Oklahoma football: Bennie Owen was a Sooner for all seasons

Bennie Owen is the forgotten man in Oklahoma football’s fabulous foursome of head coaches.

The man for whom the field at Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium is named after won the fewest games among the four members of OU’s century club, but he coached the longest of any of the Sooners’ 22 head coaches.

Their are few, if any, Oklahoma football fans who were alive when Owen roamed the Sooner sidelines. He began his OU coaching career in 1905, 10 years after the Sooners played their first varsity football game. Although the program was only a decade old, five coaches had preceded him in the position.

Owen served as the head football coach for 22 years, his final season coming in 1926. Oklahoma’s record over those 22 seasons was 122-54-16 (.677). Only three times under Owen did the Sooners endure a losing season, and they all came consecutively toward the end of his tenure (1922 through ’24).

Although his contributions to Oklahoma football is what he is best remembered for, Owen also coached two other sports at the school. He coached the Sooner basketball team from 1908 to 1921 and was head baseball coach from 1906 to 1922. He was much more successful, however, with the football program.

While he was still coaching at OU, he held a fourth job. For 27 years, from 1907 to 1934, Owen served as the school’s athletic director.

Bennie Owen as the first of the great Oklahoma football coaches.

Owen was born in Chicago, Illinois. He moved with his family to St. Louis, Missouri, when he was 12, and shortly thereafter the family relocated again, to Arkansas City, Kansas.

It was in Arkansas City that he developed his love for football. Owen had played on the baseball team in high school in St. Louis. At that time in his life, he had not ever witnessed a football game.

That changed a few years after the family moved to southeastern Kansas. Owen learned that a football team was being put together in town, and he stopped by the city park one day to watch the team practice. He liked what he saw and later asked the head coach if he could join the team.

At 5-feet, 5 inches and all of 130 pounds ringing wet, Owen didn’t have the physical makeup for the game of football and the coach of the team didn’t think he would turn out to be much of a player. No one bothered to tell Owen that, though, and the coach was wildly fooled with what he saw from the highly athletic and tenacious Owen when he watched him workout.

In his highly informative and insightful book on Owen’s life, “Oklahoma’s Bennie Owen: Man for All Seasons,” Gary King gave this description of Owen’s introduction to the game of football:

"“Bennie was not at all intimidated by the bigger and stronger but decidedly slower players. He attacked the sport with reckless abandon and quickly became a starter at halfback ( for the Arkansas City town team).”"

Owen enrolled at the University of Kansas in 1897 — that’s right, he was a Jayhawker before he became a Sooner. That was 10 years before Oklahoma became a state. He had heard that Kansas was looking for football players, but his real reason for going there was to pursue medical studies and follow in the footsteps of S.B. Parsons, the frontier doctor he had apprenticed under for three years in Arkansas City.

It was his time at the University of Kansas that formally kick-started Owen’s long and distinguished football coaching career and ultimately landed him in the Sooner State and at OU.

We’ll get into that in Part II of this two-part series on legendary Oklahoma football coach Bennie Owen in this same space on Friday.