Boulder – Bobby Anderson smacked around golf balls at a Palm Springs, Calif., course last week, the sun beaming down on him much the way it figuratively did the majority of his football career.
His highlight reel is lengthy, his stat sheet stuffed. Anderson’s being on the football field was so calming that a former University of Colorado teammate, quarterback Jimmy Bratten, once told the CU sports information staff: “He’s just such a great inspiration to me just playing behind me. His presence in the lineup always makes me feel like we will do it right.”
For all of his accomplishments and comforts, Anderson will officially be enshrined in the College Football Hall of Fame in two days.
But here’s the rest of the story about a player Colorado was lucky to have.
Literally.
Anderson was a Boulder boy, growing up in the shadows of Folsom Field. Anderson and his brother, Dick, could see the CU football stadium from their back porch. When he was 5 years old, 25-cent tickets earned Anderson and his father entry into Folsom Field and a spot on sandstone rock ledges in the northwest corner.
“That’s when I first started watching the Buffaloes,” Anderson said.
Later, his status as a Boy Scout earned him the opportunity to get into CU games as an usher. Late in junior high and into high school, Anderson kept himself in the stadium by selling sodas and hot dogs. Days he wasn’t in the stadium, his childhood friend and teammate, Phil Irwin, said they would be outside of it, playing football.
“We would go up there,” Irwin said. “It was just our life.”
Irwin and Anderson played for the same teams in junior high, and then at Boulder High School for coach Emerson Wilson.
When it came time for college, though, Anderson’s eyes started to wander. By then, he was a two-sport star, and baseball meant just as much to Anderson as football. Maybe even more. He was drafted by the Houston Astros out of high school, but what he really wanted was to play in college.
The cold spring weather in Colorado was a deterrent. So he searched.
Anderson went on five recruiting trips – Kansas, Stanford, Texas Christian, Arizona State and Florida. Florida was the wild card. And unknown to most everyone, who thought the local sports star was headed to CU, the Gators became the leader.
“My grandparents were in Sarasota, Fla., and somehow they had the influence to have the Florida coaches write me letters,” Anderson said. “I thought that was kind of neat. It was in the South, so I’d have the chance to play good college baseball.”
The coach at Florida was Ray Graves. The recruiting trip was thoughtful. After showing Anderson around the campus and giving him the pitch, Florida obtained use of an alum’s jet and flew the Colorado prep star to have dinner with his grandparents at the Sarasota airport. Anderson estimates the trip to have been 200 or 250 miles. Whatever the number, it was over the mandated 50- mile radius that any recruit could travel away from campus during a recruiting trip.
“It was flat-out illegal,” Anderson said.
But that wasn’t on his mind. Signing with Florida was. And he did just that.
He returned to Boulder, destined to be a Gator.
“I was about ready to die,” Irwin said.
But as Anderson later found out, Eddie Crowder, CU’s football coach at the time, got wind of the situation through Dick Anderson and with conversations with their parents. Crowder went to work.
“It’s funny because most of the stuff in my senior yearbook all said, ‘Good luck in Florida, have a great time in Florida, and good luck down there,”‘ Anderson recalled. “About the last day of school, I get home and I have a letter from Florida. It’s from Ray Graves, saying that he apologized but he had over-subscribed their allotment of scholarships and there was no longer one available for me.”
Crowder, Anderson later learned, “called Ray Graves and said, ‘He’s a local guy, his brother’s here and you illegally recruited him. If you just back off of him, I’m not going blow the whistle on you.”‘
And with that, Anderson was headed to CU.
“I just kind of got enamored with the whole recruiting thing,” Anderson said. “It was just meant for me to stay at home, and that’s the way it worked out. It was kind of a blessing in disguise. So I ended up staying at home, which in the long run was something I wanted to do as a little kid, but I kind of lost sight of that, I think.”
CU fans never lost sight of him, though. He set many school records, but his greatest accomplishment was transitioning from quarterback to tailback in the third game of his 1969 senior season and rushing for 954 yards and 18 touchdowns, adding 254 yards and three more touchdowns against Bear Bryant-led Alabama in a bowl game.
But to this day, whenever Anderson receives an award, he calls as many of his former teammates as he can to request their presence to share the honor, or to simply thank them.
“I’m tremendously appreciative of the people I got to play with and the coaches that coached me and the big brother that kind of led the way for me,” Anderson said. “I was really blessed by circumstances.
“The right time at the right place.”
Funny. That’s how anyone who ever saw him play feels, too.
Chris Dempsey can be reached at 303-954-1279 or cdempsey@denverpost.com.
Anderson’s numbers
A look at Bobby Anderson’s statistics at CU, where he started at quarterback for two seasons, then switched to tailback for the third game of the 1969 season:
RUSHING
Season Att. Yards Avg. TD
1967 166 625 3.8 7
1968 183 788 4.3 9
1969 219 954 4.4 18
Totals 568 2,367 4.2 34
PASSING
Season Comp. Att. Yds TD Int
1967 63 110 733 2 5
1968 112 222 1,341 7 12
1969 13 43 124 0 4
Totals 188 375 2,198 9 21
TOTAL OFFENSE
Season Plays Yards Avg.
1967 276 1,358 4.9
1968 405 2,129 5.3
1969 262 1,078 4.1
Totals 943 4,565 4.8
ADDITIONAL STATISTICS
Receptions: 4-68, 17.0 avg., 1 TD
Punt returns: 5-56, 11.2 avg., 0 TD
Kickoff returns: 11-193, 17.5 avg., 0 TD
Punting: 6-222, 37.0 avg.
HONORS
1969 AP, UPI, Sporting News, NEA All-American
1968, 1969 all-Big Eight team
1967 Bluebonnet Bowl MVP
1969 Liberty Bowl MVP
1969 Zack Jordan Award
1969 Coaches All-American Bowl
1969 College All-Star Game
1969 American Bowl
1970 East-West Shrine Game
1970 Hula Bowl
Big Eight Hall of Fame inductee (1980)
Colorado Sports Hall of Fame inductee (1982)
Member of CU’s all-century team
Number (11) retired by CU
Set 18 single-game, single-season and career records during his three-season career with the Buffaloes, along with earning all-Big Eight and All-America honors
11th pick of 1970 NFL draft (Broncos)
Played in NFL for Denver (1970-73), Washington (1975) and New England (1975)
