By Bob Hertzel
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — In the end, Bobby Bowden will tell you, the victories aren’t the ones that stay with you. Doesn’t matter how many there are, and for Bobby Bowden it’s 388 with one game left, New Year’s Day ironic Gator Bowl meeting against West Virginia, where he first found fame.
Only Joe Paterno, the iconic Penn State coach, has more victories as a college football coach and that includes Rockne and Bryant and Blaik and Royal and Hayes and Schembechler and any other you care to mention. Considering a team plays about 12 games a year, that figures out to 32 years-plus of 12 victories.
Even the two national championships he won, as satisfying as they had to be considering that when Bowden left West Virginia to go to Florida State there were those who told him it was a terrible career move because you could never win in Tallahassee, don’t linger as long as do the defeats.
And goodness knows Bowden, like any football coach, has had his share of defeats.
The nation knows about “Wide Right I” and “Wide Right II.” “Wide Right I” came in 1991 in a matchup with the hated Miami Hurricanes. The schools were ranked No. 1 and No. 2, Bowden needing only a 34-yard field goal to win the game and become entrenched at No. 1.
The field goal sailed wide right.
The next year, again with national championship implications, a field goal on the final play of the game with Miami leading 19-16 again sailed wide right, and the pain was just beginning, for over the next three years there would be two more games in which field goals against Miami that could have changed history were missed, one wide left, the other, naturally, wide right.
But the game that has haunted Bowden all these many years was his first meeting with Pitt in the Backyard Brawl in 1970, a game his Mountaineers took control of early and led, 35-8, at the half, only to lose 36-35.
It was, he once said, his most painful loss, but that was before Wide Right I and II, so now he was being asked about it again.
Nothing had changed.
“No, no,” he said. “Nothing will ever erase that. In 56 years of coaching, that’s the blackest moment in my career. I should be shot. But you know what, I learned from that. You never heard about me sitting on the lead again, did you? People get on me about running up the score. You’re darn right I run up the score.”
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Where do you begin when you look back on a coaching legend, a Hall of Fame coach who started his big time coaching at West Virginia, who showed great potential, first as an offensive coordinator under Jim Carlen, helping him install a wishbone offense to stun South Carolina in the 1969 Peach Bowl game, then as a head coach.
He suffered the Pitt loss that first year, and in his fifth of six years at WVU he was hung in effigy, greasing the skids for him to leave, although to this day he maintains the hanging really had little to do with his exit after the 1975 season in which he went 9-3 and beat North Carolina State in the Peach Bowl.
As with everything that is Bobby Bowden, there is even a subplot with this great victory.
Somehow, he never did get his championship ring … until September of this year, 34 years late. An anonymous donor had provided funds to purchase championship rings for Bowden and the players that were presented this year in a private ceremony before the East Carolina game.
“I’m proud of it,” Bowden said. “It’s 34 years late. It came probably around the first of this past season, probably around September. It’s a pretty ring. I had no idea. All of the sudden I had received a ring. I saw what it was and I forgot whether there was a note in there or not. I knew what it was about.”
But after that victory, Bowden packed up and left for Florida State.
“Life is nothing but experiences,” Bowden said. “Most are good, sometimes not as good. The bad year I had at West Virginia I probably learned more than any year up there. Therefore, I didn’t hate it. I just wish while I was at West Virginia that I knew what I know now.
“I came back because this is my home. This is where I was raised, in the south. I can tell you exactly what I was thinking when I left. I had no idea I’d be staying at Florida State. I wanted to remake acquaintances and eventually get back to Alabama. I wanted to go back to Alabama.”
Never happened, although he had his chances.
“Funny story,” Bobby Bowden said. “During my 34 years here I had an offer from the University of Alabama and one from Auburn, but by then I’d become successful and had decided to stay at Florida State.”
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Oh, there were a lot of twists and turns, to be sure.
In 1968, when he was an assistant at WVU, he was offered the Marshall job and even though he was eager to be a head coach he turned it down.
Two years later, the Marshall airplane returning from East Carolina crashed and burned while trying to land and killed all aboard.
“If I had taken the job, I would have been on that plane,” Bowden would say later.
He turned down LSU, too, a couple of years before the coach they hired, Bo Rein, went down into the Atlantic Ocean, killing him.
It makes you believe he was meant to be in Tallahassee.
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But do not dismiss his term at West Virginia as simply a learning period, for his influence is still felt in Morgantown.
Steve Dunlap, who was Don Nehlen’s defensive coordinator and coaches the safeties for Bill Stewart, was one of his players, came up from Hurricane and played in 1973-75, still in possession of the school record for most tackles in a game, 28 against Boston College in 1974.
“Dunlap was my play caller on defense. He was the brains of the defense, a middle linebacker, tough as nails, a typical West Virginian,” Bowden said.
And then there was Donnie Young, who had just had a good year as head coach at Salem. Bowden hired him as his freshman coach, he coached all those years for Nehlen and now is an executive assistant to the head coach.
The head coach, by the way, was a freshman linebacker who walked on to Bowden’s first team in 1970, played for Donnie Young. His name was Bill Stewart.
“I kind of kept up with Bill,” Bowden said. “He’s done an excellent job. Won more games there than I did. He’s one of the good guys.”
And John Spiker, who is the coordinator of WVU’s athletic medical services, became a trainer for Bowden in 1975.
Finally, there was a guy named Ed Pastilong, whom he brought over from Salem just before leaving. He, of course, has been the athletic director at WVU for 20 years.
The great ones, you see, plant roots that last a long time.
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The way Bowden sees it, he and Carlen before him ushered in the second era of great West Virginia football, the first being the early and mid-1950s teams of Pappy Lewis, which included Sam Huff and Bruce Bosley and Fred Wyant and Tommy Allman and went to the Sugar Bowl.
But Bowden believes it was Nehlen, himself a Hall of Fame coach, who brought West Virginia into the modern era after coming on in 1980.
“Don Nehlen put West Virginia on the modern map,” he said.
And he put FSU there himself.
You have to think back to when he went there, in 1976. At the time, the state was dominated by Miami and Florida.
The three years before Bowden arrived in Tallahassee the Seminoles were 0-11, 1-10 and 3-8.
It was so bad that Bowden assistant Chuck Klausing refused to join him down there, saying, “You can’t win in Tallahassee,” noting there were maybe 50 college players in the state and Florida would get 30 of them and Miami 20 and FSU would be shut out.
Again, something was looking out for Bowden. Florida was put on probation.
The Gators had been 9-3 in 1975, but by 1978 they were 4-7 and in 1979 fell to 0-10-1. At the same time Miami went 14-29 from 1975 to 1978, allowing Bowden to establish his recruiting and his program.
The glory years came and went. Recent times have not been quite as kind to Bowden, although he kept feeling as though he was about to turn the corner.
“You know, I guess I’m like all older folks, just like the old boxers who think you got one more fight. You’re like Holyfield, you’re like Joe Louis, you’re like these older guys — Muhammad (Ali) — you think, ‘If I got it one more time I could do it,’” he said in a long-ranging interview with the Florida media recently. “That’s kind of the way I always felt, and yet it didn’t happen. It didn’t happen last year, it didn’t happen this year. Maybe one more year, maybe it’s fixing to happen — because it will happen, it’ll happen sooner or later.”
It could have happened this year, but for a couple of plays that went against him.
He leaves the program reluctantly with this Gator Bowl, having wanted one more year, one more chance to turn it around from the 6-6 season he suffered through this year.
“Nothing would make me feel better than for (things to get better next year), nothing would me feel better with regard to Florida State and Florida State football than for them to be successful. I hope they can be real successful next year, because I was wanting to coach that next year; I thought we had a good football team coming back,” he said.
Instead, West Virginian Jimbo Fisher takes the program over after a couple of years of training under Bowden.
At 80, Bobby Bowden is leaving the game he loves, heading off into retirement.
“You know, for 56 years, I’ve drawn a paycheck and paid my bills,” he said. “All of a sudden I’m not going to have a paycheck. So Ann and I are doing a lot of checking on how we’re going to do it, where are we going to go, but I did not want to stay in Tallahassee.
“I’ve always said I don’t want it to be where I’m looking over the coach’s shoulder, people asking me, ‘Well, what would you have done?’ or ‘Why didn’t he do this like you used to?’ I didn’t want him to have to go through that, so I’m going to stay here until Ann and I can get everything worked out, then we’ll take off for Panama City or Birmingham, Ala., somewhere, where we’ll try to spend most of our time.”
And if he had one final wish for Christmas, he was asked on a recent conference call, what would it be?
“I wish I could win my last ball game. That wouldn’t be bad,” he said.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
