Bennie Owen: Gentleman Coach and Stadium Visionary
by Berry Tramel
9/13/2024
J on Trudgeon and his family have a game day tradition at OU. They enter the gates that surround Owen Field and find the plaque on the north exterior wall of Gaylord Family – Oklahoma Memorial Stadium.
The plaque that honors Bennie Owen, the father of Sooner football and the man responsible for the stadium that radio voice Toby Rowland dubbed “The Palace on the Prairie.”
The prairie is exactly what Norman was in 1905, when Owen arrived as the OU football coach, at age 29. By then, Owen already had lived quite the life. Chicago-born, St. Louis-bred. Owen’s family migrated to Arkansas City, Kan., and in 1893, Owen participated in the Cherokee Outlet Land Run. He didn’t stay in the Oklahoma Territory; Owen found himself back in Kansas as a medical apprentice, enrolled in the University of Kansas to study medicine and found football.
Owen was a Jayhawk quarterback for “Hurryup” Fielding Yost, whose teams at Michigan would revolutionize football. Yost’s 1901 Wolverines won the first Rose Bowl, with Benjamin Gilbert Owen as an assistant coach.
Owen was back in Kansas in 1902 as coach of Bethany College’s “Terrible Swedes,” where in three seasons his teams went 22-2-2. His unbeaten 1904 team capped its season with a 36-9 rout of OU, and soon enough Owen was coaching the Rough Riders.
By 1908, OU was the Sooners. By 1911, Owen had pioneered the new-rule passing game and the Sooners were unbeaten. By 1914, they led the nation in scoring. Well, you get the picture. Owen was a Hall of Fame coach, but his lasting contribution to the university was his vision for the stadium. He plotted the land, raised the funds and even helped with the labor as OU’s football home went from a patch of grass on the southwest corner of Jenkins Avenue and Brooks Street in 1923, to a 16,000-seat stadium in 1925.
Which makes this historic 2024 season the 100th year for what originally was christened Oklahoma Memorial Stadium but was widely known as Owen Field.
Bennie was always an advocate of sportsmanship. I think he was a marvelous, marvelous model for the early days of Oklahoma football.
And Trudgeon, the great-grandson of Owen, has continued a ritual. Every home game, his family makes its way to the Owen memorial on the north exterior wall, and his descendants rub the nose of the Sooner patriarch.
“I remember going when I was 10 years old,” said Trudgeon, 51, a basketball student manager for Billy Tubbs and Kelvin Sampson in the mid-1990s.
Trudgeon’s hoops connection doesn’t disrupt the Owen narrative. Owen was the OU basketball coach, too. And baseball coach. Owen was OU’s athletic director from 1907-34. His stadium project also included the OU Field House and OU Student Union. The OU Golf Course and swimming pool were his ideas, too.
When Owen wasn’t launching an athletic juggernaut or transforming the campus of a flagship university, he found time to run the Oklahoma high school sports association.
Whatever ways the University of Oklahoma honors Bennie Owen, it’s well-deserved. He died in 1970 at age 94 and lived most of his retirement years in Norman.
Trudgeon never met his great-grandfather. But a few of Owen’s grandchildren remain with us and have vibrant memories, not so much of football glory, but of a lovely man that graced Norman and OU for six decades.
Generations of the Owen family has called him “GranGran.” They remember idyllic days visiting at his house at 530 Elm Street, where now sits the Catlett Music Center.
“I just thought he was the most wonderful man in the world,” said Ann Stussi, 70, of Portland, Oregon. “He bent over backwards to make everybody happy.”
Her memories of Owen come flooding. Of GranGran digging a hole his well-manicured backyard and putting in a tin can, so the kids could play golf. Of her family stopping in Lindsborg, Kan., and a watermelon farmer declaring Bennie Owen was his hero, 60 years after he had coached the Terrible Swedes.
“He was the best grandfather anybody could ever have,” Stussi said.
Stussi’s mother, Dorothy Ann Bryan, died in 2020 at age 98.
“He was the world’s best,” Bryan said a few months before her death. “Absolutely perfect. He was never out of sorts. He was just marvelous. He was the most even-tempered, sweetest and happiest man I’ve ever known.”
Bryan recalled a childhood with former Sooners routinely stopping by the house on Elm Street. On game days, the Owens would host a lunch with all kinds of visitors, before the migration to the stadium that Bennie built.
The Owens had a reserved box at the stadium, with eight wooden-slat green chairs roped off. Stussi still laughs at the story of her mother getting chicken pox and missing the game when Will Rogers sat with Owen.
“If we didn’t have enough chairs, he’d get another chair,” said Bill Page, 80, of Warrenton, Oregon, the oldest of Owen’s grandchildren. “It was fun. Usually on game days, Saturday morning, some people would come over to GranGran’s house before the game. I remember meeting Bud Wilkinson over there one time.
“Went to a lot of games there when I was a kid. I got to go to football practice. He’d take me out there a lot of times. He’d always get me a football to bring home. It was pretty wonderful.”
Page liked non-game days even better.
When Page was visiting from Fort Worth at ages 5-6-7, GranGran would take him on walks to the drugstore for a Coke or a milkshake.
“I always loved going anywhere with him,” Page said. “I’ll never forget this. You couldn’t walk down the street with him. Everybody knew who he was and they all wanted to talk to him.”
Owen, who lost his right arm in a 1907 hunting accident, taught Page to swim in the OU pool. Funny the things you remember; Owen swam on his side, to keep from going in circles, with only one arm to stroke.
Owen would take Page to the OU golf course and ride the tractor. Building such a collection of facilities comes with some perks.
Owen’s teams went 122-54-16 in his 22 seasons, 1905-26. His best teams missed the new-stadium era. Owen’s last two teams played in the stadium; they went 4-3-1 and 5-2-1.
It would be Wilkinson’s and Barry Switzer’s and Bob Stoops’ great teams that would shine most in the stadium that Bennie built.
Oklahoma Memorial Stadium certainly was a citadel in the 1950s, when Wilkinson’s teams were in the midst of the historic 47-game winning streak.
Page was born in 1944, so those Wilkinson salad days were in his wheelhouse of youth. But Page doesn’t remember GranGran talking much about his contributions to the stadium.
“He was pretty modest,” Page said. “He wouldn’t think whatever he did there was a big deal. Didn’t really remember him trying to take credit for anything.”
That’s not the biased view of a wistful grandson in old age. That’s the standard book on Bennie Owen.
“He was a real gentleman, when most football coaches weren’t like that,” said OU historian J. Brent Clark. “Bennie was always an advocate of sportsmanship. I think he was a marvelous, marvelous model for the early days of Oklahoma football.
“Always conducted himself with great humility and character. Had he not had those qualities, he would not have been successful getting the university to move on those projects.”
Like the football stadium that is in its 100th season, standing more stately and glorious than ever, as the Sooners enter the Southeastern Conference.
And so, Jon Trudgeon, the grandson of Dorothy Ann Bryan and the great-grandson of GranGran, still makes his pilgrimage.
Much like legions of OU fans for going on a century, Trudgeon still gets a charge out of entering the stadium.
“Oh my gosh, as someone who’s loved college athletics, OU athletics in particular, I always marvel at the grandeur of it,” Trudgeon said. “Beyond compare.”
Of course, Trudgeon has a special point of view. He knows the stadium’s story well and how his great-grandfather was the vision and the will behind its existence.
“From playing on Boyd Field (the previous home of OU football) to self-financing a stadium, which could never be done today,” Trudgeon said. “What it was going to mean to the university.
“The part that’s always struck me, how did he know it was going to be the monster? I don’t know if he could envision 80,000, but he clearly had tens of thousands in his mind. That’s astounding. How it would take off. It would become a religion. I marvel at the business end of it. What it’ll mean to the city, the university, the region itself.”
He and his family find that plaque and rub the bronzed nose of the man who was in the Land Run and sat with Will Rogers and built not just a football legacy, but a stadium that remains a mecca for hundreds of thousands of Oklahomans.
