Personality of the Coach makes the School

By Charlie Barnes, Executive Director - Seminole Boosters

As the summer soaks Tallahassee, there is little to report, for which we are all grateful. Weinke is healthy; Bobby is happy; the press is occupied with other folks. All is well.

Excite Sports is running a list of the top Heisman hopefuls. Three of the top 12 are ours: Pete at No.1, Weinke at No.7, and Travis at No.12.

And you thought expectations for the offense weren't unreasonable this year.

I was churning through the Associated Press wires when two seemingly unrelated stories appeared side by side. One headline read: Knight Escapes Charges, But Still Blasts System. The second was: A Football Player's Sacrifice Gets Screen Treatment.

The Sacrifice story concerns our own Daniel Huffman, who appeared at the same awards banquet with Coach Bowden in Orlando in 1997, and was pretty much offered a scholarship on the spot by our Coach.

Huffman, a promising football prospect from Rossville, Ill., who gave up his healthy kidney and any hope of playing college ball to save his grandmother's life, said from the podium that his favorite team had always been the Florida State Seminoles.

They're filming "A Gift Of Love: The Daniel Huffman Story" in Toronto this summer, to be shown on Showtime Cable Network this fall. It may be released in theaters as well. According to the AP article, Bowden plays himself in the movie.

Coach told the AP writer that he almost turned down the role so he could enjoy a vacation with his family, "but decided he owed it to Huffman and to the school to participate."

One of the most endearing of Bowden's traits has been his indifference to ego. How many times has he taken on a burden - a speaking engagement, carting an extra microphone around, allowing cameras to follow him, out of the way appearances - just to give an extra publicity boost to Florida State?

He has never sought out recognition or praise for himself. If fact, given a choice of ways to spend his time, he'd probably rather wear his hat, coaching shorts and Oakeley shades, a whistle around his neck, and spend the afternoon yelling at large, fast young men. That, or drive a tank across some World War II European battlefield.

The day will come, five years or more down the road, when we will have to select the next fellow to wear that hat and whistle.

Which brings me back to that second headline, the story about Indiana basketball Coach Bobby Knight. I haven't really followed Knight's career; I pick up the same odds & ends of stories that you do. What was it - 20 years ago? - Knight was arrested in Puerto Rico for punching a cop who had the temerity to ask a question about Knight's use of a practice facility for the U.S. Olympic Team.

I remember seeing pictures of Knight flinging courtside chairs across the floor at an Indiana basketball game. Last year or the year before, there was a flap about Knight's supposed elbowing or slapping a player on the bench during a game.

This latest story has to do with a "restaurant confrontation" on June 7. "[Knight] had been accused of making a racist remark and choking a customer in the parking lot, but the prosecutor said Knight appeared to have been provoked."

Knight has been at Indiana about the same length of time Bowden has been at Florida State. The question before us is: What do we really want and what are we willing to tolerate in a high-profile coach?

Players generally do not take on the personality of their coach. No two fellows are more dissimilar in their personality than Bowden and Spurrier, yet for the most part if you put Seminole players and Gator players together in a room, there's little difference to see.

The fans, I think are different. If a coach is popular enough, and if there is enough time, the fan base, and by extension the school, begins to take on that distinctive personality. Bryant at Alabama not only affected Tide fans, but a whole generation of coaches who tried to emulate the personal style of Bear. It's hard to imagine Tom Osborne coaching at Oklahoma, or Barry Switzer at Nebraska.

Paterno fits Penn State, but after so many years and so much success, you have to ask whether the school has come to reflect the man, or was the man shaped by his experience with the Nittany Lion supporters?

Why do the solid Midwestern folk in Indiana tolerate Bobby Knight? The answer is: he's established, and he wins.

If Bobby Bowden is Michael Jordan, then Bobby Knight is Latrelle Sprewell. No question that both Jordan and Sprewell are enormously talented men, but only one is of exemplary character. Just as Sprewell is praised for his physical ability, so Knight is praised and adored by tens of thousands of Hoosier fans for his loyalty to IU and for his role in keeping Indiana among the nation's elite basketball programs.

When the time comes for us to choose, what sort of man will we look for, will we accept? Why, another Bobby Bowden, of course. But there will not be another Bobby Bowden. There cannot be another Bear Bryant, or Vince Lombardi, or John Wooden, or Dean Smith.

One of the characteristics of leaders in that class is that each is unique. You may be able to replace them with someone as good, but never with someone who is the same.

The great ones, with both the character and ability, are out there. Certainly Lou Holtz qualifies, and South Carolina discovered a way to lure him back into coaching. Mack Brown may grow to fit the description. So may Tommy Bowden. There are others.

Television has made so much difference over the last 20 years. For millions of Americans who are college football fans, Bobby Bowden is Florida State. It is ironic that Bowden's greatest legacy may lie in our ability to raise enough money while he's here to secure the future of FSU athletics. Because of him, we may be able to become like Notre Dame, where no one coach has a larger identity than the university itself.

That would be a legacy befitting Bowden. For nearly a quarter-century we have taken some of our collective personality from his good humor, sportsmanship and self-effacing generosity. What we might have become under another coach I cannot say.