Football player Dennis Wayne Harrah was born in South Charleston on March 9, 1953. He grew up on the West Side of Charleston and played football at Stonewall Jackson High School. As a youth, he showed little interest in sports other than playing Little League baseball. In an interview with the Charleston Gazette, he later joked, "If I was a great athlete, I wouldn't have been playing offensive line." His playing skills, though, came together his junior year at Stonewall, and he saw football as a way of "climbing the ladder of life." In 1970, he was named an all-state center.

In high school, he was recruited by Marshall just weeks before that team's tragic 1970 plane crash. West Virginia University did not reach out to him, so the six-feet, five-inch guard attended the University of Miami (Florida) from 1971 to 1974. During those years, Miami split two games with WVU. He said he turned up his intensity in both games to "prove that they possibly have made a mistake."

In the 1975 National Football League draft, he was the 11th overall pick and the first-round pick of the Los Angeles Rams. In the years Harrah played on the offensive line, his team averaged 2,450 yards rushing per year and won 61 percent of their regular season games. Harrah was named First Team All-Conference guard six times, Second Team All-Conference three times, and First Team All-NFL four times. He was named to six Pro Bowl games. He played in one Super Bowl, in 1980, but the Rams lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers. Harrah played 168 games at offensive guard until his retirement in 1987.

After football, Harrah worked in real estate and coached football in California. He married his wife, Teresa, in 1986, and they have two grown sons. In 2009, Dennis and Teresa moved to Harrah Ranch, an equine retirement community near Paso Robles, California. He was inducted into the University of Miami Sports Hall of Fame in 1989 and into the West Virginia Sports Hall of Fame in 2013.

Despite being snubbed by WVU during the high school recruiting process, Harrah holds no ill will, saying, "I'm a West Virginia fan and always will be a West Virginia fan."