Bobby Bowden enriched college football in so many ways
Bobby Bowden died Sunday at age 91 and college football is the poorer for it. But you don’t need an accountant to figure out that Bowden spent a coaching lifetime enriching the sport in so many ways.
To describe the effect Bowden had on college football with his career stats is like describing Willie Nelson’s music by listing the notes. Bowden won 377 games in a 44-year career at Howard (now Samford), West Virginia and Florida State. He won two national championships with the Seminoles, taking over a second-string program in 1976 and turning it into a national power.
You can’t imagine what a joy it was to cover Bowden and his Florida State teams during their unrivaled 14-year streak of top-five seasons (1987-2000). To give you an idea of the magnitude of that streak, Clemson has the longest current streak of top-five seasons at six. Nick Saban’s Alabama teams top out at five.
Bowden coached an exciting brand of football: multifaceted offenses, suffocating defenses, a penchant for trickery at just the right unexpected moment. His gutsiest call, the “Puntrooskie,” at Clemson in 1988, pulled a victory out of the thin air of Death Valley and saved the Seminoles’ season.
The rivalry with Miami decided national championships, transformed the state of Florida from college football backwater to the sport’s nexus and tortured Bowden. Nine times the Hurricanes beat a Seminole team ranked in the top five.
Bowden made covering the Seminoles a treat because he liked people, including sportswriters. Bowden had a quick wit and a native charm, and he used both to captivate an audience that wanted to be captivated. On Sunday mornings after home games, he held “Breakfast with Bobby” at a local Tallahassee hotel.
Most coaches go straight to the office on Sunday mornings. Bowden would go to church, and he would tend to the writers. The breakfasts gave us material for our early-week stories. Bowden loved to entertain, even if he got a question he didn’t want to answer. When that happened, we all knew the drill: Bowden would stare at the ceiling, repeat the question as if mulling it over, then give the non-answer answer that most coaches would have barked out right away.
That Bowden cloaked the answer in a bit of performance art illustrated both the respect he held for writers and his bedrock humility.
Bowden had deep Alabama roots
My relationship with Bowden began mostly out of luck. I took over the national college football beat at The Dallas Morning News in 1987, the year that Bowden’s Seminoles began that streak of top-five seasons.
I was new to the beat and knew no one. Bowden took a liking to me. For one thing, in the pre-Internet days, coaches wanted to get their names and their programs in The Dallas Morning News to reach recruits. More important to Bowden, he had relatives in Dallas, and he wanted them to read about him.
That’s how we got started, and once I made sure he realized that I, too, came from Alabama, he connected with me. “I, like you, have got a lot of pride for the state of Alabama,” he wrote me in 1990. “I guess you just can’t take it out of our blood.”
In 2007, ESPN.com published one of the favorite stories of my career: Bowden describing his lifelong love affair with Alabama football. That week, the 77-year-old Bowden, in the 487th game of his head-coaching career, finally stepped on the same field as the Crimson Tide.
Bowden dreamed he would play quarterback for Alabama, but didn’t. After his freshman year, he returned home to Birmingham to marry his sweetheart, Ann Estock (they were married 72 years), and enrolled at Howard.
Bowden dreamed that he would play trombone in The Million Dollar Band at Alabama, but didn’t. At West Virginia in the early 1970s, Bowden quelled his pregame nerves by humming “Yea, Alabama!”, the Crimson Tide fight song.
Bowden dreamed he would coach at Alabama, and that dream didn’t come true, either. He wanted the job in December 1986, and went to Birmingham to accept it, only to discover that he was walking into a job interview. He went home. Three years later, Alabama offered the job without an interview, but Bowden’s roots had sunk too deep in the sandy Tallahassee soil.
Nearly 20 years later, during the week that Florida State played Alabama, Bowden regaled me with stories about growing up in Birmingham, where he and his dad used to climb on the roof of the family garage — they had a garage but didn’t own a car — to peek over the hedges to watch Woodlawn High football practice. Bowden grew up in the same neighborhood as Harry Gilmer, the single-wing halfback whose jump-passing for the Crimson Tide inspired Bowden and every other boy who played football in Birmingham in the mid-1940s.
I shared his love of college football history. We also shared a love of World War II history. The teenaged Bowden spent more than a year bedridden with rheumatic fever; he channeled his interest into the ongoing war, a hobby that he maintained throughout his adult life. In 1998, I sent him a copy of “With the Old Breed,” a memoir by E.B. Sledge, another Alabaman, that is unsparing in its depiction of the hell that was the Pacific theater in the first months of 1945. HBO used the book as a source for its 2010 series “The Pacific.”
“It is one of the best I have ever read in regard to battle,” Bowden wrote me. “I wish I could meet E.B. Sledge someday, although he may have passed away (he died in 2001). What a book!”
‘He called everybody “buddy” ‘
Bowden coached Florida State to the national championship in 1993 and again in 1999. He lost national championship games in 1996, 1998 and 2000. But a coaching staff he had kept together for many years began to atrophy — key assistants like Chuck Amato and Mark Richt took head-coaching jobs — and the Seminoles spent the 2000s settling into mediocrity. Florida State pushed him out after the 2009 season at age 80.
It seems just right that Bowden died on a Sunday. His Baptist religion inspired him. He didn’t drink alcohol and, in public, anyway, his language never got stronger than “dadgum.” Bowden had six children. Three of his boys — Terry, Tommy and Jeff — went into coaching; the fourth, Steve, became a minister. Bowden called him “the black sheep.”
Bowden spent his last days saying goodbye. For instance, he got word to Steve Spurrier that he wanted to talk.
“He said, ‘Hello, buddy,’ ” Spurrier recalled the other day. “He called everybody ‘buddy.’ ”
In 12 seasons at Florida, Spurrier went 5-8-1 against Bowden (12 regular-season games, two bowl rematches). For perspective, Spurrier didn’t lose more than two games to any other coach.
Spurrier thanked Bowden for convincing him that he could be a college football coach. After retiring in 1976 from a 10-year NFL career, Spurrier sat in the stands for a Florida-FSU game and saw Bowden’s Seminoles throw the ball all over the field. That, and not the option football that dominated the sport then, was what Spurrier wanted to coach.
Nick Saban held a debt of gratitude to Bowden, too. Saban, a West Virginia native, remained at Kent State after his playing career as a graduate assistant for Don James. When Saban’s father died suddenly, Saban contemplated leaving coaching to help his mother run the family business. Saban got a phone call from the head coach at West Virginia.
“Bobby picked up the phone and called me and said, ‘You got a job here anytime you want it. You can be by your mom,’ ” Saban said. He decided to stay at Kent State, but added, “I never forgot that about Bobby Bowden.”
There is so much that so many attached to college football won’t forget about Bobby Bowden.
(Top photo: Sporting News via Getty Images)