Chad Bowden | In Focus | Backstory Pt. I
They must have looked crazy at the time.
Heck, they thought they were crazy at the time.
But in hindsight, it explains plenty.
“Both of us were equally psycho and we sort of pushed the psycho within one another, if that makes sense,” Jac Collinsworth says of the time himself and Chad Bowden spent living together in Hollywood, Calif., during their late-teens and early-20s.
“It got to a point where we'd be racing each other at 5 a.m. to get to LA Fitness. Then on the way back, the sun would be coming up and we'd be sprinting up the hill because Chad didn't want me to beat him up the hill on the way back to the apartment.”
And whether their bosses knew it or not, they would then race them to work, trying to be the first ones to turn the lights on – Collinsworth at a production agency and Bowden at a call center selling Google Ads.
“Chad's dad would be in our ear, my dad would be in my ear, so we would be the last ones to leave,” Collinsworth recalls. “We'd be getting home at 9:30 at night and eating dinner together, whatever we could bring out of the fridge.”
The sons of famed broadcaster Cris Collinsworth and longtime MLB executive Jim Bowden certainly weren’t living the glitz and glamour Hollywood lifestyle as the children of wildly successful parents.
“(Chad) was truly hustling out there in LA, living sort of paycheck to paycheck to pay his bills, pay his rent at the apartment, which was not much of an apartment, I've gotta say,” Collinsworth says. “I mean, it was a pullout couch, it was a bed and it was a little tiny kitchen. All of it somehow managed to fit within one room and that's where we lived.
“That was just sort of what the summer was. But I think both of us sort of toughened each other up that whole process and it's why we've been close friends until today.”
Bowden believes their parents were trying to teach them a lesson.
“Obviously, they had the means they could have put us up in a house if they wanted to, but I think they were trying to teach us to be humble and work through it,” says Bowden.
You don’t need to tell Bowden he was blessed to grow up with a silver spoon. Shoot, that spoon was golden, according to him.
But he didn’t end up with one of his profession’s premier jobs by the age of 28 because he was given things. In fact, quite the opposite.
He was able to zoom up the industry’s ladder – heading up recruiting at Cincinnati before eventually being named Notre Dame’s Director of Recruiting this offseason – precisely because he was not given those things.
“A lot of people think that when you grow up with a golden spoon in your mouth that you don't learn values of hard work,” says Bowden.
“I still have to pay off student loans. What, because I grew up in a family that has money people think that means they should pay for my things? No, my dad wanted me to pay for my student loans because he had to pay for his student loans.
“My parents never wanted me to feel that I had a golden spoon in my mouth. They wanted me to have to work for things.”
Somewhere along the way, a tenacious desire for competition emerged and it’s now directed firmly toward his father.
“My biggest thing is I've always just wanted to be better than my dad,” Bowden acknowledges.
Bowden’s father served as Senior VP and General Manager of the Cincinnati Reds and Washington Nationals for a total of 16 years.
“I think for me, it's the reason I am who I am today,” Bowden says. “My dad was brash, cocky, arrogant, but was also really hard-working and understood talent, understood player personnel, understood people.”
In 1992, Jim Bowden became the youngest GM in the Majors when he took the position with the Reds at the age of 31.
“Obviously, he was a big public figure in the city of Cincinnati,” Bowden says of his dad. “He was able to bring in Ken Griffey Jr. and I was part of that. I was able to watch that, was able to watch him work day to day.”
As a youngster, Bowden would tag along with his father for full days at the office from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.
“I was able to really learn, whether it was contract negotiations or trading or dealing with people or players or managers or whatever,” he remembers. “I was able to get in all those rooms. I would not be who I am without him.
“I learned so much about people and politics and trying to maintain being yourself. That's one thing I really learned from my dad is trying to always be yourself even when you have the role that could change a lot of things in a program or an organization, try to remain being yourself because that's what gets you where you are.”
And now he wants to use those lessons and his position at Notre Dame to accomplish things his father never could.
“I want to crush his career and be so much better than him,” he says. “He's my best friend, but I want to be so much better than him. And I want him to know about it too.”
Collinsworth can relate.
“When you're growing up like that, the expectation is really high, maybe even sometimes without being spoken,” says Collinsworth. “You sort of readjust it within your own head, or you readjust it within your relationship with your friends, with guys like Chad.
“Your dads or your family or whoever it was that sort of gave you those opportunities, set the bar at a certain level and it's on you to take it to a different level. It's not on you to meet that level. It's on you to take it somewhere else. I think that's the way that we always looked at it. We wanted to get something even deeper out of ourselves to be able to go achieve that.”
Bowden is quick to point out that his father was the Director of Player Personnel, not the GM, when the Reds won the title in 1990.
“He never won a World Series as a GM,” he says. “I want to win a World Series. I want to win a national championship in college football. That's what I want to do.”
Bowden has vocalized his goals to his father “multiple times.”
His father’s reaction…
“Good luck.”
After his freshman year at Anderson High School in Ohio, Bowden transferred to Highlands High School in Kentucky, where he became fast friends with everybody, Collinsworth included.
Highlands has a storied football tradition with 23 state championships and was in the middle of a run that would see the school win six straight when Bowden arrived. Not the kind of place where newcomers just stroll in easily.
“Most of the guys had grown up together, been together forever,” Collinsworth says. “He just immediately meshed with the group. He was funny, but he took everything dead serious. He got along with the older guys and he got along with the younger guys. He was sort of the glue piece from a cultural perspective probably within a year.”
And he proved his dedication, often in hilarious, but serious ways.
Bowden broke his nose during a January workout one offseason, but refused to call it quits.
“It couldn't be further from the start of football season and Chad refuses to stop winter workouts,” Collinsworth laughs now. “His nose couldn't have been more crooked across his face and just refused to see the trainer, refused to stop working out, finished the entire thing. Then goes to the doctor at 9 o'clock at night and gets his nose broken back into place.
“I think that perfectly describes who he was and why everybody just immediately gravitated toward him.”
After his career at Highlands, Bowden was excited about the prospect of playing football in college. He was looking at walking on at Akron or playing at Kentucky Wesleyan or Mount St. Joseph.
“All I loved was football, but my dad was pretty adamant that what I should do is move out to Los Angeles and start working,” Bowden explains.
He did an internship with MVP Sports Group under Dan Lozano and then got the job cold-calling for a company called Link Tech.
“I would make 350 phone calls a day and your job is to get three of them to say 'Yes,'” he explains.
Saying ‘Yes’ meant entrusting a kid with their credit card so their ads could be displayed on the front page of Google. He would basically get hung up on 347 times just to get his three for the day.
“I learned so much about life in those moments and trying to stay consistent and positive,” he says now.
Collinsworth remembers Bowden seeking out positivity and consistently playing motivational clips from YouTube while they were racing to beat their bosses to the office.
“He would find some clip of some guy giving us this crazy pump-up speech,” Collinsworth laughs. “It's 6:30 in the morning and we just got done working out. Now, we're getting ready to go for a full day at work.
“We were just kind of crazy in that way. I think we're still kind of crazy in the exact same way to be honest with you.”
They would pick each other up and challenge each other to the point where merely achieving their individual goals wasn’t enough. They had to accomplish those goals as soon as possible.
“He would say, 'You're going to be on ESPN before you're 25,'” Collinsworth says. “I'd be, 'You're going to be running the Miami Dolphins,' or whatever it was that he was dreaming about at 20 years old or, 'Running Notre Dame Football and recruiting all these guys.'
“He always had one of those brains where he could make people believe. He did it in high school football. He was sort of the voice of the coach on the field.”
That voice kept calling Bowden back to the field and it wasn’t the only voice doing so.
To Be Continued…
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