'Whenever we talked, it was never about football:' Helmick recalls time playing under Bowden

Aug. 11—CUMBERLAND, Md. — Genuine. An adjective. Described as something — or, in this case, someone — actual or true.

Todd Helmick couldn't think of a word that fit Bobby Bowden more to a T.

Bowden, who frequently said, "After you retire, there's only one big event left," died on Sunday at the age of 91.

"I say the same thing a million people have said over the last 24 hours," Helmick said on Tuesday, "he cared about people more than he cared about you as a football player. When you spoke to him it was always genuine. He amazed you with his ability to know people. He talked to people about life, not football."

Including his wins at South Georgia College, Bowden amassed 411 career victories and put north of 150 players in the NFL.

"Always to be genuine and remember there's more to life than football," Helmick said of how he'd remember Bowden. "I was touched by him. I didn't spend a lot of time with him, but he had an open-door policy. I'd pop in and talk for five or six minutes with him. He was a big Civil War buff — he'd have all kinds of Civil War stuff in his office. Whenever we talked, it was never about football."

Helmick played under Bowden at Florida State as a walk-in from 1986 through the 1988 season, right as the Seminole football program started to turn a corner, and Helmick remembers the turning point like it was yesterday.

It happened right after Helmick's first year with the team when the Seminoles closed out a 7-4-1 season with a 27-13 win over Indiana in the All-American Bowl on New Year's Eve. Some teams may be happy with a 7-4-1 season, especially considering just over 10 years prior, Florida State had a 1-10 season follow an 0-11 campaign — but it wasn't nearly enough for Bowden.

Quickly, rumors began spreading throughout every nook and cranny in the nation about Bowden leaving Florida State to take the head coaching job at Alabama, which was a dream job for Bowden, who was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama.

Bowden would have succeeded Ray Perkins, who became head coach with the Crimson Tide after Bear Bryant retired.

With rumors abounding and the spring semester underway, Helmick said the team was called into the athletic facility on campus, and the team was expecting to hear the news that Bowden was leaving. Quite the opposite happened.

"Each coach came out to the podium and gave a complete fire and brimstone lashing on the team," Helmick said. "They called out our manhood and preached about how a 7-4-1 record we just completed was not near good enough. I mean this was a complete thrashing. Then Coach Bowden came out last.

"He wasn't one to go fire and brimstone on the team. He'd raise his voice when needed, but never to the degree of that day. He raised his voice and challenged everyone to go all in, this was serious. I will never forget leaving that meeting and the stone-cold look on every player's face that this was about to get real. And when I say real, I mean the coaches were not joking around. Fun time was over. That spring training regiment was rough, a serious challenge to everything your body was capable of. But we knew that day that we were really going to turn a corner."

The Seminoles turned the corner — and then some — going on a run of 14 straight top five finishes in the Associated Press Poll, nine straight bowl wins and two national championships thrown in during the 14-year stretch.

Florida State went 11-1 in 1987, starting a run of 14 straight seasons with two losses or less, and Bowden's decision to stay changed the course of Seminole football forever.

"What people don't realize is how many people he touched, how many branches he had," Helmick said. "After he died (Sunday), the outpours that came out from every corner of the planet was something to behold."

Helmick, a 1985 graduate of Fort Hill, recalled staying in touch with Bowden and his sons after his graduation from Florida State in 1989 during Helmick's time as a radio show host in Baltimore.

"He was on my radio show, and so were Terry and Tommy," Helmick said. "The first time I ever formally met Coach Bowden was when I was on the team that first week. We were in an elevator together and I told him I was from Cumberland."

Helmick recalled Bowden coming to a local Elks Lodge father-and-son banquet as a guest speaker during his time in Morgantown, West Virginia, bringing his children Terry and Tommy. "They were all huge Pittsburgh Pirates fans because of that," Helmick said of the Bowdens.

Helmick added from the elevator conversation that after Bowden asked where he was from, Bowden followed up by asking if he knew Charlie Lattimer.

"I said, 'I sure do. He's the vice principal at my high school,'" Helmick said. "He looked at me and said, 'He's not coaching anymore?'

"That's just how Coach Bowden was. He had a mind like a steel trap when it came to those things. I remember one time he was recruiting a quarterback out of Walla Walla, Washington, and Bowden already knew a half dozen people from that town."

Mineral County Schools Superintendent Troy Ravenscroft recalled Bowden's steel trap memory, sharing a story on Twitter Sunday morning.

"When I was living in Florida, a former Fairmont teammate (Josh Skidmore) was a graduate assistant coach with FSU football," Ravenscroft wrote. "He hosted me and another teammate (Stanley Moore) to come and tour the facilities and go to an FSU game in Tallahassee. (Skidmore) said he'd try for us to meet Coach Bowden.

"The game was a devastating 4th quarter loss for FSU ... against rival Miami. As we waited in the coaches' conference room while (Skidmore) did his postgame GA duties, he told us we probably wouldn't get to meet Coach Bowden. He'd been in the locker room and he knew it was a really tough loss. He told us if we saw him in the hallway to keep walking and not to bother him.

"When we left the conference room, Coach Bowden had just entered the hallway area headed towards his office. Coach stopped when he saw us and said "Hey Skiddy, who are these guys you have with you?" (Skidmore) introduces us as his teammates from Fairmont State—from WV. Coach Bowden asks us "where are you from in WV?"

"When I told him Keyser, he began to name all the players he'd recruited from Keyser, Piedmont, and the surrounding region while he was coaching at WVU. He did the same with (Moore) and Preston Co. He went out of his way, after a devastating loss, to kindly give five sincere minutes of his time to a couple nobodies. He was an absolute gem of a man and a coach."

Kyle Bennett is a sports reporter for the Cumberland Times-News. Follow him on Twitter @KyleBennettCTN.