Not that anyone is asking but I found HHH at the tim I was hearing some shit about Sark and wanted more of an insider perspective. Still waiting. PM to IrishDawg write me back Fucker. Waiting to get dialed in. No HOMO!
As a millennial doog that was too young or too busy chasing girls till the Peterman era to be on the boards I find the lore of the football team and this site by extention to be very interesting. I also find I like the posters even more after hearing their personalities on the pod (irishdawg stopped replyingto me dms). Keep bringing out the guests over the offseason perhaps
It's funny you say you're a millennial. I haven't given it lots of thought but I've always assumed you were a tall guy in his early 40s living in Gastown. Looks like I'm waaaaaay off.
Haha I'll take that as a compliment
❌Under 6'. Under 30. Under the necessary salary to afford Vancouver...
Derek, would love to see those notes put in writing out here.
Cheers!
Okay here are the six pages of notes I wrote. These are unedited. There are misspelled words, butchered sentences, incomplete thoughts, etc. It was written basically stream-of-consciousness. There might be some glaring omissions or an inaccurate timeline. But if it's not accurate it's pretty close.
Here it is:
January 2011 Today’s podcast has been launched right before Thanksgiving weekend. Hopefully some people will be abel to enjoy it while traveling to relatives or maybe they’ll listen sometime in December sitting by the Christmas tree or drinking outside along the side of the house while avoiding their in-laws, like Mike Damone. But this special episode comes in three parts. First, I’m taking a few minutes to describe the genesis of the site and its growth. Then me, Swaye and CFettersNachLover will talk for about 45 minutes about our memories through the years. And then the show will conclude with a piano rendition of Silent Night, as a refined Australian accented voice will read some of PuppyLove_Sugarsteele’s greatest rants.
Now, you could say that Hardcore Husky became imminent from a post I made on Dawgman.com in January 2011. In it I stated that Jake Locker should have been a safety all along, and it would have been better for him and UW. I received a message from Dawgman CEO Kim Grinolds telling me that my posts were making people upset and he wasn’t going to allow that to continue. By that point things were so strained from our differeing philosophies on right and wrong that it was time to move on.
A couple months later, my book Bow Down to Willingham was released. I thn began writing a book with former Husky Dave Hoffmann, which ended up being called The Husky Hitman.
By early 2012, however, I was keenly aware that I missed having a message board to hang out on. The wild and feral Husky Half Brains site had been shut down in 2010, and I would never go back to Dawgman. I did have my podcast with former Huskies Matt Rogers and Kyle Benn, but it wasn’t the same thing as the actual message board.
By the summer of 2012, I decided why not create my own message board. I would take the concept of Husky Half Brains, make fancier and higher-grade, employ light moderation with a scant few rules like no images of sex acts and no calls for genocide, but otherwise let people say whatever they want with very few limitations. The limitations being anything that undermined the site or broke the law.
I reached out to CFetters_Nacho_lover was the first person I talked to about it and bounced ideas off of. I got feedback from idawg and Race Bannon. I started contacting other guys with the idea and started rounding up some seed money. VADawg sent me money with a note that said something like “Make it happen!” CFettersNachoLover, CheersWestDawg, Mike Damone, Section8, Pawz and VolcanoDawg all kicked in various amounts.
The original site name was going to be OperationHusky, we had a logo of Husky Stadium viewed through a periscope. The mission wasn’t just to give us Husky Half Brains a home, but we also wanted to battle Dawgman and create a voice that raised the standard of Husky Football, instead of the mainstream media like Bob Condotta and KJR that would buy what Steve Sarkisian and UW would sold them without pointing to UW’s history and saying. Hey! This is historicially a successful programwith a rich history and we should expect more. 7-6 with an alcoholic coach isn’t enough.
After ruminating on things, I decided a better name than Operation Husky would be Hardcore Husky. It summed up what we were about, and also was a good name after our competition against Dawgman and “jihad” against UW would have come to an end, whenever that would be. I remember iDawg was very disappointed that it wasn’t going to be called OperationHusky.
On November 26, 2012 Hardcore Husky was launched. Traffic was very slow. It was basically about 10 of us talking amongst ourselves. Our first full month, in December 2012, had 28,000 measley page views. My driving goal was to capture the spirit of the old Husky Half Brains board but our posts that first month felt restrained and watered down. For the next six months or so I ran Facebook ad campaigns and reached out to everyone I knew about our new site.
These efforts were successful and we began having great banter while traffic numbers steadily climbed. Then came the Dawgman purge of 2013, as many more posters were banned and censored they began migrating to Hardcore Husky in late July and August. The traffic increase was so steep that Vanilla called me from Montreal for an urgent conference call. They thought my site was going to be blow up and become the next Drudge or whatever. I tried to explain that the purge had led to this plus it was August and football season so they’d see
numbers climbing higher and higher until early Feb when recruiting ended, after which numbers would go back down again until the following August.
It was in 2014 (2013?) that I was going to begin fundraisers and I told the people that helped fund the board into existence that I would find a way to have it survive on its own. I funded June and July out of my own pocket. I was mildly concerned about the long-term viability of the site. I remember sitting in my stepsister’s kitchen table at 2am in Arizona in July 2014 during a massive thunderstorm outside. I had some long email exchanges with AllPurpleAllGold, aka TheKobeStopper. I was telling him how I was discouraged with UW football, the way it was being run, and wondered what I was doing running this site anyway and maybe I should close it down. APAG shared a lot of his thoughts that motivated me to keep going.
During that same night I was also communicating with my IT person who was creating the new front page and redesigning other areas of the site. I came up with the tagline, “Enjoying the Freedom of our UnFETTERED boards? Donate today!” I got a kick out of that one.
Soon after, one of our most popular posters, Swaye reached out to me asking if there was anyway he could help. In August 2014 he spearheaded that first fundraiser by threatening to scalp and burn people’s houses down if they didn’t donate, all fueled by narcotics and his Native American hatred for white people. Someone else, I can’t remember who, created a graphic called the Dong Meter, which measured donations in thousands of dollars as represented by inches of penile length. Our goal was to get to 12 inches. A goal that remains elusive to this day. But this all transformed a potentially boring, utilitarian fundraiser into a lively event unto itself. People enjoyed it. That enabled Hardcore Husky to get into the black and be self-sustaining. From this point forward, guys like PurpleBaze, Swaye and Nacho continued to donate generously each year. As well as Mike Damone who from always donated $129 at fundraiser time, and then randomly a couple more times through each year he’d send another $100-$150 and with a note or quip. He enjoyed seeing this site be a foil to Kim Grinolds and Dawgman
Bit by bit, new posters arrived and established themselves to make the place even better. CokeGresterthasnpepsi and DennisDeyoung were huge into recruiting. One of my mistakes early on was that I vowed never to have a recruiting board
because I thoguth the act of obsessively microanalyzing the recruiting decisions of teenage boys was kind of creepy. But the majority of posters actually wanted recruiting and when I finally got thsat board going (I think it was in 2015), it was a massive success. Coker and DDY ran it for the next 3+ years and did a tremendous job.
Puppylove_Sugarsteel had joined in 2013 and by 2015 had become the wildcasrd and crafted some of the best lines ever invented in the English language. He was known for making insane predicitons that never panned out, but then he’d boast about never being wrong. He was widely hated, as guys like CFetterNachLover and MikeDamone wanted him gone. But he Hardcore Husky’s pepper in the chocolate yo for the next five years.
From 2012-2016 we ran a front page. I did interviews with Don James, Warren Moon, Ronnie Lott, Dennis Brown, Dave Hoffmann. Kenny Easley, Beno Bryant, Chris Hemphill and Ben Ossai and a bunch others. But my interest in writing about the Huskies was on the wane and I finally gave myself permission to stop. From 2015-2019, Hardcore Husky was in its golden era. It’s possible that Hardcore Husky will again have another golden era, but as of right now that was our peak. We had so many great posters with wild, lively and contradicting points of view. Traffic-wise, the little website that had 28,000 pagiev iews its first month was crossing into over 2,000,000 page views a months. If you entered Washington Huskies footbasll wesbites, we were the first site to come up in Google. We were getting as many as 40,000 lurkers a month.
The last time I attended a game at Husky Stadium was September 2019, the infamous Cal game. Thinking back to how my dad had taken me to my first game when I was five years old in 1976, here I was now taking my 80-year old dad to what ended up being our last game together at Husky Stadium.
The weather was nice enough as we got to our sesats. They played about half a quarter when suddenly there were a couple of lightning flashes in the distance. Play on the field stopped, and the PA announcer said that there would be a delay due to dangerous weather. I put my arm around my dad’s shoulders and said “Leave it to the UW to be pussified about weather too!”
But moments later, torrents of beating rain hammered down on us and the skies unleashed frequent lightning bolts all around the stadium. Very
surreal. We headed for the mezzanine for a few minutes before then deciding to head to my car, which was parked about two miles away.
But we barely got out of the stadium before the rain began pounding so menancinly and with lightning strikes coming down about every ten seconds, that we sought shelter beneath a concrete overhang just outside the stadium. We would stand there for the next 45 minutes as we wait for weather to lighten up.
There were about fiften silhouetted people standing with us under that overhang. I started talking to a couple guys who were in their late 20s/early 30s. We talked college football and Husky football for about 25 minutes.
At one point one of them said something about Longview and I pointed to my dad and told them about how when my dad was 10 years old the Huskies were on their way to play Oregon and stopped in Longview to practice. My dad went down there and watch QB Don Heinrich and running backs Hugh McElhenny and Roland Kirby. That was it, he was a Husky for life. He’d listen to all the games on his transistor radio.
When the rain started to lighten up and I asked my dad if he was ready to brave the elements and he said yes. One of the guys stuck out his hand and said nice talking with you I’m so-and-so. I said yeah nice to meet you, I’m Derek Johnson. And the guy did a double take and said, “Derek Johnson? The guy who runs Hardcore Husky?” I nodded and said yep. And the two guys started going crazy and shaking my hand again. They said it was their favorite site on the internet and they are on it every day. They loved all the crazy posters on there like Pup, Swaye and PurpleJ. One of them left for a second and then came back and handed me a wad of cash and told me to give a badge to someone who couldn’t afford one. I asked them which handles they were but they laughed and said OH no, we could never sign up for that site and risk being associated with it, and then went on to discuss what they did for a living and bit of their background.
We said goodbye and dad and I made the two miles walk to the car. He was staying overnight at a hotel in Eastgate, so I was driving him down Interstate 405 as lightening was going off every few seconds all around us. I said it seemed like a Hollywood movie, very surreal.
Dad told me later that when he got to his hotel room, the TV did not carry the Pac-12 Network so he couldn’t watch the game. (Fuck you Larry Scott). So he resorted to doing what he did as a kid—he listened to the Huskies on
the radio. The game eventually restarted and ended at 2:30a.m. Huskies lost to Cal of course, because we always lose to Cal.
A few months later began the Covid era, and watching the UW have a Covid outbreak and hand over the Nroth title to Oregon and wished them good luck to boot. Hardcore Husky continues to this day to chug along though our numbers haven’t returned to where they peaked in 2019.
But we’ve had and have so many great posters we’ve had and I can’t sit here and name them all, but if you see a poster with a shitty little orange or purple badge next to their avatar. They are supporting the site and are a valuable part of our community.
The current rendition of our podcast continues to steadily gain audience. It would not exist if it weren’t for Baseman, who approached me about during the Covid year of 2020. But through circumstances it ran out of steam throughout the backdrop of the failed Jimmy Lake era.
When I met JoeyD and WoolleyDoog at The Pizza Coop in July 2021 and the conversation was lively enough that I spontaneously asked them if they wanted to do a pod. We’ve done roughly 30+ episodes and it has been a blast.
I can’t wrap this up without mentioning our late friend DeLarry who got hit by a car and died in April 2020. DeLarry had a colorful life story that I wrote about and can be found on Hardcore Husky. But he was an OG Half Brain and one of our better posters in the early days of the site. We miss him a lot.
So here we are now in 2022, as the Huskies get ready to play WSU in the Apple Cup. I’ve blathered on long enough, so without furether ado let’s move on to the conversation with me, Swaye and CFettersNachoLover.
Comments
Not that anyone is asking but I found HHH at the tim I was hearing some shit about Sark and wanted more of an insider perspective. Still waiting. PM to IrishDawg write me back Fucker. Waiting to get dialed in. No HOMO!
❌Under 6'. Under 30. Under the necessary salary to afford Vancouver...
✅Above average skater
Also, like I said there were going to be dozens more that just didn't spring immediately to mind. You, @Fire_Marshall_Bill, @FireCohen, @HoustonHusky, @Houhusky, @Kaepsknee... I could prattle off more and more
Here it is:
January 2011
Today’s podcast has been launched right before Thanksgiving weekend. Hopefully some people will be abel to enjoy it while traveling to relatives or maybe they’ll listen sometime in December sitting by the Christmas tree or drinking outside along the side of the house while avoiding their in-laws, like Mike Damone. But this special episode comes in three parts. First, I’m taking a few minutes to describe the genesis of the site and its growth. Then me, Swaye and CFettersNachLover will talk for about 45 minutes about our memories through the years. And then the show will conclude with a piano rendition of Silent Night, as a refined Australian accented voice will read some of PuppyLove_Sugarsteele’s greatest rants.
Now, you could say that Hardcore Husky became imminent from a post I made on Dawgman.com in January 2011. In it I stated that Jake Locker should have been a safety all along, and it would have been better for him and UW. I received a message from Dawgman CEO Kim Grinolds telling me that my posts were making people upset and he wasn’t going to allow that to continue. By that point things were so strained from our differeing philosophies on right and wrong that it was time to move on.
A couple months later, my book Bow Down to Willingham was released. I thn began writing a book with former Husky Dave Hoffmann, which ended up being called The Husky Hitman.
By early 2012, however, I was keenly aware that I missed having a message board to hang out on. The wild and feral Husky Half Brains site had been shut down in 2010, and I would never go back to Dawgman. I did have my podcast with former Huskies Matt Rogers and Kyle Benn, but it wasn’t the same thing as the actual message board.
By the summer of 2012, I decided why not create my own message board. I would take the concept of Husky Half Brains, make fancier and higher-grade, employ light moderation with a scant few rules like no images of sex acts and no calls for genocide, but otherwise let people say whatever they want with very few limitations. The limitations being anything that undermined the site or broke the law.
The original site name was going to be OperationHusky, we had a logo of Husky Stadium viewed through a periscope. The mission wasn’t just to give us Husky Half Brains a home, but we also wanted to battle Dawgman and create a voice that raised the standard of Husky Football, instead of the mainstream media like Bob Condotta and KJR that would buy what Steve Sarkisian and UW would sold them without pointing to UW’s history and saying. Hey! This is historicially a successful programwith a rich history and we should expect more. 7-6 with an alcoholic coach isn’t enough.
After ruminating on things, I decided a better name than Operation Husky would be Hardcore Husky. It summed up what we were about, and also was a good name after our competition against Dawgman and “jihad” against UW would have come to an end, whenever that would be. I remember iDawg was very disappointed that it wasn’t going to be called OperationHusky.
On November 26, 2012 Hardcore Husky was launched. Traffic was very slow. It was basically about 10 of us talking amongst ourselves. Our first full month, in December 2012, had 28,000 measley page views. My driving goal was to capture the spirit of the old Husky Half Brains board but our posts that first month felt restrained and watered down. For the next six months or so I ran Facebook ad campaigns and reached out to everyone I knew about our new site.
These efforts were successful and we began having great banter while traffic numbers steadily climbed. Then came the Dawgman purge of 2013, as many more posters were banned and censored they began migrating to Hardcore Husky in late July and August. The traffic increase was so steep that Vanilla called me from Montreal for an urgent conference call. They thought my site was going to be blow up and become the next Drudge or whatever. I tried to explain that the purge had led to this plus it was August and football season so they’d see
It was in 2014 (2013?) that I was going to begin fundraisers and I told the people that helped fund the board into existence that I would find a way to have it survive on its own. I funded June and July out of my own pocket. I was mildly concerned about the long-term viability of the site. I remember sitting in my stepsister’s kitchen table at 2am in Arizona in July 2014 during a massive thunderstorm outside. I had some long email exchanges with AllPurpleAllGold, aka TheKobeStopper. I was telling him how I was discouraged with UW football, the way it was being run, and wondered what I was doing running this site anyway and maybe I should close it down. APAG shared a lot of his thoughts that motivated me to keep going.
During that same night I was also communicating with my IT person who was creating the new front page and redesigning other areas of the site. I came up with the tagline, “Enjoying the Freedom of our UnFETTERED boards? Donate today!” I got a kick out of that one.
Soon after, one of our most popular posters, Swaye reached out to me asking if there was anyway he could help. In August 2014 he spearheaded that first fundraiser by threatening to scalp and burn people’s houses down if they didn’t donate, all fueled by narcotics and his Native American hatred for white people. Someone else, I can’t remember who, created a graphic called the Dong Meter, which measured donations in thousands of dollars as represented by inches of penile length. Our goal was to get to 12 inches. A goal that remains elusive to this day. But this all transformed a potentially boring, utilitarian fundraiser into a lively event unto itself. People enjoyed it. That enabled Hardcore Husky to get into the black and be self-sustaining. From this point forward, guys like PurpleBaze, Swaye and Nacho continued to donate generously each year. As well as Mike Damone who from always donated $129 at fundraiser time, and then randomly a couple more times through each year he’d send another $100-$150 and with a note or quip. He enjoyed seeing this site be a foil to Kim Grinolds and Dawgman
Bit by bit, new posters arrived and established themselves to make the place even better. CokeGresterthasnpepsi and DennisDeyoung were huge into recruiting. One of my mistakes early on was that I vowed never to have a recruiting board
Puppylove_Sugarsteel had joined in 2013 and by 2015 had become the wildcasrd and crafted some of the best lines ever invented in the English language. He was known for making insane predicitons that never panned out, but then he’d boast about never being wrong. He was widely hated, as guys like CFetterNachLover and MikeDamone wanted him gone. But he Hardcore Husky’s pepper in the chocolate yo for the next five years.
From 2012-2016 we ran a front page. I did interviews with Don James, Warren Moon, Ronnie Lott, Dennis Brown, Dave Hoffmann. Kenny Easley, Beno Bryant, Chris Hemphill and Ben Ossai and a bunch others. But my interest in writing about the Huskies was on the wane and I finally gave myself permission to stop.
From 2015-2019, Hardcore Husky was in its golden era. It’s possible that Hardcore Husky will again have another golden era, but as of right now that was our peak. We had so many great posters with wild, lively and contradicting points of view. Traffic-wise, the little website that had 28,000 pagiev iews its first month was crossing into over 2,000,000 page views a months. If you entered Washington Huskies footbasll wesbites, we were the first site to come up in Google. We were getting as many as 40,000 lurkers a month.
The last time I attended a game at Husky Stadium was September 2019, the infamous Cal game. Thinking back to how my dad had taken me to my first game when I was five years old in 1976, here I was now taking my 80-year old dad to what ended up being our last game together at Husky Stadium.
The weather was nice enough as we got to our sesats. They played about half a quarter when suddenly there were a couple of lightning flashes in the distance. Play on the field stopped, and the PA announcer said that there would be a delay due to dangerous weather. I put my arm around my dad’s shoulders and said “Leave it to the UW to be pussified about weather too!”
But moments later, torrents of beating rain hammered down on us and the skies unleashed frequent lightning bolts all around the stadium. Very
But we barely got out of the stadium before the rain began pounding so menancinly and with lightning strikes coming down about every ten seconds, that we sought shelter beneath a concrete overhang just outside the stadium. We would stand there for the next 45 minutes as we wait for weather to lighten up.
There were about fiften silhouetted people standing with us under that overhang. I started talking to a couple guys who were in their late 20s/early 30s. We talked college football and Husky football for about 25 minutes.
At one point one of them said something about Longview and I pointed to my dad and told them about how when my dad was 10 years old the Huskies were on their way to play Oregon and stopped in Longview to practice. My dad went down there and watch QB Don Heinrich and running backs Hugh McElhenny and Roland Kirby. That was it, he was a Husky for life. He’d listen to all the games on his transistor radio.
When the rain started to lighten up and I asked my dad if he was ready to brave the elements and he said yes. One of the guys stuck out his hand and said nice talking with you I’m so-and-so. I said yeah nice to meet you, I’m Derek Johnson. And the guy did a double take and said, “Derek Johnson? The guy who runs Hardcore Husky?” I nodded and said yep. And the two guys started going crazy and shaking my hand again. They said it was their favorite site on the internet and they are on it every day. They loved all the crazy posters on there like Pup, Swaye and PurpleJ. One of them left for a second and then came back and handed me a wad of cash and told me to give a badge to someone who couldn’t afford one. I asked them which handles they were but they laughed and said OH no, we could never sign up for that site and risk being associated with it, and then went on to discuss what they did for a living and bit of their background.
We said goodbye and dad and I made the two miles walk to the car. He was staying overnight at a hotel in Eastgate, so I was driving him down Interstate 405 as lightening was going off every few seconds all around us. I said it seemed like a Hollywood movie, very surreal.
Dad told me later that when he got to his hotel room, the TV did not carry the Pac-12 Network so he couldn’t watch the game. (Fuck you Larry Scott). So he resorted to doing what he did as a kid—he listened to the Huskies on
A few months later began the Covid era, and watching the UW have a Covid outbreak and hand over the Nroth title to Oregon and wished them good luck to boot. Hardcore Husky continues to this day to chug along though our numbers haven’t returned to where they peaked in 2019.
But we’ve had and have so many great posters we’ve had and I can’t sit here and name them all, but if you see a poster with a shitty little orange or purple badge next to their avatar. They are supporting the site and are a valuable part of our community.
The current rendition of our podcast continues to steadily gain audience. It would not exist if it weren’t for Baseman, who approached me about during the Covid year of 2020. But through circumstances it ran out of steam throughout the backdrop of the failed Jimmy Lake era.
When I met JoeyD and WoolleyDoog at The Pizza Coop in July 2021 and the conversation was lively enough that I spontaneously asked them if they wanted to do a pod. We’ve done roughly 30+ episodes and it has been a blast.
I can’t wrap this up without mentioning our late friend DeLarry who got hit by a car and died in April 2020. DeLarry had a colorful life story that I wrote about and can be found on Hardcore Husky. But he was an OG Half Brain and one of our better posters in the early days of the site. We miss him a lot.
So here we are now in 2022, as the Huskies get ready to play WSU in the Apple Cup. I’ve blathered on long enough, so without furether ado let’s move on to the conversation with me, Swaye and CFettersNachoLover.