Bowden Tour

By Charlie Barnes

Bobby Bowden initiated his annual tour of Seminole Booster Clubs soon after he arrived here in the spring on 1976. The population of Florida was much smaller then, and the roads were much darker.

We spent 32 years together driving from town to town, almost always late at night. Each Club hosted a Seminole golf tournament in the morning, followed by an evening banquet alive with boisterous and adoring fans.

At West Virginia, the coaches’ tour included Bowden and the basketball coach and the athletic director, each of whom spoke every night. But at Florida State, the tour was Bowden only. He alone was who our Seminoles wanted, and he was the one they needed to hear.

In the early days, we’d drive from Tampa up toward Orlando and I-4 was dark. The only lights were the fiery yellow domes radiating from the phosphate mines as we passed through Polk County. We decided that if there was in fact an entrance to hell, that surely looked like the spot there the journey would begin.

We’d leave Orlando sometime around midnight and head down I-75. The highway was dark south of the city, and it remained dark until we saw the lights of Lake Buena Vista.

One night, we left Palatka late at night and drove down back roads to Wauchula. We knew the Seminoles there to be fine people, but there wasn’t much in the way of accommodations.

We found the motel, and Bobby said, “You know it’s a bad sign when a motel has the word ‘Vacancy’ painted on the wall.” The manager had long since left the office for home, but two room keys were taped to the glass. One for Barnes, and the other for ‘Bouten.’

It was well after midnight when we went to our respective rooms. In a few minutes, I heard a knock on Bowden’s door.

I opened my door to see two uniformed troopers standing in from of Coach. “Coach Bowden!” they exclaimed. “We’ve been across the street at that burned-out Stuckey’s conducting a drug stakeout. We saw you drive up with our night goggles.”

One of the troopers pulled out a football. “For my boy; would you mind?” Bobby was happy to autograph the ball. He noticed the other officer looking on with envy. “Do you have anything you’d like signed,” he asked.

“No sir. I don’t have anything on me.” Bobby asked me to get a couple of photos out of the car. “Anyone else need autographs?”

Part of my job – and sometimes most of it – was to watch his back to make sure no one took advantage. Our routine was for him to go back to the hotel and take a nap after golf. One day in a town along I-75, a young deputy and his girlfriend and a couple of his pals, bullied the front desk clerk into giving him the number of Bowden’s room.

When Mike Bristol arrived to pick up Bobby for the evening’s banquet, we found the deputy and his party had set up shop in Bobby’s room, demanding autographs and stories. Bristol started to go after the deputy and I assumed there was a good chance that Mike and I would end up in jail, or at least Bristol would.

But the deputy and his gang slunk away, having had their fun. I intended to call the Sheriff that night, but Bobby, good natured as always, said it was no big deal.

As the Dynasty of the 1980s and 1990s began to take shape and command national attention, watching Bobby’s back sometimes became a full-time adventure.

Everywhere south of I-10 and down to Miami, we learned to be especially watchful for what we called the Black Bag Mafia. Celebrity autographs were a lucrative business in those days. Autograph hustlers would give stacks of photos to children and send them to Bobby.

“Sign you picture for me Coach?” Bobby would always comply. “And sign another one for my mom? And another one for my aunt?” The kid would take however many Bobby was willing to sign and go to collect his money.

The Black Bag Mafia operated out of Miami. Bobby was a hot commodity and authentic autographs were big business. In the 1990s we began asking our Seminole Booster Clubs to provide uniformed security on the golf course.

The Black Bag operatives were very clever. They’d stake out a golf course, identify a long hole and estimate where Bobby’s t-shot would land in the fairway.

They’d hide in the woods, and then race out to Bobby’s golf cart dragging black plastic bags filled with footballs, helmets and anything else of value and beg Bobby to sign them.

Once, Jerry Kutz was to take Bobby back to his hotel but the mafia had already staked out the golf course parking lot, and a high-speed chase ensued across Broward Country worthy of scenes from The French Connection.

It ended in the hotel parking lot, and Kutz braced himself for the confrontation.

But Bobby smiled and said, “It’s OK. It’s like a game. I’ll sign a few things for them. A man’s got to make a living.”

‘A man’s got to make a living.’ That one phrase illustrated all of Bowden’s sense of humor, lack of pretension and kindness toward the underdog.

Bobby was known to be the most accessible college coach, and had a great relationship with the media. But it was not always sweetness & light.

‘Tainted Title” was the cover of a Sports Illustrated story about supposed misdeeds on the part of the defending National Champions. For sports reporters without much else to occupy their interest in the spring of 1994, the Florida State ‘scandal’ was like a set of weeks-long passes to Disney.

The ‘scandal’ turned out to be not that much in the end, and I’m told that the author of the stories was eventually fired from the magazine. But the Bobby Bowden Tour that spring was a constant hide-and-seek with some very creative members of the press.

When we checked into any hotel, I told the front desk to hold all calls to Bowden’ room. Period.

Knowing where we were, but not knowing his room number, reporters started calling the hotel and claiming to be Ann Bowden. “Oh, gosh Coach, no this is not Ann. I don’t know how that mix-up happened. But as long as I’ve got you on the line…”

One night we were in Sarasota and we knew the media were lurking to get a statement. We slipped out the back door after the banquet and drove around town for an hour before going back to the hotel.

We were on one of the high floors and when the elevator stopped, I got off to look up and down the halls to make sure no one was there. We had adjoining rooms, and almost as soon as we closed our doors, I heard knocking. I heard him open his door and speak to a young man who apologized but he was just doing his job and would Bobby please just give him a statement.

Always gracious, Bobby invited the man in.

It turned out the young reporter had figured out which floor we were on, but not which rooms. So, he climbed above the ceiling tiles and waited.

A few days later, we went to visit the Booster Club in Clewiston. Spring, 1994 was a time when newspapers still had a lot more money to spend, and more sportswriters on staff. I was standing outside the golf shop with a Golden Chief, a sugar lobbyist, when the club manager came running out, wide-eyed, holding up a phone.

One of the newspapers in Tampa Bay sent a helicopter and crew to Clewiston, to ambush Bobby Bowden on the golf course as he played in the Seminole tournament.

The voice on the phone demanded to know when the tournament had started and where that would put Bowden on the course, so they could land on the fairway.

I looked at the lobbyist; he looked at me. Then he said, “I’ve got my .30-30 in the trunk. Say the word and I’ll bring that sumbitch down. Hendry County has plenty of swamps. Nobody will ever find that thing.”

I said, “OK, let’s do it.”

Of course, we did not shoot down the media helicopter. That would have been wrong. But we didn’t make the decision right away.

Toward the end of Bobby’s reign, a writer from ESPN Magazine followed us to Bobby Bowden Day in Polk County. He interviewed Bobby and some of the local Seminole Booster Club leaders. He paid attention, seeing how Bobby mesmerized the crowd; he watched how Bobby fed off the fan’s enthusiasm.

“How many of these have you done?” he asked. I estimated so many every spring over so many years, and he said, “So, you and Coach Bowden have done about 800 of these?”

That couldn’t possibly be correct. Eight hundred sounded like an overwhelming number. It’s not possible we could have travelled that many roads, to that many towns, sat at that many head tables, given that many introductions and speeches.

“Well, that’s the way I calculated it,” he shrugged. He was right, but at that moment, all those years seemed to have passed so quickly. The memories were still fresh, but the end was near.

Mark Twain said, “Let us live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry.”

When Bobby died, the undertaker, the reporter hiding in the ceiling tiles, the black bag entrepreneurs, the troopers crouching in a burned-out restaurant, all the fans in all the towns across all the years, were not the only ones who wept.