Dan Doornink, the WSU Hall of Famer and longtime Seahawks running back known to teammates and fans as “Dr. Dan,” has died at 70, the Seahawks announced Sunday.
Doornink’s football path ran from Wapato High to Washington State University and then into an eight-year NFL career, with seven of those seasons spent in Seattle. With the Seahawks, he piled up 1,836 rushing yards and 15 touchdowns in 105 games, and his most memorable afternoon may have come in the 1984 wild-card playoff win over the defending Super Bowl champion Los Angeles Raiders at the Kingdome, when he ran for 123 yards in a 13-7 victory.
The Seahawks called him “a beloved member of the Seahawks early days, both on and off the field.”
His nickname came from an unusual combination of football and medicine. While playing for Seattle, Doornink was studying at the UW Medical School, and he once explained the grind this way: “I was competing against guys who didn’t have to study all the time,” Doornink once said in an interview with the Times. “It was hard and challenging and I didn’t get much sleep those years.”
After his playing days ended, he completed a Doctor of Medicine degree at UW and later built a long career in internal medicine in Yakima.
Doornink also spoke publicly in 2021 about a difficult fight with COVID-19, which was complicated by a rare blood disorder. In an interview that year with the Seattle Times, he said he spent 23 days in intensive care and lost 38 pounds.
On the field, his rise started at Wapato High, where the football field now bears his name. In a 2018 interview with the Seattle Times, Doornink said he originally signed with WSU and then-coach Jim Sweeney as a quarterback, but found himself buried on the depth chart and eventually shifted to running back when injuries hit that position.
That move changed everything. He led the Cougars in rushing in both 1976 and 1977, including the season when Washington State opened with one of its biggest non-conference road wins ever, a 19-10 upset of 15th-ranked Nebraska. A member of WSU’s Hall of Fame, Doornink still ranks 14th on the school’s all-time rushing list with 1,739 yards and is 25th in career receptions with 105.
The Giants took him 174th overall in 1978, and he rushed for 306 yards as a rookie despite missing six games with a shoulder injury. Before the 1979 season, he was traded to the Seahawks for a 1980 seventh-round pick.
In Seattle, Doornink became a starter in 1979 and 1980 before settling into a key rotational role from 1981 through 1985. His 1,530 rushing yards with the Seahawks rank 14th in franchise history, and his best regular-season total came in 1979, when he finished with 500 yards as Seattle went 9-7.
That season also produced his top regular-season game, a 122-yard effort on 21 carries in a win over Atlanta during the Seahawks’ first appearance on Monday Night Football. Many remember that game for Jim Zorn’s pass for a first down on a fake field goal to kicker Efren Herrera. It was the only 100-yard regular-season game of Doornink’s career.
His biggest number, though, came in the postseason. After Seattle dropped its final two regular-season games to the Chiefs and Broncos - losses that also cost the Seahawks the AFC West title and featured nine turnovers combined, including eight interceptions - coach Chuck Knox turned to a more direct approach against the Raiders. Seattle used a double tight-end formation almost exclusively, ran the ball 51 times and threw only 10 passes in the playoff game.
Doornink had not carried the ball in either of the previous two games, but Knox fed him a career-high 29 times against Los Angeles. The Seahawks built a 13-0 lead and hung on from there.
“They knew exactly what we were going to do and still we were able to get th yards,” a happy Doornink said afterward.
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