Bowden Has Title to Go With Charm

Bobby Bowden was standing in the Green Room of the Anaheim Hilton and Towers the other day, demonstrating how he finally won a national collegiate football championship.

There was not a chalkboard in sight. Nor a football.

It was just Bobby, chucklin’ and joshin’ and spinnin’ tales and pattin’ a sportswriter on the back.

“Where you from?” Bobby asks, as neighborly as can be.

“How long you been out here?”

“Didn’t I talk to you in Atlanta?”

Bobby is just being Bobby, which, according to many college football observers, had more to do with Florida State’s No. 1 ranking than Charlie Ward being Charlie Ward. Writers and fellow coaches vote in the two polls that decide such matters, and Bowden is beloved by both. Lou Holtz, on the other hand, is not. Yet Holtz has the only football team in the country that beat Florida State last season, a team that finished 11-1 and won its bowl game--and finished behind Florida State in every poll that is influenced by the human process.

Is it just because most humans would rather split a plate of biscuits and gravy with Bowden? Because most humans prefer Santa to Scrooge?

Did the force of Bowden’s personality sway an entire election?

“It could have, it could have,” Bowden admits, nodding as the question is put to him. “I don’t know. This stance I take with the media is not a planned stance. I do not have a plan to win the media.

“I try to treat them like everybody else. I try to treat them like my daddy taught me . . . be friends with everybody, because my daddy was that way. My daddy, he’d walk in the door and his hand would go out like this and he’d shake hands with everybody in the room. That stayed with me when I was a kid.

“I think some of the coaches say, ‘Bobby does that to get votes and all that.’ I do not.”

Bowden laughs.

“But, it does seem like it.”

Bowden was in town to take delivery of the championship trophy that had eluded him for the first 41 years of his coaching career. It’s like they always say: The 42nd time’s the charm.

“I guess it’s more a relief for me than anything else,” Bowden says. “Before, it was kinda like, ‘When’s he gonna win one? Is he ever gonna win one? Well, geez, he’s had four chances, what’s the matter? What’s he missing?’

“Sometimes, I’d get kind of embarrassed. Every time I’d see one of my coaches, I’d kind of put my hand over my face and try to hide. I know what they were thinking: ‘Why don’t you win one once so we can shut that up?’ ”

When Bowden finally broke through two weeks ago, a different type of clamor arose, with Holtz doing most of the stoking, and shutting that up may be mission impossible.

“I don’t blame Lou at all,” Bowden says. “Lou, I really like Lou. I saw him here a couple days ago and he and I talked for 30, 40 minutes.

“I said, ‘Lou, you probably had the best ball team in the country. I sure didn’t want to play you again.’ You exchange pleasantries . You know how it is--we exchanged pleasantries, like nothing happened.

“I have absolutely no resentment toward him. He had a very good point in his regard to winning it. (But) I really felt like you should take it on the overall season and not base it on one game. ‘Who was the best in all of 1993?’

“I think that’s the one thing Florida State did. For 13 games, we played like maybe the best team in the country. The day we played Notre Dame, they were.”

Bowden notes, however, that Holtz’s view of the situation changed dramatically between Halloween and New Year’s Day. In October, Holtz was fretting over whether his boys could handle Navy. By early January, Holtz had declared his boys the best in the land and wondered why the rest of the land wasn’t in unanimous agreement.

“I kidded him about that the other night on Jay Leeno ,” Bowden says, drawl getting the best of him. “I was on Leeno and Jay asks me, ‘Well, Lou Holtz says his team in the best in the country, how do you reply to that?’

“So I was tryin’ to be halfway funny, and I said, ‘Well, you know when we played Notre Dame, Lou said we were the best team he’d ever seen. Lou said we might be the best team he’d seen in 10 years. Lou said we might be the best team he’d seen in 20 years. Lou said that he didn’t know if they could hold us to 40.’

“ ‘Lou did so good a job selling us, they voted us the national championship.’ He was the oversale.”

Bowden tosses his head back and cackles.

“I got to play him next year, so I got to break him of that somehow. That rascal. He is the master . . . he is the master of making your kids think they’re better than they are.”

Suppose they had played again this season, in a winner-takes-all championship game that the masses in and outside of South Bend are now pressing for.

Could Florida State have beaten Notre Dame in a January rematch?

“We might-could,” Bowden says. “At least we’d have the advantage of playin’ them with our kids at their peak. He did get a week of practice on us (in the November game). In a week’s time, you can put in some things you can’t do in three days.

“But I couldn’t predict we would beat them. We had the kind of ballclub this year, though, that if I was a betting man and I was neutral, I would bet on whoever had Charlie Ward. You put him on a lot of teams and they’re gonna win.”

Stupendous Bowl ’94 didn’t come off, although Bowden sees a four-team college football playoff in the near future. “It won’t be because of the debating,” Bowden says, “it’ll be because of money. You schools want us to help pay some bills, we’ll get you a playoff.

“But the debating and the arguing, I think, are probably healthy.”

For Florida State it has been.

Everything else being equal, as it stands now, this year you had to bet on whoever had Bobby Bowden.