After Football-playing Career
Owen was the host of Pro Football Highlights on the DuMont Television Network from 1951-53.
After the Giants slipped to 3–9 in 1953, Owen announced his retirement as head coach (moving into the team's front office as head scout), ending his 23+ seasons on the field in New York at 150–99–17. As the final minutes ticked away in his last game as Giant coach, a late-game loss, television cameras showed him standing alone on the sidelines in tears. But he returned to the college ranks a year later as a spring practice assistant, first at South Carolina and then at Baylor, signing on as assistant coach at Baylor University in Texas on July 18, 1955.
Just weeks after the end of the 1955 NFL season, the Philadelphia Eagles hired Hugh Devore as head coach and added Owen as his assistant soon after. But two seasons of struggling in Philadelphia led to the entire coaching staff's dismissal, and Owen eventually became a head coach yet again, this time on an interim basis with the Canadian Football League's Toronto Argonauts on September 21, 1959.
The Argonauts declined Owen's offer to stay on as full-time head coach for 1960, but retained him as a scout and advisor before he moved to the CFL's Calgary Stampeders on August 23, 1960 as interim head coach, but as in Toronto Owen was replaced at the end of the season. On December 29 of the same year, he was named head coach of the CFL Saskatchewan Roughriders, a team that had won just once in 1960. Owen's 1961 team nearly reached the playoffs, then did so the following year and was voted CFL Coach of the Year. But after suffering a heart attack late in 1962, he resigned on January 6, 1963.
Unable to stay away from the sport, however, he soon came back as head coach of the United Football League's Syracuse Stormers on March 20, 1963 only to return to his beloved Giants that November to scout for them, unfortunately for only a short time before being stricken with a terminal cerebral hemorrhage the following May. A great active life in football came to a sad end after eight days in critical care, on May 17, 1964. Steve Owen was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a member of the fourth class, enshrined 17 September 1966.
Read more about this topic: Steve Owen (American Football)
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)