When the Bear Was King

The Last Coach
A Life of Paul "Bear" Bryant
by Allen Barra
Norton, 545 pp., $26.95

CONTRARY TO WHAT THEY CLAIM down south, football was not invented in the old Confederacy. Southerners, in fact, came late to the game, and teams from Dixie were considered inferior to those of other regions until the Rose Bowl of 1926, when an underdog eleven from Alabama, featuring future cowboy star Johnny Mack Brown, upset the top-ranked Washington Huskies, 20-19.

Nine years later, another Alabama team, this one featuring All-American end Don Hutson, and a hard-nosed country boy called "Bear," returned to Pasadena to defeat a favored Stanford squad, 29-13. Hutson would later gain fame as a record-breaking pass receiver for the Green Bay Packers, while his teammate would go on to become, as the dust jacket of Allen Barra's The Last Coach tells us, "the greatest football coach in history."

An arguable claim outside the state of Alabama, but what claim isn't arguable in an age of sports talk radio? This much we know, however: At the time he died (1983), no college football coach in history had won more games (323, including six national championships) than Paul "Bear" Bryant, and two decades after his passing, no coach, college or professional, has inspired more biographies.

This is no less than the fifth biography of the fabled Alabama football mentor, and that only begins to tell the story. There is also Bryant's personal memoir, Bear--unique among that genre, thanks to John Underwood's pitch-perfect rendition of the coach's rustic voice--along with a score of Alabama football books hinged on the Bryant persona, from Winston Groom's The Crimson Tide to Eli Gold's (no relation) more recent Crimson Nation.

Which is not to say the subject matter is exhausted; only that the sportswriter who undertakes another book about Bear Bryant would do well to come up with an original theme. For Jim Dent's The Junction Boys, it was the capsule story of the hellacious summer camp Bryant held to weed out "those who don't want to play" in his first year at Texas A&M; for Tom Stoddard's Turnaround it was coverage of a single season at Alabama and what one reviewer called "an exploration into the complicated psyche of 'Bear' Bryant."

Barra, a native Alabamian who grew up immersed in Bryant lore, works with a broader brush. He sees Bryant as a transitional figure on the American sports scene, the last of a line that coached college football as the ultimate game, not simply a bridge to the National Football League.

"When Bear Bryant began his career, the NFL wasn't even a tail to the dog; college football was the whole dog," writes Barra. "Bryant's intention was to field winning football teams, not train players for the professionals."

A seeming contradiction there since, intentionally or not, Bryant earned a reputation as the Saturday breeder of Sunday stars Joe Namath, Ken Stabler, Lee Roy Jordan, and Ozzie Newsome. But as Barra makes clear, contradiction lies at the heart of the Bryant mystique: A hard-drinking, heavy-smoking blasphemer, the Bear nonetheless remained a folk hero in the Bible Belt; a man who prized winning above all things earthly, he could summarily dismiss Joe Namath before a major game on learning that Namath, his star quarterback, had broken team rules. (Alabama won the game with a second-string quarterback on four field goals, delivering the message Bryant intended. A chastened Namath rejoined the team the following season.)

The contradictions abound. Bryant by reputation was a brutal taskmaster, so intent on winning football games that he drove his charges to a point where, at Junction, Texas, in 1954 (105-degree heat, no shade, no water during practice), their lives seemed at risk. Yet few coaches enjoyed the lifelong relationship the Bear forged with players in his 37-year career at Maryland, Kentucky, Texas A&M, and Alabama. At his funeral, Barra reports, "The procession ran three miles long and included six buses loaded with current and former players and staff members.

"Some journalists compared it to the slow train cortege that carried Franklin Roosevelt's body from Warm Springs, Georgia, to Washington in 1945," writes Barra. "Viewers across the nation turned on their nightly news to an astonishing sight: All along the 55-mile route [from Tuscaloosa to Elmwood cemetery in Birmingham] an estimated quarter of a million people lined the highways and crowded onto overpasses to view the procession. . . . The overwhelming majority had never attended college, let alone the University of Alabama."

The coach as icon. A southern regional quirk? Not at all. Barra quotes the New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" column two weeks after Bryant's death: "When I heard on the radio that he had died, and I started to cry," wrote Ian Frazier, "I knew I was just part of a big chorus."

How to explain the aura that set Bryant apart from other coaches who, Saturday afternoon fever aside, were engaged in what, after all, is merely a boys' game? The Bear himself sometimes wondered. Though Bryant enjoyed the limelight, his hardscrabble origins as the son of a dirt-poor farmer in Moro Bottom, Arkansas, was never far from his thoughts. Barra recounts the story of Bryant wearing a new T-shirt at a Sugar Bowl victory party in New Orleans. When one of the guests pointed out that his shirt had a hole in it, Bryant replied, "Yeah, I know. I always tear a small hole in my T-shirts so I'll never forget where I came from."

A star on his high-school football team, Bear--he got the nickname at age 12 wrestling a circus bear for a dollar a minute--was recruited by Alabama and, like other poor country boys of the Depression era, seized the opportunity to trade muddy coveralls for a clean football jersey. It was a background that helped Bryant-the-coach relate to other poor country boys, both white and black, in later years.

At six-three, 200 pounds, with piercing blue eyes and a voice like slow rolling thunder, Bryant was a presence so awesome that one of his Kentucky recruits, George Blanda, signed up thinking, "That's what God must look like." (A later recruit, Alabama's Ken Stabler, had visions of "a face on Mount Rushmore.")

For all that, Bryant knew the only impression that mattered for a major college football coach had to do with numbers on a scoreboard. "Winning isn't everything," he would say, "but it sure beats anything that comes in second."

Not exactly an original insight, though in Bryant's case it wasn't winning alone that created the aura but the way he did it. There are two kinds of players you can win with, he would tell young coaches: those that are good and know they're good, and those that are good but don't know it. The Bear had his share of the former, but what got him out of bed at 5:30 each fall morning was the challenge posed in motivating the latter--getting under-achievers to realize their potential, turning losers into winners.

Bryant teams, from Maryland in the 1940s to Alabama in the '70s, were best characterized by the phrase made famous by Jake Gaither of Florida A&M. He wanted players, said Gaither, who were "a-gile, mo-bile, and hos-tile." Bryant's players were all these, but more, they were drilled to think in terms of what their coach called "oneness," playing for your team, not yourself. God help the Alabama linebacker who danced after a tackle, or the halfback who did anything but hand the ball to the referee after crossing the goal line.

"We don't build character," Bryant told an inquiring reporter who asked about his recruiting philosophy. "Our players have character when they get here."

Barra captures all this, the man and the legend, in what, by all odds, should be the last word on the life and times of Paul "Bear" Bryant--though personally, all things considered, I think there are books yet to come about a Deep South football coach whose passing could bring tears to the eyes of a New Yorker writer.

Victor Gold, a graduate of the University of Alabama, is national correspondent for Washingtonian magazine.