As I said a few posts ago (and in keeping with the ‘speed’ theme), Phil Williams did not run the forty. No sir. I hope that has been clearly established.

But…when the NFL scouts came through Tallahassee to time the seniors-to-be, a few days before spring training, the New York Jets scout began talking to me about a couple of my better games from my junior year, mentioning Nebraska in particular; so I started thinking…um, maybe.

Uh-oh.

“Is it possible that I might have gotten faster over these last couple of years?” I asked myself. “Why yes, it is,” I responded. “And besides, it’s gonna be the NFL scouts holding the stopwatches, not our guys…”

Had I not always dreamed of playing in the NFL?

“Oh, what the hell!”

Listen, there are several angles I could share about what happened on that dreadful spring afternoon, once again on the turf within Doak Campbell Stadium that is now known as Bobby Bowden Field, but I will simply share the one forgettable scene.

And then ask you to forget it.

When it was my time to run, I got down in my attempt at a sprinter’s stance. We were running from west to east, away from the football offices, and I felt a slight breeze in my face. Damn. That ain’t gonna help.

Well, folks, I did what I did when I had run the forty in the past - I gutted it! Smooth is not a word that would have come to anyone’s mind. I gutted all the way through that finish line, the one that had initially seemed a mile away and which had sort of kept moving away from me as I moved toward it. Though I really didn't want to do so, I turned and looked back at the scouts.

Here’s the picture. There were three or four of those guys standing there in a huddle, all of them staring incredulously at their stopwatches, then at each other, then at each other’s stopwatches, their mouths in tight O’s and their eyes looking as if they had just seen their first UFO.

But here’s the kicker. Coach Bobby Bowden was standing right there beside them. And I swear to you, that little man was having the time of his life. He was laughing so hard I thought he might fall down. Those scouts looked at him as if he might know something they did not (which he did!), and he just kept on laughing.

Folks, I do not know what my time was. I never asked. I had not the slightest interest. I took the very long way around all of them, and instead of getting back in line and running a second forty like all of the other seniors-to-be, I headed through the tunnel and disappeared. I have no idea what all else they might have done out on the field for those scouts. And I did not care. All I could see in my mind was Coach Bowden laughing as those guys stared at each other in amazement.

So, yeah, I knew before I even made it into the locker room that now, without a doubt, I had only one more season of football in me.

It’s funny, I wasn’t mad at Coach Bowden. And I did not blame him for laughing. Quite the contrary. It felt to me like he was saying with his body language that I was his boy….”And yeah, he ain’t fast, but I don’t really care. He’s one of mine.”

And I was.

I was, and am, one of Bobby’s Boys!

Photo: Garnet and Great, FSU Football Archivist