Bryant Paul Bear. - Bear : the Hard Life & amp ; Good Times of Alabamas Coach Bryant

To Mama, who put me on my way; and to Mary Harmon, who made it a pleasant journey; and to the players, the coaches, and the fans of college football, the greatest game there is.

Contents

An Introduction

The image endures, defined even better by the breadth of his lifes impact. We were sitting on the patio of a friends house in the Florida Keys, a haven to which he retreated when his peripatetic life, and the telephone, wore him down. It was July; seasonably, unreasonably hot, windless, and washed out, a day drained by the enervating sun. A sign in red and white could be seen protruding from the sandspurs in the vacant lot next to the house: Bryant Field. Over the lavatory inside was a super-enlarged postcard depicting him walking on water with the inscription: I believe!

Paul Bear Bryant, in a lounge chair, pushed his thick white legs out from his baggy swimming trunks into the sun. The brim of his straw hat cast a shadow over his face and accentuated the lines around his eyes. I was reminded how the lines had deepened and proliferated since wed first met, like those on a fine antique, but yet, remarkably, had not diminished the handsomeness of his face. Rather, they tended to enlarge on his strength, to accentuate itgranite and ice and true grit. Seeing that face for the first time years before, George Blanda thought (as he wrote later of quarterbacking at Kentucky for Bryant), This must be what God looks like. When Bear Bryant walked into the room, Blanda said, you wanted to stand up and applaud.

You lost your mind? Bryant said, straightening in his chair. From my own mooring in the sun I had suggested that having done everything he had set out to do as a football coach at least oncenational championships; bowl games won in all sizes, shapes, and dollar values; Coach of the Year awards; books written about him, songs written about him, buildings named after himthat Bryant might just as well quit and go watch the bullfights in Spain.

Id croak in a week, Bryant said. Im more fired up now than I was 20 years ago. He paused to let me appreciate how fired up that meant. Ive been fortunate. Ive had honors. But if I couldnt stay in it, Id go crazy. I dont have as much fun as I used to because Im not as close to the kids, not coaching as much. But still. Today, tomorrow. When I walk out on that practice field cold chills run up my back. A new day. And its something I wouldnt swap for anything. I dont know how else to say it.

As time would tell, Bear Bryant was, indeed, far from done. His Alabama teams won three more national championships after that to bring his grand total to six (nobody else comes close), and when he announced his retirement and finished off the 1982 season with another bowl victory, he had won more games than any college coach in history. It was irresistible from then on for sports historians and other armchair quarterbacks to dredge the 44 years of his career for fragments to explain his greatness. I anticipated no new evidence, and got nonenot then, not since. Bryants success had a lot to do with his being tough to pin down. It was part of his genius that it was impossible to pin him down for long. Stifle his offense and he beat you with defense. Graduate his passing attack and he hammered you with wishbone running. Take him for granted at Kentucky and he slipped away in the night to win at Texas A&M. Bryant said and Bryant did, but he always kept you off balance doing it.

At Maryland, Kentucky, Texas A&M, and Alabama, Bryant won 323 times. The record stood until Bobby Bowden at FSU and Joe Paterno at Penn State stuck around longer and passed him by. One of Bryants former assistants, Bum Phillips, used to say that Bryant didnt coach football, he coached people. I would refine that only to say that coaching people checked out to be a unique ability to communicate. The hard-eyed toughness, the mumbling, and the baggy pants were only trappings. Bear Bryant out-communicated everybody.

Before an important road game one year, he invited me to live with the team to help get the makings of a story I was doing for Sports Illustrated . At the pregame breakfast on Saturday I sat next to an Alabama professor and department head who had been invited along. Bryant curried faculty support by doing things like that, itself a form of communication. When he made his talk to the team, he barely spoke above the growl of a whisper that he activated whenever he wanted (demanded) your utmost attention. The players leaned forward in their seats, eager to hear, and in so doing one accidentally tipped over a glass of water. The spill hitting the floor sounded like Niagara Falls. When Bryant finished, the professor turned to me, awed. If I could reach my students like that Id teach for nothing, he said.

Effective as he was with a group, Bryant was even better one-on-one. In person he really communicated. He coaxed and cajoled, and scared the hell out of people. He knew he could do this, and he used it like a wrench. Bum Phillips told me that John David Crow stood outside Bryants office for more than an hour one afternoon at Texas A&M, waiting for the man to come out, but not daring to knock. And all Crow had done was win the Heisman Trophy. Bryants assistant coaches were no less awed. One day after a particularly uninspired practice at Alabama he ordered his coaching staff to meet in my office first thing in the morning to, as he put it, get this damn train back on track. Not knowing for sure what Bryant meant by first thing, and not daring to ask, Dude Hennessey slept on his office floor that night.

But the Bryant who could intimidate could also care deeply, and those who overlooked this part missed the best part. If he took advantage of your fear, he also appreciated your love. Those who saw this sought him out. He enjoyed being sought out. My daughter Lori, when she was in school at Alabama, used to drop in on him unannounced, invading the posh inner sanctum of his office to forage into the refrigerator he had given her access to and bullying him with affectionate needling about his insatiable smoking habit. He never turned her away. Years afterward, he would preface our phone conversations with Hows Lori? When she heard he had retired, Lori cried. I love that old man, she said. I told Bryant. Yeah, my grandchildren cried, too, he said.

Most of all Bryant loved the communication he had with athletesgetting my message acrossand even if he scared them silly, they sensed his empathy. Joe Namath, whom Bryant always called the best athlete I ever saw, never called him anything but Coach Bryant, but told me their private pregame walks were voyages rich in discovery (or words to that effect). It was reciprocal. A favorite story Bryant told me at least twice was of a time he enjoyed with his players after a victory over Florida in Gainesville, when we got out to the airport afterward and the doggone plane wasnt there. Our kids could have been home and out enjoying themselves, but there we were standing around in that heat, and I was so mad.

Well, I dont know whyit was Mary Harmons idea, reallybut I went around and said, When we get back, if you dont have anything better to do, bring your wives or your dates and come over to our house. We got a new pool with AstroTurf all around, and Mary Harmon will cook up something. (Mary Harmon, of course, was the agelessly beautiful wife Bryant had won over when they were students at Alabama; he routinely referred to her as the best thing that ever happened to me, and obviously meant it.) I expected a handful [of the invited players] to come to the house, but a whole bunch of em came. I was inside having a drink and listening to a game and they were around the pool, and one by one they started coming in until they were all in there, laying around like little pigs, listening to the game with me. It was one of the best times I ever had.