Kaye Cowher carved out her own identity
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Steelers coach Bill Cowher and wife, Kaye, greet fans during a parade celebrating the team's victory in Super Bowl XL on Feb. 7, 2006.
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She was the wife of the Pittsburgh Steelers football coach -- but she wasn't just Mrs. Bill Cowher.
Kaye Young Cowher, who died of skin cancer Friday at age 54 in her home state of North Carolina, was her own person, with her own accomplishments, even as she protected her husband and children from the limelight's fierce glare.
And if you don't believe it, ask Agnus Berenato, the University of Pittsburgh women's basketball coach, who knew her back in the early days of Title IX, when she was one of the first women to play college basketball on a scholarship in North Carolina.
"Kaye was Kaye, and as far as I was concerned, Bill was Kaye's husband," said Ms. Berenato, whose history with Mrs. Cowher dates back to the 1970s.
Ms. Berenato and her sisters, while playing basketball for the University of North Carolina, were "rivals on the court" against Mrs. Cowher and her identical twin Faye, who both played for North Carolina State. Faye Young Miller would later become Ms. Berenato's assistant when she coached Georgia Tech's women's basketball team.
But when Ms. Berenato first came to Pittsburgh in 2003 to coach for Pitt, she said, "there was a banquet at the YMCA the first or second week I was in town, and Bill was at the head table, and they asked me to speak. I thought, 'What am I going to speak about, are you kidding?' I was young, dumb and didn't know anything -- least of all that Bill was something like a god in Pittsburgh. I had never been to Pittsburgh, I didn't know.
"So I got up and looked over at him and said, 'Well, ha, you all might think Bill's in charge, but Kaye's the one who wears the pants in the family,' and so forth," she said. "Well, Bill was laughing and the whole thing was on television, and believe me I never heard the end of it."
Ms. Berenato is joking about the pants-in-the-family part -- "they had an amazing partnership and strong mutual respect for each other," she said. But her point is that through the years, Mrs. Cowher carved out her own identity as a pioneering female athlete and advocate for women's sports while raising three daughters who were gifted athletes -- and coming to Pittsburgh wouldn't change that.
No one saw this more clearly than Dan Rooney, the Steelers' owner who is now the U.S. Ambassador to Ireland. After the Cowhers arrived in Pittsburgh in 1992, Mrs. Cowher -- a mother with a baby -- went out of her way to be helpful to the Steelers players' wives, he recalled.
First Published July 25, 2010 12:28 am
