stopped ringing. There is more plebeian interest in the color of the helmet than there is in who will be the new university president.

Keep the stripes, keep the block "W" on the helmet, don't wear all purple, don't mess with success.

So much of this area's athletic pride is tied up in the Huskies, where unlike most schools modern history is the best history: three straight Rose Bowls in the 1990s and one national championship.

Imagine Billy Joe Hobert in white pants and a purple helmet. Would Napoleon Kaufman look as fast or Steve Emtman as big? These aren't images with which one easily tampers.

Warren Moon wore the uniform as Washington climbed back on the national stage beating Michigan in the 1978 Rose Bowl. Jacque Robinson wore it as MVP in the 1982 Rose Bowl and the 1985 Orange Bowl.

In many ways, the current Husky uniform is as distinctive as the classics worn by UCLA and USC. Good teams generally don't do much to change their look; they just beat people with it.

Nebraska, Penn State, Alabama, USC, Notre Dame. Do they look any different than they did in the '50s? Oregon State changes its uniforms.

"I think Jim wants to put his stamp on things," said Jim Owens, who as coach changed not only the style and substance of football at Washington in the early 1960s but of the entire West Coast.

"I understand that perfectly."

Lambright played for Owens and later coached for Owens and Don James. For more than 30 years, he has been more involved and aligned with Husky football than anyone else.

He wants to blend the best of those eras with a new look that is his look. It becomes both a break from and a bowing to the past.

"This is the end of two years of probation," Lambright said. "This is like my first year as head coach. We've spent two years just trying to hold things together.

"This is a year of emergence."

Both Owens and James shake their heads when they hear about the concern voiced over Lambright's plan. Both said they received no criticism and very little comment when they changed things.

Times and attitudes were different. Owens was the third coach in three years when he took the job in 1957. James' hiring in 1975 followed a declining period of UW football under Owens, a time of racial strife and poor teams.

"I remember asking Joe Kearney (the athletic director) during my job interview if there was any problem changing the uniform," James said. "Joe said absolutely not."

Owens wanted the Huskies to look and play like the Oklahoma and Texas A&M teams he had grown up with. His uniforms were simple, straightforward, classic, just as his teams would be. They set a Pac-10 trend rather than following one.

Toward the end of his reign, Owens, grasping for something to excite the players and fans, tinkered with the uniform continually, adding stripes, colors and gimmicks. It no longer had the clean impact it did in the beginning, but then neither did his teams.

The question is always there. Do the players make the uniform or does the uniform make the players?

James, coming to Washington from Kent State, said he always had admired what he called "the striping system" of the 49ers and chose to adopt that look. His teams were as coordinated as were his uniforms.

As the years passed, James let the players have a role in modifying the uniforms. They got rid of the long socks and the stripes on the pants. They went from white to black shoes.

"But I didn't want them to change the helmet," James said.

Lambright's changes will face far more scrutiny and criticism. He inherited the double-barrel legacy of a championship team and two years of probation. He hasn't proved that he is the coach James was. There is a lot of tradition, success and emotion wrapped up in the James uniform.

"I've told the players we are going to look good with a certain class and style," Lambright said. "We're not going to look like grapes (all purple uniforms), I can tell you that."

Lambright scoffs at there being one Husky look. He talks about the uniforms Don Heinrich and Hugh McElhenny wore in the early 1950s.

"You see more blue and white than anything else," he said. "And the uniform I wore (in 1964) was navy blue, not purple. You couldn't get purple in those days."

Lambright seems bent on following his heart, rather than a fad. And his heart bleeds purple.

Gary Barfield, a representative of Russell Athletic, the company that manufactures Washington's uniforms, said there is no identifiable trend in college football uniforms.

"Baseball," he said, "tends to gravitate toward tradition. Basketball will try anything with those pants. Some college-football teams - Penn State, Alabama, Nebraska - want to remain traditional. Others are looking to the future."

Russell made some strange-looking pants that North Carolina State and Washington State wore in bowl games last year.

"We had some high-school teams see those pants on television and order them for this season," Barfield said.

The Cougars, who looked as if they were heading for an aerobics class in their Alamo Bowl game against Baylor, will add the swirled pants to their arsenal this season. The players will decide whether to wear crimson, gray or both, in the case of the new pants.

Lambright is giving his players less input. He is not working with a design firm for a new look, relying instead on what 30 years of being around Husky football tells him.

"We're not even finished with the design yet," he said. "The players will be the first to know what we decide."

A best guess of what the uniform will look like is this: purple helmet with a white Husky dog on the side, retention of the James jersey, white pants of the McElhenny era, plus purple socks and white shoes.

This appears, however, a uniform of transition. Lambright apparently wanted to go to a more traditional stripeless jersey with curved numbers, but can't get them manufactured in time.

And the 1996 uniform may look different from the one in 1995.

Owens was delighted at the prospect of the team wearing purple helmets.

"That would look sharp," he said. "Our purple-helmet concept was to award a very few players that distinction based on the way they performed during the season."

James said he wanted a gold helmet because of a fondness he had developed for it while coaching at Colorado. What he didn't want were some players wearing one helmet and others another.

"I wouldn't ask the players to wear something I wouldn't wear," Lambright said.