A King Among Us

By Charlie Barnes, Executive Director - Seminole Boosters

Jim King

The sky was slate gray all the way to Jacksonville for Jim King's funeral and I was glad. I didn't think I could bear having to say goodbye to Jim on a bright and sunny day.

Most Floridians knew King as the legislator elected in 1986 who rose through the state's political hierarchy, Eventually becoming president of the Florida Senate. Other than Seminole loyalists, few knew Jim King as the passionate leader of the Jacksonville Seminole Booster Club and volunteer architect of the explosive growth in Seminole Booster Clubs throughout the 1980s.

Old eras end and new ones begin, and I'm at an age now where I can see the creases in time that mark those shifts. In the long era of Bobby Bowden, a distinguished skein of familiar names and faces enriched the Seminoles' rise to national prominence. While so many of them still represent the foundation blocks of this great athletic program, most are content now to let the torch of leadership pass to a new generation.

And too many of them are gone. Jim King's name is now writ alongside Carole Haggard, Dennis Boyle, Bob Fohl and others on that sad roll of the departed. One era is slowly giving way to the next.

The first era of Seminole football began long ago with Ken MacLean's catch of Don Grant's pass on a chilly October night in 1947. That first Seminole football game launched decades of excitement and promise and joy and dreams. The departure of Coach Bill Peterson after the 1970 season was were the first of those creases in time appeared. An era ended.

For a few years in the early 1970s, the football program drifted. Not that there weren't great players and signal achievements. Quarterback Gary Huff was a Heisman Trophy candidate in 1971, Barry Smith was an NFL first rounder after our Seminoles played in the first Fiesta Bowl in 1972.

But the years from 1071 through 1975 represented a pause in time, a sort of empty zone between eras. The Seminole Boosters organization was disbanded and became something else, something called the National Seminole Club. And so the past glories of Seminole football faded in the unhappiness of three miserable years. The winless 1973 season did dreadful collateral damage to other FSU varsity sports. Without income from a winning football program, those sports lost scholarships and their performance levels declined.

Jacksonville businessman Jim King stepped forward after Bobby Bowden took over in 1976. King's infectious enthusiasm rallied Seminole fans eager to ring in the new era. He was all energy and boisterous good humor. When he entered a room, everyone turned toward Jim and smiled.

After the famous 1980 win over Nebraska in Lincoln, our people couldn't stop talking about the classy Cornhusker fans who stood and applauded our team after the game.

King put together something he called Project Image to capture some of that Nebraska sportsmanship. Volunteers, mostly from the Jacksonville Seminole Boosters Club, handed out complimentary bags of boiled peanuts to opposing fans and welcomed them to Doak Campbell Stadium.

King and other Jacksonville Seminoles created a Booster Club of astonishing scale and impact. Young alumni flooded to the Tuesday night meetings to socialize. Mature alumni joined to share the joy of winning and to reclaim the old pride. A typical weekly meeting downtown during football season might draw 800 to 1,000 Seminole fans.

King drove a gigantic automobile that cruised like a dreadnought festooned with battle flags on game day. I spent a lot of time with him in those days and not a small amount of it in that car. He had everything; he knew everyone.

Sometime after midnight, Jim and I would typically settle into the comfort of his living room. His wife Linda would make us bacon and eggs and we'd talk Seminole football until morning light began to color the St. Johns River.

As I walked up the steps to St. John's Cathedral, the first man I saw, his eyes rimmed red behind dark glasses, was the only one who ever bested King in an election. Around 1980, Jim had run for president of the Jacksonville Seminole Boosters Club and lost. He confided later, "I learned something. I learned that if I can be outworked, I can be beat." He won the next year and never again lost an election of any kind.

Mark Twain drew a map of Jim King's life in one sentence: "Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry."

In Jacksonville on a gray day, more people than it seemed the great church could hold bowed their heads. And the undertaker was not the only one of us who wept.