College Sports Information Directors of America

By Bob Rodman
The Register-Guard

He is a day away from fighting in his 36th
and final Civil War.

The old warhorse never threw a pass, threw a block or
threw a flag - not in any of those football games,
anyway.

But 63-year-old Hal Cowan is guaranteed to gnash his teeth, pump his fist and scowl his scowl when Oregon State and Oregon play Saturday afternoon at Autzen Stadium.

Then again, he's that way most days, and has been year after year after year as the sports information director at Oregon State and before that, believe it or not, at Oregon.

He's been called "Mr. Happy," because he usually isn't, and been described as "grumpy" because he usually is. Look up "curmudgeon" in the dictionary, and you ought to find Cowan's picture.

His stretch as the OSU athletic department's SID - a public relations specialist who is a combination of spokesman, media liaison, publicist and chief statistician - has lasted more than 27 years, a run preceded by an eight-year tour of duty at Oregon and a brief stop with the defunct World Football League.

Now he is digging his way out of a Gill Coliseum office piled high with reference material and media guides dating to the early 1970s. In it, you find curled and discolored photographs, and a desktop - complete with dustbugs - that hasn't seen daylight in a couple of decades.

There are notes with information long ago unneeded, some duct tape (who knows why) and two bras (that's right) hanging on a wall hook behind his office door (we're not going there).

The king is leaving his kingdom.

Hal Cowan - the fifth of just five sports information directors at OSU since 1924 - is retiring.

After a career spanning 38 years, including 313 consecutive Oregon State football games - the longest current streak among NCAA Division I-A SIDs - Cowan has darn near barked at his last TV reporter.

He is waving goodbye to the 99-hour work weeks, to the long days and sometimes longer nights on the road, to the horde of media requests for athlete and coach interviews, to the danged computer age, and to his long, seldom-successful struggle known as the Civil War.

He is taking with him mega-awards for his labor-of-love work, including the one his peers presented a decade ago as the best in his field.

He is taking with him an Old School approach in a New Age era.

He is taking with him, too, the lovable character few knew - and the cantankerous, crusty, ornery and often pain-in-the-backside demeanor with which many were familiar.

And he is taking with him a defeat-ravaged Civil War record that, on the eve of his final battle, includes just seven wins, 27 losses and that infamous 0-0 tie in 1983.

"It's been tough," Cowan admitted.

No kidding. In his eight years with the Ducks, he was on the winning side only once. In his 27-plus years at OSU, he's had bragging rights just six times, and half of those came in the last five years.

"That game has always been for the right to live in the state, and I got reminded of that all the time," Cowan said.

Rod Commons, a former assistant sports information director at OSU who is in his 28th year as the SID at Washington State, said Cowan carried that cross a long time.

"He took an ungodly amount of ribbing," Commons said. "At Oregon, he couldn't beat Oregon State. At Oregon State, he couldn't beat Oregon."

Cowan grew up in a single-parent family with no siblings. He leaned heavily on athletics and knew as a schoolboy in Salem that his career would land somewhere in the sports communications arena.

He was a fair athlete in his day, playing a little football, basketball and baseball until one summer he was beaned by - wouldn't you know it - a University of Oregon pitcher.

Despite a tolerance level that can be measured in, oh, millimeters, Cowan has piloted an office that is an efficient, thorough and complete ship. He is meticulous and precise. He just hasn't done it with kid gloves.

"Here's what I have to say about the `Beav,' " said Bob Murphy, a former sports information director at Stanford and longtime friend of Cowan.

"He's having this retirement party at the Corvallis Country Club, the same place he sued."

To know Cowan - who really and truly got legal with his golf course over a mishap and won - is to love Cowan. But love at first sight it usually is not.

"Hal's done a wonderful job," former OSU broadcaster Darrell Aune said. "But you could never take him out in public."

This is a guy who once threw OSU's own cheerleaders out of the school's football stadium press box. A guy who once convinced an OSU radio crew to say hello to his poodle - but not his wife - on the air. A guy who once wore a bright orange cowboy hat and believed it was cool attire. A guy who challenged the ability of Pac-10 Conference football officials to the head of those same officials during a game.

"Hey," Commons said, "the guy served in the military. I'm not sure he doesn't still have some shrapnel in his backside."

But the real Hal Cowan, Murphy said, "is about a quarter-inch below the surface. As much as Cowan would appear to dislike people, to be short and abrupt, he loves the personal relationships."

Or, as Bob Grim, the former OSU and NFL star and analyst on Beaver radio broadcasts for 15 years, put it: "It's just his personality, one with a big bark but no bite."

Others have taken a bite or two out of Cowan, however.

Steve Hellyer, the former media relations director at Oregon, would annually post Cowan's Civil War record in the game-day news release.

"At one point his record in the Civil War was 1-13-1," Hellyer said. "It was so abysmal you had to call attention to it. It was news."

Or course, Cowan and Hellyer - never described as softspoken - were more alike than either preferred to admit.

"He's a true warrior," Hellyer said. "We had our battles but he is one of the true Beaver icons left. I have the utmost respect for him and the job he has done. I wish him well in his retirement."

Hired by the famous - Len Casanova at Oregon and Dee Andros at Oregon State - Cowan has seen some of the best at both schools.

"The four greatest competitors I've been around? Dan Fouts, Steve Prefontaine, Gary Payton and A.C. Green," he said. "They would refuse to lose."

Mr. Happy's happiest moment? "It sure felt good to win a Civil War game, and I felt like I was on top of the world when Oregon State won the Fiesta Bowl," he said.

Jan Cowan, his wife of 27 years - a feat that often has her mentioned with Mother Teresa as a candidate for sainthood - said her husband often brought the job home with him.

"Once in awhile he'll be short with me, and that's when I remind him I'm his wife, not one of his cronies," she said.

Over the years, Cowan said, the relationship between the media, on one side, and the athletes and coaches Cowan represents has become more adversarial, and the demands for interviews more intensely competitive.

"I now know how many damn talk-radio stations there are in the U.S. because I had to deal with them when (former OSU coach Dennis) Erickson was here," he said. "Sometimes I have to say no. I tell it like it is. I don't mince words. If I feel the need to pounce, I pounce.

"Ideally, you'd like everybody in the world to love you. The reality is, that isn't going to happen."

Which makes Cowan sound tough as nails - well, OK, he can be - but on the other hand, there's the story of the 1991 Civil War, when the winless Beavers, under first-year coach Jerry Pettibone, stunned the Ducks in Autzen Stadium, 14-3.

"As the clock was ticking down," Pettibone remembered, "there was Hal, on the sideline, in his topcoat, a clipboard under his arm and his lip quivering.

"He was crying like a baby. I knew then just how important the Civil War and Oregon State were to Hal."

Saturday will be his last Civil War, and in a few months the Cowans will move to Bend, to a place on a golf course, where he'll be gone, but not forgotten, an era ended.

"After they made Hal," Commons said, "they broke the mold."

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