Barnes / Bowden The Bowden Dynasty

A Story of Faith, Family & Football An Insider's Account
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4245-5436-2
Verlag: BroadStreet Publishing Group, LLC
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 464 Seiten

From 1987 to 2000 the Florida State Seminoles won the hearts of America and thrilled their fans with fourteen consecutive ten-win, top-five seasons. In seven of those seasons they lost only one game. More often than not, the players' quest for a perfect season came down to one play where mere inches or seconds determined the outcome. This special collection of essays spotlights the extraordinary strength of Coach Bobby Bowden's leadership and character, providing entertaining insight into the national landscape surrounding Florida State football in the fourteen-year dynasty era. Author Charlie Barnes served as executive director and senior vice president of Seminole Boosters until his retirement in 2012. He and Coach Bowden traveled together on the annual Seminole Booster banquet-and-golf circuit (The Bobby Bowden Tour) for more than thirty years. Charlie Barnes was also the voice of the boosters, and his articles appeared in the Report to Boosters, Unconquered Magazine, the Florida State Times, the Tallahassee Democrat, and more. Coach Bobby Bowden and his son Steve also teamed together to provide Bobby's insights on each of the fourteen years of the dynasty for this book, which is a companion to the feature documentary film The Bowden Dynasty.  

Charlie Barnes was senior vice president and executive director of the Seminole Boosters until his retirement in 2012. He and Coach Bobby Bowden travelled together on the annual Seminole Booster banquet-and-golf circuit for more than 30 years, building up the Seminole Boosters organization. Barnes is a popular writer and speaker and is a featured columnist for the Seminole Boosters Unconquered magazine. He and his wife, Connie, are both alumni of Florida State University.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Barnes, Charlie

Bowden, Bobby

Leseproben

Introduction

The film and this companion book are a fusion of dreams, serendipity, and faith all coming together. I first met Charlie Barnes when he was an older FSU alumnus supervising his fraternity’s opening rush night in 1980. I had been on campus for no more than a week, and this was the first rush party I had been to. My roommate and I were flattered that Charlie was so outgoing and welcoming. Unlike the dozens of other people we met that week, I didn’t forget Charlie’s name and how enthusiastic of a salesperson he was. Later I would recognize him as an up-and-coming executive with the Seminole Boosters.

The Seminole Boosters realized early on that given Tallahassee’s remote location in the state of Florida, if they were to begin raising serious funds to help build a top-level football program, then they were going to have to go where the money was—in cities and towns all over the Southeast. Charlie Barnes was for many Boosters the face of the organization, traveling every year with Coach Bobby Bowden from town to town. They hosted banquets, golf tournaments, pep rallies—anything they could do to help build the Seminole Boosters organization. Charlie did it all: he drove Bobby and Ann Bowden in the Boosters’ van; he was the master of ceremonies; he slapped every back he could; and he regaled anyone who would listen with one Seminole tale after another. Coach Bowden would stay late and sign autographs, and then it was on to the next town.

Charlie was one of the most impressive public speakers at FSU, and few people had more enthusiasm for what was happening at Florida State during the Bowden era. At the same time, Charlie was a print voice of authenticity for the Boosters, sharing his insights in Booster reports, magazine articles, and newspaper columns. In those days, before the Internet, that was how most of us who followed the FSU football team got our “insider” news—via first-class mail, in Booster magazines.

For many of us fans, Charlie Barnes’ Booster columns were as insightful in the 1990s as the sports news we’d get in the , a Seminole sports newspaper run by Jerry Kutz. If you were a die-hard fan back then, chances are you subscribed to the for the most candid news and inside stories about the program. A good friend from the FSU Foundation, Pat Ramsey, introduced me to Jerry Kutz back in 2006 and said she thought we might have something in common. None of us had any idea of what was to come.

It was my good fortune to meet up with Charlie Barnes as I began imagining our film . The year was 2012 and Charlie mentioned he was culling his best articles and columns for a possible book he had in mind that focused on the same topic of the dynasty. He offered to let me read the manuscript, and when I did, I couldn’t put it down. Unfortunately, the timing wasn’t right for the film to come together and it would be a few more years before I could talk to Charlie about combining our film with his written accounts of the dynasty years.

In 2013, I took a chance meeting with Seminole Booster executives Andy Miller and Jerry Kutz to discuss the idea of a documentary on the dynasty years and Coach Bowden’s life story. Jerry bought into the idea so much that by the time lunch was finished, he had already scheduled a meeting with Coach Bowden—an hour later! Before I knew it, Jerry was driving me across town to Bobby Bowden’s home.

I wasn’t prepared for this, and I was about as apprehensive about the meeting as I could ever be. Over the years, I’ve worked with a number of military generals, and had the opportunity to direct some amazing talents, including actors George C. Scott and Charlton Heston. I even had the opportunity of four meetings with President Ronald Reagan. But an appointment with Bobby Bowden loomed larger to me, perhaps because he has always been a larger-than-life hero. He had been so iconic to everyone else who shared the FSU experience with him as a head coach. And I was just a fan! As we drove toward his house, I wasn’t sure what to say, or even where to begin. The film was just a few sentences of description at the time, a set of goals really, because documentaries are often journeys of discovery—they rarely start with scripts.

Jerry pulled up to Coach’s front door, and Bobby came right out and greeted us personally. With a firm handshake, he looked me in the eye and asked with a smile, “How are you doing, boy?” It was like meeting an old friend, and I instantly felt at home. I had posed for a picture with Coach once at a 1993 golf tournament in Los Angeles, and before then my only time shared with Bobby Bowden was on an elevator ride in the FSU stadium ten years before. Even then, he walked into the elevator with a number of his staff members, and the first thing he did was ask me how my day was going! Imagine how that single act of kindness made me feel back then when I was just a junior in school. Coach Bowden made me feel like the most important person on that elevator that day. I will never forget that moment, because it speaks volumes about the man.

So here I am, thirty years later, sitting in Coach’s home discussing a potential documentary. Coach Bowden asked where people would eventually see the film, and, at the risk of alienating him, I had to be honest. “I don’t really know, Coach,” I said. “I can take this concept to a number of television networks first, but the minute we do that we’ve lost editorial control.” Coach just listened and didn’t say anything. I told him I wasn’t interested in doing a retrospective of his thirty-four years at Florida State, and I didn’t want to get tied down in the X’s and O’s either.

With Jerry Kutz looking on, I shared my desire to shine a light on one of the most important sports records of all time—Florida State football’s fourteen years of top-5 AP finishes and ten-or-more wins from 1987 to 2000. To me, it is one of the greatest sports stories never told. Bowden’s ’90s teams had been recognized by ESPN as the team of the decade (in any sport), and many other accolades had been bestowed on Bowden’s teams over the years for their achievements. But the record Coach Bowden and his teams set in those fourteen years is a true marvel. I wanted to dig for details and tell the story of how he and his staff pulled it off.

As I explained these points to Coach Bowden, his eyes seemed to light up. He remarked that the fourteen-year dynasty was the record he was most proud of, because of both the adversity the teams faced and overcame and the consistency with which they had to play to stay at such a high level year in and year out.

It’s not easy to be a top-5 college football team for even a few years. When you are a top-rated team, every school on your schedule is going to prepare all summer for that meeting, and you are going to get their very best shot. Over the years, we’ve seen teams peak for a while. USC, Ohio State, Florida, Alabama, Miami, and Oregon come to mind as schools that looked like dynasties in the making, but eventually fell out of the top 5 at the end of a given year. The closest a team has ever come to FSU’s fourteen-year, top-5 dynasty streak is the University of Oklahoma, with seven straight years—in the 1950s.

Another fact makes the dynasty all the more astonishing. There is only one team in the country that plays in two “conferences.” For the past several decades, Florida State has played in the “Florida Conference,” as well as the ACC. In those fourteen dynasty years, the University of Miami and the University of Florida were also top-level teams, and were always on the Noles’ schedule. (Those two teams stopped playing each other annually years ago.) As Mickey Andrews says in the film, “If you can win the state championship in Florida, there’s a pretty good chance you can win the national championship.”

No documentary had ever explored the details on how Coach Bowden and his staff pulled off the dynasty feat, and Coach seemed grateful I wanted to tell that side of the story. I then shared with Coach another reason why I wanted to make the film independently, and that was to be able to tell the story of his faith. That seemed to be the clincher for him, and he was the most enthusiastic about that opportunity.

For decades Coach Bowden has been preaching all over the country to groups large and small on Sundays with little fanfare. The idea of a film that could reach many more people with his message and be a lasting testament to his Christian faith appealed to him. Neither of us could think of a network that would green-light our documentary production and still allow us to have the final word in the edit room. By the time Jerry and I left, Coach Bowden gave his word on a handshake that if I could fund it, he was on board.

Given that I was already working full time on a long-term project, I needed to find a team to help produce the vision Bobby and I now shared. Watching the SEC channel one night, I came across a terrific documentary about Will Clark and Rafael Palmeiro (who formed the imposing one-two hitting punch known as “Thunder and Lightning”) on the best team never to win the College World Series—the 1985 Mississippi State Bulldogs.

After tracking down the credits, making a few phone calls, and booking a flight to Charlotte, I met producer Rob Harvell and editor Brian Goodwin in person. Rob and Brian like to share the director credit...