Sigvard Hansen, Jr., rates among the finest offensive lineman in Whitman football history. As a senior captain in 1956, he earned first-team All-Northwest Conference honors, repeating a first-team selection from his junior season.
Hansen also earned Whitman’s R.V. Borleske award to culminate his career at the College.
A four-year letterman in football, Hansen began his career in the offensive backfield as a fullback but moved to the line after his sophomore year. George Sullivan, a fullback from the ’50s and also a Hall of Fame inductee, said of Hansen, “Ted was part of probably the best offensive line Whitman ever had. He was fast for a guard, and he was smart. I guess he showed us later how smart he really was after he left Whitman!”
Hansen graduated from the University of Washington School of Medicine in 1961 and spent three years in the U. S. Navy. His distinguished career includes work as a professor and as chief of orthopedics at the UW School of Medicine, where the Sigvard T. Hansen, Jr., Chair for Traumatology Research was endowed in 1994.
He is widely recognized as a founding father of orthopedic traumatology and as one of the early team members who helped establish Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center.
Dr. Hansen, the director of the Foot and Ankle Institute at Harborview, received the UW School of Medicine’s Distinguished Alumni Award in 2001.
