Ann Bowden - The first lady of football

By Charlie Barnes, Executive Director - Seminole Boosters

Ann & Bobby Bowden

Ann and Bobby Bowden's endearingly chaotic early life together with six little ones motoring through the house is a wonderful story.

Bobby was 19 and Ann was 16 when they snuck off in the senior Bowden's car, across the Georgia line to a justice of the peace on April Fool's Day in 1949. Thus did the Bowden Ship of State set sail.

All the passions of youth billowed those sails with gusty breezes, and while some of the gusts were sharp, the boat was never really in danger of capsizing.

"There was no divorce in either one of our families," Ann remembers. "No matter how tough things got - no matter if I locked him out of the house a couple of nights because he was spending more time with his buddies talking football than paying attention to me and the kids - we never considered divorce."

Bobby Bowden locked out of the house? Well, not very often. When they finally got their own house, Coach would come home and sit and rock the babies and give them their bottles. After dinner, he did the dishes while Ann finally got to put her feet up.

Now, nearly fifty years later, Ann laughs: "He and I have been together just about every day of our lives since I was fifteen...We started going together when we were kids, and he's still a big kid, going off with his friends to play games...I joke with my friends now that I've never had an adult relationship."

Much of this story and more is in the forward of Ben Brown's new book Winning's Only Part of the Game. Brown wrote St. Bobby & the Barbarians, and while Winning's a much less ambitious effort, the book is well worth the price just for Ann's superbly written account of their life.

They are both hard chargers.

His fame masks her intensity and drive, but she has matched him from the beginning. They went through Howard College together with two babies in tow. While he quarterbacked the football team, she led the cheerleaders. When he was president of Pike, she was president of Phi Mu.

Ann Bowden really is the First Lady of College Football. She is the wife of a great Head Coach, the mother of a great Head Coach, the mother of two potentially great Head Coaches-to-be. She has a son-in-law on the Auburn staff who could snag a head coaching job someday. And, she is a high-profile personality in her own right.

My guess is they'll probably both admit that she's the ambitious one. His life is football. I don't think he's ever happier than when he's out on the practice field, wearing his coach's shorts, a hat, shades, and a whistle. Ann thinks he loved the life so much in Birmingham that he might have stayed there. "I may have been more ambitious for Bobby than he was," she says. She was not enthusiastic about leaving West Virginia.

In 1975, West Virginia was considered a better job than Florida State. But they had spent a few years in Tallahassee in the early '60s and Coach was disillusioned with the West Virginia situation. The jump to Tallahassee was not considered permanent.

But things worked out, happily so. Ann was a leader right away. She was a founder of the Extra Point Club, the women's group that does so much to support Seminole athletics. And I'm not at all sure she wasn't the one who suggested putting spears on the helmets. A few years ago a TV interviewer asked Coach Bowden who started the Seminole War Chant. He thought about it for a second, and asked, "Was it my wife?" It wasn't, but he fairly assumed that Ann had something to do with it.

As they grew together, she lost any resentment about the claim that football has on his attentions. "I realized we were working for the same thing," she says. Over time, they developed a division of labor. "I tell him even now," she laughs, "you sit up there in that fancy football office overlooking the stadium, the king of your domain. But I'm still head coach of the house."

Ah yes, The House.

Coach and Ann have lived at the same address in Killearn since 1976, when Coach accepted the FSU job at a princely salary of $37,500.

After the first decade, the money was appreciably better, and Ann campaigned mightily for a plantation she had picked out. The battle was as hard fought as any ever was. It was the classic "Let's-don't-mortgage-our-retirement" point of view versus the "I-raised-six-babies-on-the-damp-concrete-floor-of-a-South-Georgia-Juninor-College-barracks-so-now-let's-finally-get-something-really-nice-before-we're-too-old-to-enjoy-it" appeal.

In the end, no plantation. So Ann launched a massive renovation of the existing house. Bobby just shook his head. "You all say the University Center is the largest brick construction project in the history of the southeast...well, when my house is finished, you all are going to drop to #2."

Many years ago, Ann traveled with us on the Bowden Tour in the spring. Coach and Ann and I, cruising through the night from town to town in a station wagon.

Ann would curl up and sleep in the back seat, and one night I noticed him just looking at her for a long time. Finally, he said, "You know, Ann is the toughest person, man or woman, I've ever known."

He said it with great affection. I didn't know either of them very well then, and so I didn't say anything. What I know now is that the two of them are as much one single entity as it's possible for two to be.