Changes to FSU football program reinvigorate Bowden

By Charlie Barnes, Executive Director - Seminole Boosters

We meandered slowly down the steep twists and turns of the perfect road. The black asphalt was flawless; the clean, carved edges of the road were perfect. Flowers along the narrow shoulders were perfectly gorgeous in the cool, early spring of the North Carolina mountains.

Looming above us and tucked below us into the steep rocky slopes were the perfect homes. Each home elaborately appointed, enormous with stone and timbers and soft lights, and each house was the muted color of mountain wilderness so as to fit politely into the landscape.

Everything was as perfect as all the money in the world could make it, and evidently all the money in the world spends its summers in western North Carolina.

I said, “You could never live here, could you?” Bobby Bowden chuckled softly and shook his head. “No.”

A life of leisurely retirement on the mountaintop is something he could never endure. He can’t sit; he is incapable of spending months, or even hours, in peaceful contemplation. As he stared out the window, I wondered if he envisioned life after football and feared what he saw. For icons such as Bear Bryant and Lawton Chiles, the realization that their life’s work had ended opened like a trapdoor beneath their feet. Bryant died within a month of his retirement. Chiles died in the last month of his second term as Florida’s governor.

Bobby Bowden remains a man of phenomenal energy. Surely that strength was tested, sapped by the controversies of the last several years. Perhaps not even he envisioned Seminole football turning on its head as it did in the first months of 2007.

Seminole fans who saw Bowden this spring thought they noticed a lighter step, a quicker smile. Wrenching changes in all areas of the football program have the faithful intoxicated with joy. The reconstruction of Seminole football played out like scenes from a stage play: the arrival of new offensive coordinator Jimbo Fisher; new offensive-line coach Rick Trickett’s “Jenny Craig” introduction; and the homecoming of former Seminole players Lawrence Dawsey and Dexter Carter, who will coach wide receivers and running backs, respectively. Chuck Amato’s return as linebackers coach and executive associate head coach—to stand again with defensive coordinator Mickey Andrews and Coach Bowden—left fans breathless. The addition of Bob LaCivita to handle recruiting yielded immediate, five-star results. Finally, former Seminole star Todd Stroud, an intense and urgent young man, took over the football strength program as summer loomed.

“This is my last shot,” Coach Bowden told throngs of fans and alumni this spring. He thanked the Seminole Boosters profusely for providing money to refit the program and to pay for new championship-caliber coaches and administrators.

Bowden’s “last shot” isn’t about just one more championship, or even about his race with Penn State’s Joe Paterno to see who will be crowned king of college football forever. Bowden meant that he was embarking on his final great adventure, and that he intends to stay the course for as many more seasons as he is able.

These last few years have made him restless. Coaching a program noted for the fact that it used to play for championships is uninspiring. A tedious retirement might be even worse. Bowden is no longer is young, but his heart has renewed its yearning for adventure, like ancient King Ulysses, who sailed one last time from Ithaca to seek the greatest challenges until he falls beneath the waves.

Tennyson’s study of Ulysses portrays him as an old man, a warrior bored and unfulfilled as “an idle king, by this still hearth among these barren crags…How dull it is to…rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!”

Nearly sixty years ago, when Bowden graduated from Woodlawn High School, each student was asked to submit a favorite quotation from the classics. A very young Robert Bowden selected as his inspiration the ending couplet from Tennyson’s poem.

As he begins his fifty-fifth year of coaching, the story of Bowden’s life suggests he is more than a passing echo of Tennyson’s hero. Ulysses, like Bowden, can be no one other than who he is: He will gather his old comrades and “sail beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars, until I die.”

Bowden has recruited younger coaches to pull hard on the oars, and his ancient lieutenants, Andrews and Amato, are strong at his side on the helm. Almost six decades have passed since Bobby Bowden selected the final lines of “Ulysses” as his signature quotation. Now, the fullness of that poem reflects the breadth of his career. Though the language of Bowden’s “last shot” is different, the sentiment in “Ulysses” is the same. And what once were simply two lines of poetry to an 18-year-old now is an early completed epic.

        It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
        It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
        And see the great Achilles,whom we knew.
        Tho’much is taken,much abides; and tho’
        We are not now that strength which in old days
        Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
        One equal temper of heroic hearts,
        Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
        To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

As we were descending that North Carolina mountain, I said, “Maybe the best ending for you would be to call the play that scores the winning touchdown in the championship game, and then you drop stone dead on the sidelines.”

He laughed and nodded. “That might be the best way. Yes, that would be the way.”

An appropriate end for a king. Summer's over, and fall beckons. Let the final great adventure begin.