The phone rings on a Monday afternoon.

Late summer sunlight glares into the newsroom.

The sports editor at the Iowa State Daily gets ready to answer, not knowing what to expect on the other end.

The same can be said about the gruff, terse voice on the other side, ISU boxing coach Terry Dowd.

“Iowa State Daily sports, this is Kyle.”

“Hi, this is Coach Dowd.”

“Excuse me? Who is this?”

“Coach Dowd, with Iowa State boxing.”

“Oh, hi, Coach.”

“Hi young man. What’s your name?”

“Uhh, it’s Kyle.”

“Hi Kyle, nice to meet ya. I just wanted to let you know that Iowa State boxing starts on September the fifth at State Gym. Could you plug that in the paper?”

“Yeah, I can probably do that Coach.”

“OK, great son. You have a good day now.”

“Of course, you too.”

A week passes. The phone rings again.

“Iowa State Daily sports, this is Kyle.”

“Hi Kyle, this is Coach Dowd.”

“Oh, hey Coach. How are you today?”

“Good. I was wondering if I could get you to come watch a boxing practice today?”

“Well I don’t know if I have time today, but maybe sometime next week?”

“Sure, that sounds great. You’re a good American, Kyle.”

If there is one thing to say about 58-year-old Dowd, it’s that he cares about the people he associates himself with through boxing more than he does about the sport itself.

That’s not to say he won’t stick up for his program – “Boxing is alive and well at Iowa State, remember that,” – but it’s not the end-all be-all to him.

His athletes have to have a 3.0 GPA to compete and a 2.5 just to practice. “They’re not here to box, they’re here to get an education,” Dowd says. He’s made friends with former ISU football coach Dan McCarney and former ISU basketball coach Larry Eustachy.

He’s had numerous articles written about him, as represented by the seven or eight taped on the wall of the boxing cage.

“I’ve probably got 20 more on file at home,” he said.

He’s created a culture of more than just winning – 17 national championships, by his count – and leaves an impression on seemingly everyone he comes into contact with.

He’s quick to point out that holidays bring him cards from former athletes all over the world and on any given night, he could get a call from any of his current athletes at 2 a.m.

“He’s my dad. He pretty much keeps me on top of things here. He keeps the grades up and keeps me going,” said boxer Chris Meyers, senior in civil engineering.

“If you’re having a rough day, you just look at him one day. You appreciate life more and more every day. The guy’s been through a lot. I think he’s got nine lives.”

Dowd had a stroke in 1997 that left him nearly unable to move his left leg. Last June, Dowd fell and hit his head. Doctors told him he had three hours to live unless he had surgery to drain the fluid out of his brain. Dowd’s response – “Let’s go.”

“Once he was heading into surgery, he was ready to just do anything because he was unable to stand upright, he couldn’t walk, and that just doesn’t sit well with him,” said Dowd’s wife, Marge. “So he was ready to do anything that would help him.

“It’s hard to watch somebody who is normally very active have to be on bed rest.”

Two holes in his head later, Dowd was working on recovery. His doctors said recovery would be slow; he was on his feet in 10 days. Three weeks later he was walking around. By the start of the fall semester he was coaching.

“I didn’t know that he had any health problems over the summer until I got back to school,” said Norman Banks, sophomore in industrial technology and second-year boxer. “Then I was just like, ‘whoa, whoa, what is this about? Where did this all come from?’ This year, I just try to make sure he’s all right.”

Finding his family

Dowd grew up in a Catholic orphanage. He enjoyed boxing at a young age, watching it on Friday nights “if the nuns would let me. That didn’t happen very often.”

He was married at 16, just before going off to Vietnam, where he boxed in the service. “I still have nightmares about Vietnam,” he said. After being a building instructor, Dowd became the ISU boxing coach in 1976.

Although his athletes have great things to say about him, it’s not to say Dowd is perfect. He divorced his first wife after 23 years. “She was a ‘too’ person,” he said. “Too hot, too cold, too much, too little.” His daughter, Lisa, hasn’t talked to him for years. “She’s mad a me. She’s been mad at me for 10 years.”

“It’s just something to do I guess. My other daughter [Laurie] says ‘she’s got to have something to be mad about all the time.’ That’s her problem.”

Marge feels quite the opposite, however. Terry met Marge in 1989, while Marge was working for the city of Ames taking payments for light bills. Whenever Terry would come in to pay, Marge would give him a “bad time” for paying bills for his kids, who were grown-up. The relationship escalated from there.

“There were a lot of different little things, kind of a feisty attitude, a can-do type of personality,” Marge said. “Nothing can ever stop him. If you put a roadblock in front of him, he just kind of keeps on going, and I was always impressed by that.”

“I found out there was actually a very well-rounded person standing on the other side of that counter.”

Marge said that Terry cares about every one of the boxers as if they were his own children, a trait she has picked up since starting to help out with coaching 10 years ago. The boxers seem to feel the same way about Terry.

“Sometimes he calls my mom and tells her how good of a son I am and all that,” Banks said. “He’s kind of like a grandfather to me.”

Terry’s relationship with Meyers is even more personal. Meyers had three surgeries in the fall of 2006, and Terry was with him the whole way. When the spring semester started, Meyers was back in practice.

“He just kind of helps you through it, you know. He calls me ‘son’ and stuff like that. He’s that guy, you know – you see him and you know what’s up,” Meyers said.

“He tells you what you are doing wrong, but he just gives you that confidence, that I can get into the ring, I can do it.”

Leaving a legacy

It’s early on a Thursday evening and boxing practice is in full swing. Coach Dowd walks up to Maura Frana, senior in art and design, who is attending her first-ever boxing practice. Dowd, who is wearing boxing gloves, decides to show Frana exactly how to take a swing by opening his palm and saying “Hit me. C’mon, harder than that. Take a swing.”

“I wasn’t really expecting that,” Frana said. Nonetheless, she says “I had a lot of fun.”

Meanwhile, as Dowd limps around his team, weaving in and out of the punching bags hanging in the basement of State Gym, Meyers watches in awe.

“You don’t really hear anybody complaining around here after watching him get down and do sit-ups one-armed and one-legged,” Meyers said. “You get a guy walking around like that – who shouldn’t even be walking – and it gets everybody going. You appreciate what you have; don’t take anything for granted.”

Meyers says Dowd has nine lives. Marge just says Terry refuses to give up.

“What you see is what you get. That’s how he is. He’s the same personality at home as he is [at practice]. He doesn’t let anything keep him down for too long. He’s always willing to try something new.

“He won’t let anything stop him. That stroke could have stopped him 10 years ago, but he didn’t let it.”

Banks hopes nothing stops Dowd for awhile.

“I don’t know what boxing would be without him,” Banks said. “I just hope he can live for another decade, so I can come back and see him once I’m out of college, come back and visit him.”

That’s just the kind of thing Dowd would love.