Sorry, Charlie : Former Ram Great Cowan Gets No Help from the NFL After Kidney Failure, but Old Friends Come to His Aid

Charlie Cowan, a former 270-pound blocking machine for the Rams, is now tied down to different apparatus three times a week. In the failed kidney business, you love your machine or move on, as a friend of Cowan’s recently proved.

“He told them to get him off the machine so they had to take him off,” Cowan said. “He got tired of the routine. They can’t force you to stay on the machine. He went to Texas. And died. He felt it wasn’t worth all this procedure.”

Cowan, whose kidneys quit working two years ago, couldn’t spell “dialysis” when doctors first described the machine of so many tubes and knobs that would become his constant companion. Now, he knows more than he wishes to about kidneys: stones, transplants, renal failures, donors, complications. He knows the kidneys are a pair of glandular organs in the upper abdomen that separate water and waste products from the blood and excrete them as urine. When they fail, a machine must take over the job of filtering.

Cowan, who retired after the 1975 season, played 15 years at guard and tackle for the Rams. He played in 206 games, only two fewer than franchise leader Merlin Olsen. Cowan was more mountain than man, at 6-foot-4 and 270 pounds, dominating defensive ends in an era of restrictive, no-hand, chicken-wing blocking techniques. If he plays today, Cowan probably is another Anthony Munoz, the Cincinnati Bengals’ monster tackle who makes $500,000 per season. Cowan earned $12,000 in his 1961 rookie season.

So you think timing isn’t everything? In today’s game, Cowan maybe stashes enough money to absorb the runaway medical costs that have consumed his family since a routine trip to the doctor two years ago to treat what Cowan believed to be flu symptoms. Before he knew it, his ailment was diagnosed and he was introduced to the dialysis machine to which he would be strapped three times a week, four hours per session, for as long as he lives, perhaps.

His lifestyle, to say the least, was permanently cramped. Cowan’s kidneys failed over a period of years, he says, damaged irreparably by the high blood pressure medication he’d been taking for as long as he can remember.

Cowan’s weeks are best described as filling voids between dialysis treatments just completed and those upcoming. Out of town trips? Oh, sure. Not long ago, Cowan planned an excursion to Las Vegas.

“I had to start 45 days before,” he explained, “setting up a clinic in Vegas so I could do dialysis while I was there. You’re definitely tied to it.”

Meanwhile, a pile of bills mounts in the corner. Cowan, 52, collected them recently and measured them at a thickness of 1 1/2 inches, estimating the costs in excess of $400,000.

His two insurance companies, Medicare and F.H.P. (Family Health Plan), are in the process of sorting through his mess to determine who’s going to pay for what, and how much.

Whatever they don’t cover falls into Cowan’s lap.

“That’s the big question,” Cowan said. “How much are they going to pay? I really don’t know. What is my percentage?”

Actually, Cowan can’t take much of a hit. Dialysis has reduced him to a part-time employee handling automobile extended services contracts at a Newport Beach company.

The National Football League, his employer for 15 seasons, only shrugs its shoulders toward Cowan and hundreds of others in similar situations. The league’s pension plan is, frankly, deplorable when compared to other sports. Cowan could have taken early retirement at 45 and received $500 per month at the price of losing his disability insurance.

Cowan can wait three years and receive full benefits of $900 per month at age 55, but that money applied to his expenses is not unlike fighting an oil fire with a water pistol.

“I checked into it once, and it’s nothing,” Cowan said of his NFL pension. “It’s too depressing to look forward to that.”

Cowan was shocked when a former Angel player told him recently he would make as much money per year from his pension, about $60,000, as when he was playing.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Cowan said. “My mouth was open. And he’s not walking around with zippers in his knees.”

Cowan’s insurance premiums alone have increased to $900 quarterly. He doesn’t like thinking about losing his Fullerton home, where he resides with his wife, Irene, and one of his three daughters, Cecilia. But he does.

“It has crossed my mind with all the medical expenses,” he said. “Somehow, we’ve always managed to work our way through.”

Cowan’s fortunes turned for the worse last October, after it appeared a successful kidney transplant would mean a return to normalcy. Potential recipients lead a strange existence, waiting by the phone for someone to die and leave behind their healthy kidney, so that it might save the life of another.

Cowan’s call came Halloween night from UC Irvine Medical Center in Santa Ana. There was no time to spare. Kidneys don’t last long, and Cowan was rushed into surgery.

“All I knew was that the kidney came from a young lady that was in a car accident,” Cowan recalled. “She was 16 or 17 years old. It was a great kidney. They put it in there and in 10 minutes it was working. And it worked for 10 or 12 days.”

Shortly before Cowan was to be released, though, he began experiencing stomach pains. Minutes later he was rushed into emergency surgery to repair a ruptured colon.

“I had popped a big hole in my colon, they said about an inch,” Cowan said. “My waste was going to spread throughout my body. And then it’s over. It was something we had to do to save my life.”

Cowan is hesitant to speak of his colon problems, believing the rupture may have been caused by steroids he was taking to neutralize his system before the transplant.

Dr. Donald Martin, chief of urology and kidney transplants at UCI Medical Center, said the steroids are needed to suppress antibodies that would attack the new kidney.

“The immune suppressed state is exposed to all sorts of infections,” said Martin, who performed Cowan’s transplant. “It’s part of the risk patients accept when they undergo a transplant.”

The complications forced the removal of a perfectly good kidney.

“When they took it out, it was still working,” Cowan said, almost proudly.

Now he’s back to square one, except that colon surgery has taken an exacting toll. Cowan’s weight has dropped from 270 pounds down to 212 since surgery. He wants to try another transplant next fall, but can’t risk it until he regains his strength. However, Cowan has to watch what he eats to protect his system. For instance, he can’t eat foods high in potassium.

“The body gets rid of potassium through the kidney,” Dr. Martin explained. “And too much potassium stops the heart.”

Some days, Cowan can get out of bed only long enough to collect the latest round of medical bills from the mailbox.

With little financial assistance from league offices and player associations, professional football players can only turn inward and try to help their own. Jack Faulkner, the Rams’ director of football operations, went to work to organize former teammates to raise money for Cowan. Faulkner had taken similar action a few years back when former Ram Clancy Williams was dying of cancer.

“When football players are in trouble, they’ll come out just like that,” Faulkner said. “They have no help from the NFL, they don’t care about former players. I called everyone I could get a hold of.”

And they turned out in force for a January benefit auction at Rams Park. Merlin Olsen, Dave Elmendorf, Eddie Meador, Tom Mack, Joe Scibelli, Jack Snow, Lamar Lundy, Deacon Jones; some teammates Cowan hadn’t seen since his playing days. Faulkner’s goal was to raise $25,000 to purchase a home dialysis machine for Cowan. They raffled off jerseys, footballs, vacations, dinners and anything else that might draw a bid from well-wishers who paid $25 for admission.

Ram owner Georgia Frontiere purchased a Joe Montana jersey for $2,400 and one from her own quarterback, Jim Everett, for $2,000. Faulkner pieced together some film clips of Cowan, just in case some had forgotten what a force the three-time Pro Bowl selection had been on the field. Cowan, a fourth-round pick from New Mexico Highlands, was also quite versatile. He entered the league as a guard and played both right and left tackle during his long career.

“The guy was a great football player,” Faulkner said. “And he never complained about anything. He could play.”

Courtesy of the Anaheim police, Cowan was flown from his Fullerton home to Rams Park in Anaheim, via helicopter, which landed on the team’s practice field.

Not long after, Cowan tearfully embraced Scibelli, his buddy at guard for many years. Both players retired in 1975 and hadn’t seen much of each other since. Scibelli is suffering from cancer, and had surgery shortly before Cowan. They were still doing things together.

“I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Cowan remembered of the night. “That people, after all those years, would still remember an offensive lineman.”

They remembered to the tune of nearly $65,000, more than double what Faulkner was seeking.

Faulkner is hoping someday to raise enough money to fund a home for retired players left disabled by poor health and poor pensions, to be modeled after the Screen Actors Guild for retired actors. He estimates it would take $5 million to get the project started.

Cowan, in the meantime, has been pricing home dialysis machines, but is holding out hope for another transplant, which would liberate him from his unpleasant tri-weekly ritual. The one-year survival rate of an outside (not a blood relative) source kidney transplant is 80%. Cowan doesn’t think he’ll end up on the short end twice.

Aside from the obvious life restrictions of dialysis, the process also weakens the patient because it causes anemia, a blood condition that is eliminated through a successful transplant.

“The biggest difference is the quality of life,” Dr. Martin said.

Once a towering giant of force and talent, Cowan’s body has betrayed him. But his spirit has not waned.

“From day one I’ve said, ‘What can we do?’ ” he said. “I’ve had some awful bad days, but I never let myself get depressed. I’ve been frustrated, very much, but then I work my way through it.”

Cowan says the discipline of professional football has helped him through his ordeal.

“Over the years of training you learn to deal with the negative,” he said. “You learn to accept the negative and reverse it. Early in my career, the offensive line took the brunt of everything. It was our fault if we lost football games. You start learning to deal with those type of things. Now I’m dealing with something similar, except we’re talking about life and death.”