Bear : the Hard Life & amp ; Good Times of Alabama's Coach Bryant

312 Pages·2007·2.35 MB·English

by  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
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Appendix
Photo Gallery
An Introduction
T , life’s impact. We
HE IMAGE ENDURES DEFINED EVEN BETTER BY THE BREADTH OF HIS
were sitting on the patio of a friend’s 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 we’d 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 it—granite 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 once—national 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 him—that Bryant
might just as well quit and go watch the bullfights in Spain.
“I’d croak in a week,” Bryant said. “I’m more fired up now than I was 20
years ago.” He paused to let me appreciate how fired up that meant. “I’ve been
fortunate. I’ve had honors. But if I couldn’t stay in it, I’d go crazy. I don’t have
as much fun as I used to because I’m 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 it’s something I wouldn’t swap for
anything. I don’t 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
none—not then, not since. Bryant’s 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 Bryant’s former assistants, Bum
Phillips, used to say that Bryant “didn’t 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 I’d 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 Bryant’s 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. Bryant’s
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 “How’s
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 athletes—“getting
my message across”—and 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 wasn’t 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 don’t know why—it was Mary Harmon’s idea, really—but I went
around and said, ‘When we get back, if you don’t 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.”
Only when you’ve seen the grinding poverty of Moro Bottoms, Arkansas, the
town that spawned him, and the active distrust he had for failure thereafter, can
you fully appreciate another otherwise implausible Bryant character trait. The
one that combined ham and humble pie, and an unabashed joy in celebrity (and,
yes, being catered to by celebrities). He really dreaded “going back to The
Bottoms,” and embraced any affirmation that it wouldn’t be necessary. When we
put together his life story for a series in SI, then expanded on it for the first
edition of this book, we went over the manuscript at that same house on the
Florida Keys, owned by a close friend named Sloan Bashinsky, the president of
Golden Flake Potato Chips. Sloan was a sponsor of The Bear Bryant [television]
Show. He and a couple more of Bryant’s cronies were there, and Bryant was so
pleased with the written evidence of his imminent apotheosis that he carted the
manuscript around, from one guest to another, making each read a favored
portion or two.
Later that year, on the eve of the Hall of Fame banquet, we had plans to meet
in New York City. My flight arrived late, it was raining and near freezing in
Manhattan, and I was on the edge of a substantial head cold. When I got to the
hotel I found he had left word to meet him at Patsy’s Restaurant, but in no mood
to venture back out, I ignored the order and went to bed. The phone rang.
“Where the hell are you?”
“It’s raining. It’s cold. I’m sick. I’m in bed.”
“Frank Sinatra is at my table. You better get on over here.”
“Yeah, sure. I wouldn’t want to miss Old Blue Eyes. Is Bing there with him?
“Okay, smart guy. Just hold on.”
There was a short pause, then an unmistakable voice. “Hello, John? This is
Francis Albert Sinatra. The Bear says for you to get your ass over here.”
Bryant got back on the phone, tickled.
“What’d I tell you?”
I regret to admit that I stayed in bed.
We spent hundreds of hours in conversation over the years, mostly when I was
in quest of his viewpoint for SI. His candor, from the beginning, was remarkable.
And unsettling. I wasn’t always sure I wanted to be entrusted with the classified
stuff he threw at me. Before games he would pour out the wisdom of his battle
plan, detailing what his team would do to win on Saturday, and then ask, “Are
you sure you understand this?” I would say, “Sure I do.” And he would say, “I
don’t think you do. Let’s go over it again.”
More remarkable was his frankness in explaining himself in that he left
nothing unsaid. When he wanted a name protected, or a fact kept confidential, he
simply asked it, as if trust was a given. His ability to recall conversations,
incidents, names, places, dates, yard lines, etc., was uncanny. I have on record
the same stories told six years apart. Not only are his words the same but so are
his voice inflections.
But what really got me was that three or six months or a year later he would
throw something back at me that I had said, something in passing during a gin
game on a private airplane or poolside in the Keys when he was relaxing. He
would say, “Wait a minute. Didn’t you tell me last June that so and so and so
and so?”
“Yes,” I would be forced to admit, “but I thought I was interviewing you.” I
got by with no imprecisions.
It’s absurd to believe that because Bryant said he knew less about football than
he did about people that this meant he wasn’t brilliant about football. Football
got him “out of the Bottoms,” he “tied” to it, and clearly he knew it as well as
anyone. He was always doing things a little better or a little different, and if it
was something he borrowed, like Darrell Royal’s wishbone, he invariably
improved on it. He was so adept in winning at the limits, in fact, that the NCAA
watched him like a hawk. His use of the “tackle-eligible” pass was so sneaky
and effective that the rules committee eventually banned the play.
One Friday night before a big road game he invited me by his hotel room to
continue a conversation we’d started that afternoon at the field. I got there before
he had taken his sleeping pill. He was sitting by the radio in red pajamas,
charting a game that involved a future opponent who was supposed to be very
good that year. Bryant was scribbling on a legal pad as the broadcast progressed.
But the game was barely into the second quarter when something happened that
made him growl, and he abruptly stopped charting, scribbled in bold letters
across the page, and threw the pad aside. I picked it up to see what he’d written:
“CAN’T WIN.” It was underscored twice.
“Who can’t win?” I asked. He named the future opponent, a surprise because
the score was tied at the time and the team in question was heavily favored. I left
long before the game was over but made it a point at breakfast the next morning
to check the local paper to see who won. The future opponent that “couldn’t
win” hadn’t, by 24–7. Later that year Alabama beat the same team by five
touchdowns.
On the field Bryant seemed always to be three or four moves ahead of the
competition. During one game in Birmingham I was on the sidelines when he
turned to his offensive coordinator, Mal Moore (now Alabama’s athletics
director), and asked what amounted to a very technical question about the rules
on quick kicks. I remember neither question nor answer, only that it struck both
Moore and me as a strange inquiry. It was first down at the time, and the other
team had the ball. Two plays later the other team quick kicked.
For a Saturday afternoon, Bryant was the consummate competitor, willing to
take a chance, unafraid to challenge the odds. It was the gambler in him. He
loved to gamble, in any venue that made it possible, and made no bones about it.
That reputation, some have said, might have contributed to The Saturday
Evening Post’s misguided attempt to pin a fixed game on him and Georgia’s
Wally Butts in the 1960s, a convulsion of bad journalism that cost the Post
dearly (as the text ahead will recall). But that’s a stretch. Gambling was fun for
Bryant, that’s all. Fun was the object. His gin games were legendary for their
arcane scoring methods, and we never took an extended flight together that he
didn’t break out the cards and a score pad. Similarly, his golf games at the Indian
Hills course near Tuscaloosa were raucous with good-natured arguments over
the betting contingencies.
One spring afternoon I teed it up as a first-time addition to his “regular
foursome.” I had arrived late after a delayed flight, hurriedly changed, and
assembled my clubs and nerves to make it to the first tee—just in time to find
that I had been given the dubious honor of leading off, and that we were a
foursome only in the sense that we had four golf carts. There were actually seven
players, and the bets were cross-wired with such complexity that I figured I
could win about five bucks or lose a month’s wages. Bryant said, “We got a rule
on the first tee. You hit till you get one you like.” I hit my tee shot reasonably
straight, and far enough so that I couldn’t see the writing on the ball, and decided
one was enough. I stepped aside.
The other six hit until each “got one he liked.” When they were finally done,
the fairway looked like a field of freshly sprouted mushrooms.
The craps tables at Las Vegas were equally favored when Bryant could avail
himself. One night I was with him when he was enjoying the action at a
particularly crowded table. He had the dice, whooping it up, when the man on
his left suddenly pitched nose-first into the chips. I was on Bryant’s other side,
and from that angle I could see the man sprawling forward, his right hand in
Bryant’s bearlike left—and Bryant’s wallet protruding from his fingers. A split
second before they had been in Bryant’s back pocket. Security guards quickly
moved in and took the thief away, marveling at how deftly he had been done in
by his prey. Bryant, unfazed and matter-of-fact, went back to the dice.
We had joined up in Las Vegas—Bryant and Mary Harmon, USC’s John and
Corky McKay, and myself—for a short respite before Bryant’s scheduled