The Stadium Bennie Built Turns 100
by Berry Tramel
8/9/2024
B ennie Owen participated in the 1893 Oklahoma Land Run and lived long enough to see Steve Owens win the 1969 Heisman Trophy.
Owen coached OU football to 14 wins with two arms, then another 108 with only one arm, after a hunting accident. Owen was the OU athletic director for 27 years and took the Sooners first into the Southwest Conference (1915), then into the Missouri Valley (1920), which became the Big Six. He’s a charter member of the College Football Hall of Fame.
And yet, Owen’s most lasting contribution to Sooner football came in 1917. He published a book.
Oh, maybe it was more like a pamphlet. But either way, “A Stadium for Oklahoma” outlined the plans for a 30,000-seat football stadium, expandable to 52,000, and a 5,000-seat gymnasium. Estimated cost: $340,000. Eventually, a new student union was added to the fundraising campaign.
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The OU Athletics Department will celebrate the 100th season of Gaylord Family - Oklahoma Memorial Stadium in 2024. Join us as we take a look back on a century of magic.
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Owen delivered his book to anyone who would read it, declaring that OU was in need of such a gathering place and that the stadium would pay off over time.
Owen delivered. That stadium, which was constructed in time for the 1925 season, on the plot of land at the southwest corner of Brooks Street and Jenkins Avenue, where the Sooners began playing in 1923, still stands today.
Gaylord Family – Oklahoma Memorial Stadium begins its 100th season on Aug. 30 against Temple. And for a century, the stadium has been a citadel for championship football. Memories by the millions have been made for football fans and alumni returning to campus and students using a ballgame as a quick way to find community in the early days of a semester.
We have got to go ahead or go back, we can’t stand still,Bennie Owen
Bud Wilkinson, Barry Switzer and Bob Stoops followed Owen as Hall of Fame coaches who called the stadium home. Seven OU football teams have won national championships; seven Sooners have won the Heisman Trophy.
The stadium has served as the primary revenue-generator for OU athletics, but it’s also been the graduation venue for tens of thousands of students, and in later years it’s become even a notable concert host.
And it all started with Bennie Owen’s book.
“We have got to go ahead or go back, we can’t stand still,” Owen declared more than a century ago, sounding very much like a contemporary administrator.
The late Gary King, an Owen biographer, titled his book “Oklahoma’s Bennie Owen: Man For All Seasons,” and Owen was that. And not just because he also coached OU baseball and basketball for a while.
Owen was everything to the stadium project, starting as its visionary.
In November 1920, according to the Oklahoma Daily, Owen announced that he would ask the legislature for $350,000 for the project. When that proved fruitless, the same student paper reported in December 1921 that Owen addressed an assembly of OU students and “told them that the only way the stadium drive would be successful would be for the university student body, alumni and people in Oklahoma with a special interest in ‘Soonerland’ to get behind it.”
Owen’s plan: over Christmas break, the students would petition the people of their hometowns to drum up support for the project. “The first gun has been fired in the stadium campaign, and now we need every Sooner to get behind the movement and put it across,” Owen said.
According to King, the biographer, Owen got the faculty behind him and organized university clubs around the state to donate. Owen also asked students to pledge money, and the students themselves ignited the campaign.
And the man with one arm even participated in the construction of the stadium. There are vintage photos of Owen helping build the stadium.
The stadium was christened Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, in honor of the fallen soldiers from the Great War, but before the stadium’s construction, the university had named the field in Owen’s honor. Throughout the 20th century, the most common name for the Sooners’ football home was Owen Field.
From vision to hammer to coaching on the field to generational impact, Owen’s impact reverberates even to this day.
Owen Field was circled by a cinder track until a 1949 expansion. Owen got the cinders from the Oklahoma Gas & Electric Company, and he persuaded the Rock Island and Santa Fe railroads into hauling the cinders from Harrah for a dollar a carload. With the leftover cinders, along with dirt from what now is Parrington Oval, Owen filled in the low, marshy area south of Owen Field. Soon enough, OU had a football practice field and a new baseball diamond.
Owen’s fundraising produced not just the football stadium, student union and baseball field, but eventually the original OU golf course, swimming pool, tennis courts and intramural field.
In July 1925, three months before the opener against Drake, The Daily Oklahoman opined of the stadium’s importance: “A larger stadium means more revenues from football. Larger revenues mean a larger coaching staff; a larger coaching staff means better teams. Better teams mean still larger revenues.”
Quite prescient, though, that Drake opener filled only about half of the 7,500 west-side seats that were rushingly finished for the opener. The stadium eventually seated 16,000 by season’s end.
The east-side seating was added by 1929, up to 32,000 capacity, and subsequent expansions brought the seats to 55,647 (1948), 61,826 (1957, with the south bleachers), 71,187 (1975, west-side upper deck), 75,004 (1980), 82,112 (2004, completion of east-side upper deck) and 83,489 (2016, south end bowled in).
In recent years, capacity has been reduced to 80,126 due to the widening of aisles and some seats.
The early 21st-century improvements were funded in part by a $12 million donation from the Gaylord Family, and the stadium was rechristened Gaylord Family – Oklahoma Memorial Stadium.
What a ride for Owen Field. Like the Oklahoman editorial suggested, the Sooners’ success has fueled the stadium’s enhancements, which have been fueled by the Sooners’ success.
The 1949 expansion came on the heels of Wilkinson’s early championships (1947-48). The 1975 expansion came after Switzer’s back-to-back unbeaten seasons in his first two years as coach. The east-side upper deck and suites were ignited by Stoops’ 2000 national championship.
The same plot of grass on which Baker Mayfield and Kyler Murray produced Heisman Trophy-winning seasons is the same plot of grass on which Owen coached his final OU team, and in between were legends of the game. Joe Golding and Joe Washington. Billy Vessels and Billy Sims. The Burris brothers and the Selmon brothers. Jack Mitchell and Jack Mildren. Darrell Royal and Daryl Hunt.
Stoops teams once won 39 straight on Owen Field, where Wilkinson teams won 20 of their historic 47 straight victories.
And now the Sooners embark on a new era, in the Southeastern Conference, which has hallowed cathedrals like Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge and Neyland Stadium in Knoxville and Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa. The SEC has become the master of promoting its tradition, and Gaylord Family – Oklahoma Memorial Stadium figures to soon join the company of SEC snake pits.
Plans for the future include new suites and press box on the west side, further enhancing what radio voice Toby Rowland dubbed The Palace on the Prairie.
But 100 years ago, Norman was even more of a prairie, with a population somewhere around 7,300 and OU sporting an enrollment of about 4,200.
And the Sooners’ man for all seasons, the football coach and athletic director and chief fundraiser, also was a visionary. His stadium was built, and Oklahoma football never has been the same.
