Before becoming a Yakima doctor, Dan Doornink starred on the gridiron at WSU and with the Seattle Seahawks.
**By DAVID ORIARD/Special to Cougfan.com**
MANY ATHLETES ARE remembered for their Hall of Fame skills. Others for their flamboyance or self-promotion. Some are remembered for their character, determination and impact on their community. **Dan Doornink** would be one such athlete.
Doornink, who practiced internal medicine in the Yakima Valley for more than three decades and was a popular running back with the Washington State Cougars in the 1970s and the Seattle Seahawks into the 1980s, died Saturday at age 70. The news arrived from the Seahawks.
He had suffered from an autoimmune blood disorder and defeated COVID-19 five years ago in what he and his family deemed a miracle.
I met Dan when he bought the house next to my parents not far from Spokane's Sacred Heart Medical Center, I believe in late 1986. He had been cut by the Seahawks at the end of training camp that season and his medical schooling at the University of Washington was complete. He was in Spokane for his residency at Sacred Heart.
Dan, a famous No. 11 at Washington State and No. 33 with the Seahawks, wasn't a prima donna. "Dr. Dan," a.k.a. Mr. Third Down in Seattle, was just a good neighbor.
I would house-sit for him when he and his wife, Sharon, took their young family of four kids camping. Once he invited me to play on his rec-league basketball team at SFCC. The Doorninks brought food to my dad after my mother died. It was neighborly stuff.
As for basketball, he was a player! It was just a random league at a community college but anyone could see the skills that this 30-something physician had back in the day when he was a multi-sport star at Wapato High.
After high school, Dan decided against walking-on at UCLA in basketball, instead following in the family footsteps by accepting a football scholarship to Washington State, where his uncle and father had played before him.
When Dan showed up for his first fall camp at WSU in 1974, he was a quarterback recruit mired in a competition so deep that he and future first-round NFL draft pick **Jack Thompson** were listed as No. 7 and No. 8 on the depth chart.
"We never got to do anything. They never had to wash my pants the first couple of weeks of practice," Doornink told me in a 2020 interview for The Spokesman-Review newspaper in Spokane.
Given his immense talent, and WSU's running back corps slowly being depleted by injuries early in that '74 season, Doornink made the switch to running back and immediately jumped to No. 2 on the depth chart behind **Andrew Jones**.
By the time he graduated he was the third-leading rusher in program history and No. 2 on the all-purpose yardage list by way of catching 105 passes, most of them thrown by his former QB foe, Jack Thompson.
"Dan and I were natural rivals when we got to Washington State, with both of us playing quarterback," Thompson told Cougfan.com today. "He was a tremendous athlete, you could see that as soon as he stepped on the field. We ran the Houston veer at that time under Jim Sweeney, and you don't have to look far to see who could run better. Sweeney loved Dan."
When Doornink moved to running back, he and Thompson became allies, not competitors. "Dan was a great teammate – a smart, confident competitor whose attitude rubbed off on all of us. He was a team leader and he possessed an inviting sense of humor, but more than anything he was tough. Just a stud. He only weighed 205 at WSU but he loved to block and would take on anybody."
As fate would have it, Thompson and Doornink were inducted together in the WSU Athletics Hall of Fame in 1989.
**DOORNINK'S DAYS AT WSU** ('74-'77) were complicated by the fact he played for three head coaches – Sweeney, Jackie Sherrill and Warren Powers – in his final three years. Several players, Thompson among them, also played for a fourth coach, Jim Walden. Doornink said he wished those in his recruiting class had the opportunity to play for Sweeney their entire careers.
"I loved Coach Sweeney. I wish he would have had the chance to coach the guys he recruited in my class," Doornink said. "We would have been awesome."
The Cougars went 6-5 in '77 but were not invited to a bowl game. Eight players from that team were drafted by the NFL, including Doornink in the 7th round to the New York Giants.
A fan favorite on the Palouse, Doornink would become even more popular in Seattle. After playing sparingly his rookie season with the Giants, he was traded to the Seahawks where his hustle, grittiness and pass-catching ability made him a popular and valuable asset, especially on third down.
When I last spoke to Dan for that article in The Spokesman-Review, he recounted some of his favorite stories from his career. I could tell that his proudest moment in his seven seasons with the Seahawks was a 1984 playoff game against the Los Angeles Raiders in which he gained a career-high 126 yards in a victory over the defending Super Bowl champions. In particular, he converted a key fourth-down play late in the fourth quarter to seal the victory.
"That was exciting, making the playoffs. To beat the Super Bowl champions in the Dome was really remarkable," Doornink said.
In that 1984 playoff game, the Seahawks, who had almost no running game since star running back Curt Warner suffered a season-ending knee injury in the season opener, ran the ball 51 times and passed only 10. Although it hadn't been the norm in the regular season, it was classic Ground Chuck.
"We ran the same play time after time – one side, then the other," recalled Doornink.
"Near the end of the game, we decided to go for it on fourth down," Doornink said, going on to describe some eye contact with Howie Long in which Doornink nodded his head to say he was coming right at the future Hall of Famer one more time.
"We got 7 yards and that was the game."
A serious of injuries limited his production in 1985 and Doornink was cut by the Seahawks prior to the 1986 season.
_**Related:**_
**AFTER FOOTBALL, DAN MADE** his way home and followed the family course, much as he had done when he chose WSU. After his work at UW and Sacred Heart was completed, he returned to the Yakima area to practice medicine. His father had a medical practice in Wapato for nearly 50 years; Dan would practice in the Yakima Valley for more than 30 years.
In early March 2020, Dan began working at the Yakima Valley Farm Workers Clinic and soon the pandemic struck. He explained to me that because his autoimmune disorder (a rare blood condition) left him at an increased risk of contracting COVID-19 he spent his hours in the administration building doing diagnostics through video and telephone calls.
Though vaccinated, he contracted COVID-19 that summer. By the time news spread about his condition he was on a ventilator and near death. His family reached out on Facebook and other outlets, asking for prayers. He pulled through.
Today, Coug fans, Seahawks fans, family and friends will remember Dan as the running back-turned-doctor from Wapato who put his community first and built a legacy that won't be forgotten.
Before his long NFL career, Dan Doornink was a fixture at running back at Washington State from 1974-77.
**NOTABLE DOORNINK NOTES**:
* In addition to his work on the football field, Doornink starred in the classroom at WSU, earning Pac-8 Scholar-Athlete honors and second-team Academic All-American plaudits.
* As a WSU senior in 1977 he played a key role in one of the greatest eight-day windows in program history when the Cougars went on the road to defeat No. 15 Nebraska and eventual Big Ten champion Michigan State on back-to-back Saturdays.
* He was selected by the New York Giants in the seventh round of the 1978 NFL draft after running a blazing Pro Day time in the 40, despite having gained 10 pounds since the end of the Cougars' season. He spent one season with the Giants and seven with the Seahawks.
* In a 2015 story in WSU Magazine, Doornink said his time at WSU reinforced a sense of hard work and humility that helped carry him through life. "I used the same philosophy in medical school that I used in football," he said. "I'm not the smartest kid on the block, but if you're not a brilliant person, what do you do? You study more than everybody else."
* The football stadium at his alma mater, Wapato High in the Yakima Valley, is named Dan Doornink Field.