If you were to paint a portrait of former Herbert Hoover football coach Joe Eddie Cowley, you'd probably have to do so using hard, rugged colors like quartz or granite.
He lived hard. He coached hard.
But when you put the finishing strokes on the portrait, make sure to add a splash of peach.
Because, yes, he was tough-minded. Yes, he was driven. But, yes, he was also a peach.
"He was a very influential man," said current Huskies coach Tim Meyer. "He didn't just teach you football. He taught you how to be a man. If you made a commitment to him, you followed through."
"Joe Eddie was a gentle giant," said Marshall athletic director Mike Hamrick. "You didn't want to wake him. If you did, get out of the way."
Sadly, Cowley entered into a courageous battle with Parkinson's disease that ended with his passing June 3 at the Lower Cape Fear Hospice Care Center in Wilmington, North Carolina. The Elkview resident fought to be 80. A celebration of his life will be held June 25 in the Herbert Hoover auditorium.
And, really, it couldn't be anywhere else.
"He put his whole life in that high school," said longtime friend and former Kanawha Valley coach Corky Griffith. "He put a lot of kids in colleges. His biggest accomplishment was helping other people."
Cowley is No. 3 all-time in Kanawha County career football wins with 163, behind only Dick Whitman and Ralph Hensley. For a few years, he coached Nitro.
But then he found his home.
A former tight end and defensive tackle, Cowley took over in 1970 for Hamrick's father Jim, who didn't feel right coaching his sons, Mike and Ed.
The Huskies made the Class AAA semifinals in 1977 when only four teams participated. Then they had a nice run starting in 1989 through 1996, when they made the semifinals twice and averaged 7.8 victories. If you throw out a four-win stinker of a season in 1991, that average balloons to 8.4.
Overall, though, Cowley's teams, mostly outmanned, lost more games than they won. He was 163-180, counting the Nitro days. At Hoover, he was 153-150 (.505).
But don't get the wrong impression.
"He might have been West Virginia's best football coach that never won a state championship," said Hoover principal Mike Kelley.
He should know. Kelley's father Pete was an assistant coach for Cowley, and Mike would go to practices and carry water for the players. He was later a quarterback for the coach. He was later yet an assistant coach for him.
"It was neat to know him and see him in all the different lights," Kelley said. "He was a really good guy. Like a second father to me. He was a hard-nosed guy, but always cared for you.
"He just had a way of connecting - especially with rough, tough kids because I think that's what he was. He was instrumental in helping a lot of kids graduate that otherwise wouldn't have."
"He was that rare breed," said former assistant and friend Fred Myers, now a defensive coordinator at Capital. "We all wear many hats: husband, dad, teachers, etc. But Joe Eddie was a coach. He had a knack, a God-given ability, to elevate you, whether as a player, a coach or just a friend. He made you better."
Myers continued.
"I've worked for all the top coaches around the Valley. Joe Eddie doesn't take a backseat to any of them. He worked hard and prepared."
Cowley liked option football and ran the veer for years. But it wasn't his style of play that'll be remembered as much as his work with the "rough, tough" kids - and his competitiveness.
"He would always say the two coaches he wanted to beat the most were Corky Griffith [at DuPont] and Steve Edwards Sr. [at George Washington]," said Hamrick, who was an all-state linebacker for Cowley. "We did beat them both when I was a junior and senior, in '73 and '74.
"But 10 or 15 years later, I asked him, 'Why did you want to beat those two so bad?' He said, 'Because I have so much respect for them.' "
Griffith remembers 1974.
"They won because they had [Kennedy Award winner] Robin Lyons," said the former coach. "He was a Randy Moss-like player at his position: tailback. He was 6-foot-3, 240 pounds and wore our linebackers out. He beat 'em up like they'd been in a fight."
Unfortunately, Griffith recently saw Cowley in a real fight. The two visited before the ex-Huskies coach was moved to North Carolina.
"He was my best pal," Griffith said. "We done a lot together - fishing, hunting, whatever. Heck, I didn't even hunt. I'd just go and be the bird dog and flush birds from the bushes.
"I'm gonna miss him. We were both at Salem together and came to Charleston in 1961. We never left."
It's fortunate for those at Hoover and beyond. Current area coaches like Meyer and assistant Richard Harper, ex-St. Albans coach Steve Stoffel Jr. and South Charleston coach Donnie Mays were part of the Cowley tree. Kelley and his brother Jeff, now at St. Albans, are principals.
"We must have done something right," Myers said.
Indeed, much was imparted by Cowley. Myers even said he left Hoover to go to Riverside in 1999 "to chase a state championship."
"He taught me that's what coaches do," Myers said.
"As a staff, we'd always meet at 9 a.m. Sunday morning and work for three or four hours," Mike Kelley said. "We'd fight and argue over what to do and then Joe Eddie would make the final call."
Again, though, Cowley won't be remembered for X's and O's as much as those represented by the letters.
"He was so good with at-risk kids," Kelley said. "He worked hard with them. He told me I had to learn not to run them off, even if they had an attitude. He told me to make them conform. And he was better at that than anyone I've ever seen."
On June 25, some of those conforming will no doubt pay tribute to Cowley. Of course, in lieu of flowers, donations in his honor were requested to go to the high school or The National Parkinson's Foundation.
He'll always be honored, however, through Clendenin's "Joe Eddie Cowley Field," renamed in 2010. He'll have his place in the school's athletic hall of fame.
Overall, though, the peach of a man will be remembered as a granite figure in the Hoover community.
"My son said Joe Eddie was a man's man," Myers said. "And there's not many of those left."