Speed: Part 4
By Phil Williams
FYI - this is #11 in my ‘tribute series’ to Bobby Bowden. #12, which I will post tomorrow (my face-to-face with Coach in 2020) - will be the last one. I hope you’ve enjoyed them.
“Speed: Part 4”
(Laugh, why don’t you!)
I’m going to cheat here and throw in two stories, one about speed, and the other…just because. So bear with me, it won’t be long.
The first story is told out of fondness for one of my teammates, one dearly loved by so many. One who is likely laughing right along with Coach Bowden as my fingers hit these keys, as they both know what is coming. Trust me, they just do.
Anyway…
It was on the lower practice field, and the 1st team offense was running against the 1st team defense, going west to east. I was a junior, but I swear I can’t remember if it was spring training or fall practice. (it’s funny, I remember certain specifics, but others I do not. You’ll understand why soon enough.)
I was running a post route, deep middle, and the ball was sailing further inside than I would have liked. When you are running full speed and tracking the ball, you can’t take your eyes off of it if you want to catch it, so I did not. I was pretty sure safety Monk Bonasorte was closing in - I could FEEL it - but I forced it out of my mind and began to reach for the ball.
Here’s where the memory gets fuzzy. I almost always could remember whether or not I caught such a ball, but in this case I do not. All I ‘remember’ is a brutal, bone-jarring collision and an immediate collapse onto the turf. I remember the agony, as I rolled and moaned and desperately fought to find a breath. My body was not in one piece, that I was sure of. My eyes were shut tight, everything black, so I was unaware of anything else that might be going on. The whole world was my pain.
I’m not sure how long I was squirming there, but when I finally began to realize that I might live, I opened my eyes. To my surprise, Monk was lying maybe a yard away, looking pitiful like me. Evidently his hit had knocked us both out!
While Monk and I had been lying there, they had moved practice to another field. But as we began to move, they returned to the lower field. I slowly made my way back behind the offensive huddle, where I stood for a while, still trying to come back to life, to get my bearings. My head bent low, I noticed a shadow fall over the grass in front of me.
I looked up. It was Coach Bowden. He had a sly smile, almost laughing.
“Philip, I could tell before Monk even hit you that neither one of you men were gonna be getting up for a while.”
Well, it sure seemed he thought it kind of funny.
“I told Coach Henshaw it’s gonna take at least five minutes.”
You know what the funny thing was to me? I could tell that he actually liked it, but that also, he was proud of us, that he loved the thrill of such a thing. Perhaps I would have, too, if I had been the one watching.
And now, as Monk has already welcomed Coach Bowden to the hereafter, I smile as I think of them, and I sense them smiling back as I tell our little story.
But…when the NFL scouts came through Tallahassee to time the seniors-to-be, a few days before spring training, the New York Jets scout began talking to me about a couple of my better games from my junior year, mentioning Nebraska in particular; so I started thinking…um, maybe.
Uh-oh.
“Is it possible that I might have gotten faster over these last couple of years?” I asked myself. “Why yes, it is,” I responded. “And besides, it’s gonna be the NFL coaches holding the stopwatches, not our guys…”
Had I not always dreamed of playing in the NFL?
“Oh, what the hell!”
Listen, there are several angles I could share about what happened on that dreadful spring afternoon, once again on the turf within Doak Campbell Stadium that is now known as Bobby Bowden Field, but I will simply share the one forgettable scene.
And then ask you to forget it.
When it was my time to run, I got down in my attempt at a sprinter’s stance. We were running from west to east, away from the football offices, and I felt a slight breeze in my face. Damn. That ain’t gonna help.
Well, folks, I did what I did when I had run the forty in the past - I gutted it! Smooth is not a word that would have come to anyone’s mind. I gutted all the way through that finish line, the one that had initially seemed a mile away and which had sort of kept moving away from me as I moved toward it. Though I really didn't want to do so, I turned and looked back at the scouts.
Here’s the picture. There were three or four of those guys standing there in a huddle, all of them staring incredulously at their stopwatches, then at each other, then at each other’s stopwatches, their mouths in tight O’s and their eyes looking as if they had just seen their first UFO.
But here’s the kicker. Coach Bobby Bowden was standing right there beside them. And I swear to you, that little man was having the time of his life. He was laughing so hard I thought he might fall down. Those scouts looked at him as if he might know something they did not (which he did!), and he just kept on laughing.
Folks, I do not know what my time was. I never asked. I had not the slightest interest. I took the very long way around all of them, and instead of getting back in line and running a second forty like all of the other seniors-to-be, I headed through the tunnel and disappeared. I have no idea what all else they might have done out on the field for those scouts. And I did not care. All I could see in my mind was Coach Bowden laughing as those guys stared at each other in amazement.
So, yeah, I knew before I even made it into the locker room that now, without a doubt, I had only one more season of football in me.
It’s funny, I wasn’t mad at Coach Bowden. And I did not blame him for laughing. Quite the contrary. It felt to me like he was saying with his body language that I was his boy….”And yeah, he ain’t fast, but I don’t really care. He’s one of mine.”
And I was.
I was, and am, one of Bobby’s Boys!
For the second story, as I said a few posts ago (and in keeping with the ‘speed’ theme), Phil Williams did not run the forty. No sir. I hope that has been clearly established.
