Jim Owens cut a big swath through Seattle

Before there was Purple Reign, before there was the Wave, before there was Don James, there was Jim Owens.

Imagine a Seattle without the Mariners, the Seahawks, the Sonics. Without sports-talk radio, and the ability to get your news off a computer. That's the era when Owens rode herd in our town, winning the 1960 and 1961 Rose Bowls, cutting a swath almost difficult to fathom.

"He brought football alive in Seattle," said his fullback of 1960-62, Bobby Monroe. "The community was ready for it. They grasped it wholeheartedly."

As big a mark as the eminently successful James left on Washington football, Owens' might have been just as indelible. When he died Saturday at 82, it had been 35 years since he last coached. In 1974, he was done at 47 with the Huskies, done coaching anywhere, and the passing years seemed only to accentuate the imprint he put on the program.

Pedigree? He played for Bud Wilkinson at Oklahoma, coached under Bear Bryant at Texas A&M. He was with Bryant for the brutal 1954 A&M training camp that inspired the book and movie "The Junction Boys."

No doubt that seasoning had a profound effect on his preparation of the Huskies, who were simply the baddest, most feared team on the West Coast for the first half of his 18 years here.

Chuck Allen, a standout guard on those Rose Bowl teams, recalled the template set down by Owens' coaching staff: "You just play to your maximum. And we know when that is, you don't."

Said Allen, "It seemed like we gave everything we had. And when we had, they asked more."

They'd fibbed only a little to Allen when he came down from Cle Elum for the start of the Owens era in 1957, telling him they'd recruited only 10 or so players. Allen showed up to find 150.

"It got weeded out pretty fast," he said.

There wasn't much time devoted to nonsense. Halfback Don McKeta, the Pennsylvanian who did a Navy tour before college, remembers Owens pressing him for a decision during recruiting.

"If you go someplace else," Owens vowed, "we're going to beat you."

Game-week Tuesdays brought the dreaded "challenge drill," when a member of the No. 2 gold unit could challenge a purple-shirted starter for his spot. A defensive lineman would then square off — "jaw-to-jaw, nose-to-nose," says Monroe — with an offensive lineman, and if he beat him and held a ball-carrier to less than 10 yards in three plays, he won the job.

It didn't take players long to discover that frequently their teammates weren't doing the challenging.

"Quite often," says guard Tim Bullard, "Tom Tipps or Bert Clark [assistant coaches] would 'volunteer-challenge' you."

The Huskies weren't big, just mean. From those 1959-60 teams, John Meyers weighed 245, Ben Davidson 240 and Bullard's brother Barry 230.

"The rest of us were 220 or less," Tim Bullard says. "Weights weren't that important. A lot of us who were marginally fast stayed out of the weight room. We didn't think we could afford to lose any speed."

There was an uncommon bond among those teams of the one-platoon era, when a guard might also play linebacker. Squad sizes were smaller. Coincidence or not, Owens' success flattened in the mid-'60s with the onset of two-platoon football, and then bottomed out completely in 1969 with a racially torn 1-9 team.

I won't presume to know what was in Owens' heart then, when he suspended several African-Americans who had questioned some of his methods. He asked them in turn if they were willing to pledge total commitment to the team, and they refused.

He was like a lot of coaches of that era. In a time of social upheaval, many clung foolishly to the notion that any suggestion for self-examination was an affront to their authority.

I'd guess that Owens was a lot like one of his contemporaries, the late Oregon State coach Dee Andros — of a different time and a different place. Andros, a post-World War II teammate of Owens at Oklahoma, was a fundamentally good man. But he once uttered this chilling line to a reporter: "I don't have anything against blacks. But I wouldn't want my daughter to marry one."

Tim Bullard takes a broad view in assessing the lamentable segment of Owens' career.

"We probably contributed to it," he says. "It was as much ignorance as anything else ... we were just small kids from the Northwest who didn't understand racism."

Naming several African-American teammates, Bullard continues: "I'm sure those fellows didn't feel we understood what was happening in their lives. It was a sad thing. I don't blame him as much as I blame the times. It happened; it needed to happen."

When he came back in 2003 for the unveiling of his statue, Owens was called to account by black-community leaders.

Twenty-nine years after he'd left coaching, four decades after Washington had rocked college football, Jim Owens was still a big deal. He always was.

Bud Withers: 206-464-8281 or bwithers@seattletimes.com