It was early August, 1998. The air hanging over the Florida State football practice field was hot and heavy as the time neared 9 p.m. Weary of the usual football questions about who was running third team at defensive tackle or how his field goal kicker was connecting from 43 yards out, Seminoles head coach Bobby Bowden had a question of his own for the assembled media.
“Any of y’all seen Saving Private Ryan yet?” he asked of the movie that had been released less than three weeks earlier. “You need to. Probably the most realistic war movie ever. We’re taking the team to see it tomorrow night.”
This was the Bobby Bowden the whole world should have come to know before he lost his battle with pancreatic cancer on Sunday morning at the age of 91.
This was the Bowden who knew World War II backward and forward because he’d been stricken with rheumatic fever for most of 1942, which forced him to remain in bed at his parents’ Birmingham, Alabama, home as he listened each day to radio reports from the European theatre.
So he became something of an expert on the war effort, even if he was too young to serve in the military. He also knew a lot about Christianity and the role he believed he was expected to serve regarding organized religion.