In 1962, a young football coach at Howard College in Birmingham, Ala., took a train to Lewistown and hitchhiked to State College to meet then Penn State football coach Rip Engle.
Bobby Bowden spent the next few nights at the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity house, and the next few days with Engle and his coaching staff, which included an offensive coordinator named Joe Paterno.
Bowden has gone on to win 359 games in his career, and Paterno hasn't done too badly for himself either, winning 353 games of his own.
But the two have always been separated in the mind of America, no matter how much success they have shared.
In the minds of Penn State fans, Paterno is the patron saint of football while Bowden is an arrogant cheat who wins with teams that are more pre-NFL then collegiate.
To Florida State fans, Bowden is a southern good ol' boy and Paterno is a preachy, holier-than-thou whiner.
Still, no matter how much discord the public has tried to create between the pair, the two men like each other, and the top two coaches in Division I-A in terms of wins have nothing but respect for the program that the other has created.
In the offseason, the two are extremely friendly, and both joke about how much their wives love to spend when they go shopping together. To hear them tell it, they really aren't that different at all.
"Personality-wise, I would think that maybe him being from Brooklyn and me being from Birmingham would be about the only difference," Bowden said. "I believe in a whole lot of the same things that Joe Paterno believes in."
This may be true, but the difference between Brooklyn and Birmingham is more than 970 miles. Much more.
Paterno is city all the way. He can be as gruff as he is engaging and has never been interested in the rural lifestyle. In fact, it seems strange that a man who hates golf and detests the tedium of hunting and fishing could carve such a niche for himself in a town as decidedly rural as State College.
"I don't like golf. I don't like to fish. I tried to take my kids fishing when they were young, and it drove me nuts," Paterno said. "We have a place called Fisherman's Paradise right down the road from here, which is the state hatchery. There are hundreds and hundreds of fish that you can see from the little boardwalk going across. I took them out there one day figuring that they can throw their line in there and get something. We were there for three-and-a-half hours and nobody got a bite so I said, 'Let's get the heck out of here, this isn't for me.' "
Bowden is a southerner's southerner; he talks with a slow Alabama drawl that has been preserved by spending most of his life in the South. Talk to Bowden, and Paterno's Brooklynese -- "the whole bit" and "people forget" -- is replaced with "doggone" and "you bet your life."
By any account, Paterno is more of a disciplinarian than Bowden will ever be.
Paterno once suspended star wideout Bobby Engram an entire season for stealing a stereo system.
In contrast, when some key players got themselves into trouble in the offseason, Bowden refused to suspend them for the Seminoles' season-opening game against the hated Miami Hurricanes, telling ESPN the Magazine's Dan LeBatard, "I could do what some of these other coaches do. I have to laugh at some of them when they say, 'We're going to suspend them for the first game.' Yeah, well, who are you playing? If I opened with Sewanee instead of
Miami, maybe I'd suspend them, too."
Bowden also disagrees with Paterno's insistence that college football needs a playoff system, and it is these type of differences that at first glance make the two men appear to be total opposites.
But for all of their differences, it is not surprising that the two men are fast friends when they aren't staring at each other from across a football field. As far apart as Brooklyn and Birmingham may be, the similarities are still there.
Both have a wicked sense of humor that they have used to both charm and cut down various members of the media over the years.
Both have been under fire recently and have heard that the game has passed them by in their advanced age.
Both have their sons as assistant coaches, and both have taken flak for this decision.
Neither of them care.
"It only bothers you if you let it bother you, and I try not to let it bother me because that's the way it is," Bowden said. "There are parts of it where naturally I don't feel like some of the people understand."
These two are the oldest of the old school, and both credit Paul "Bear" Bryant for paving the path that they have followed throughout their long and illustrious careers. Paterno admired Bryant from afar, while Bowden shared recruits with the man they have both since passed on the career victories list.
"I had tremendous admiration for him because regardless of what you might see, he was a very humble man even though he might kick your ears in," Paterno recalled. "I will never forget when we played Alabama in the Sugar Bowl in 1975, the first Sugar Bowl ever played in the dome, and he didn't have a hat on when he came in. I said, 'Where is your houndstooth hat?' He said, 'My mom said you never wear a hat indoors.' "
And it is family that ties the two together more than anything else. Both have managed to avoid falling into the time trap of major college coaching and kept their hectic lifestyles from affecting their home lives.
"I'll tell you one thing about coaching that I have found out. You have to have a coach's wife," Bowden said. "There are some gals that can't handle that. They can't handle the attention that [a coach] gets, the fact that he is gone all of the time, the attention that he gets or that he is hated by some people. I know Sue, and she's about as tough as Joe is, and my wife is tougher than I am."
Both men are proud fathers and grandfathers, and in that way they are similar, too, despite the fact that one is from Brooklyn and one is from Birmingham.
"I have always admired Bobby because I think he is an honest guy. He is a good family man. He stayed with Florida State when he has had other opportunities to go to places and I have admired that," Paterno said. "Hopefully, I am a good family man, and, hopefully, we have done it the right way."
