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."