Pat Bowlen the father
Bowlen had two families. He met his first wife, Sally Parker, while they were attending the University of Oklahoma in the 1960s. After he earned his law degree from OU in 1968, he and Sally moved to Edmonton, Alberta, where Pat became a wealthy lawyer while also helping to run his father Paul’s oil business.
He and Sally had two children, Amie and Beth, but the marriage split when the daughters were 3 and 2 years old. At that point, Sally and her two daughters moved to Hawaii. Dad soon followed and bought a second home nearby. It was roughly another 13 years or so before Pat and his second wife Annabel started their family with Patrick, followed by Johnny and three more daughters.
But for both families, Hawaii and all the islands and ocean offers was a huge part of the children’s upbringing.
“He was a young dad, but very hands-on," Amie said. “He co-parented. I remember he would pick us up on the weekends and we went to his house. My parents got along very well. It was like having two houses. We had two Easter egg hunts, two Christmases. We had a lot of fun with him."
He taught most of his kids how to swim and canoe surf. Canoe surfing is like surfing in that you ride the waves except in a canoe. There are two to four people in a canoe with the key person being the steersman.
“I thought he was trying to drown us," Amie said. “We would still be literally in floaties and he would take us out where I thought were tsunamis. We would flip the boat and Beth and I would be floating around like toys out in the ocean and he’d gather us up, put us back in the boat, and we’d go back out and do it again."
Amie said she was 16 or 17 years old when dad bought the Broncos. Beth is 16 months younger than Amie.
“My dad bought the team when I was a teenager, so he wasn’t all consumed through the younger years of my life," Beth said. “He spent half the year in Hawaii which is where I lived so we spent quite a bit of time with him as, if you want to call it, a normal dad.
“When he bought the team, I didn’t notice much of a difference in his parenting. He balanced his life between going to Hawaii and canoe surfing and balanced his achievements in the triathlon and his marathons with his life with his family. But the Broncos were certainly a priority for him."