Revisiting The Bear

As we enter the 2014 season, The Alabama Crimson Tide is in the midst of a new Golden Age of college football. Nick Saban has brought Alabama back to the glory days. Back is the key word in that last sentence. Back. Saban, statistically, is on par with another coach that Alabama fans hold in high esteem. The coach was Paul William Bryant but most know him more by his nickname, The Bear.

A lot of schools have legendary coaches in their past. There was Knute Rockne of Notre Dame, Joe Paterno of Penn State, Bobby Bowden of Florida State, Bo Schembechler of Michigan, and Woody Hayes of Ohio State just to name a few. Some of these men can match Bryant in terms of success, in some categories, they can surpass Bryant and yet Bryant carries a mystique that even the most successful coaches fail to achieve. To understand Paul Bryant’s affect on college football, you have to understand the man.

The key to understanding Bryant is to not look at him as simply a football coach. He was a man that became so ingrained in the psyche of state of Alabama that he is sometimes joked as being a deity. Even Auburn fans typically give deference to Bryant. Without tracing his entire life, know that he was born in a tiny town of Arkansas and he was poor. He was a bottom rung child. Many attribute Bryant’s nickname to his gravely voice earned through many years of being a hard drinker and a smoker but he actually got the nickname when he was a child. At the age of thirteen, as he was walking back from town, a circus promoter was promoting a traveling circus. He challenged the townspeople to a wrestling match with the circus bear. The promoter would pay anyone willing to do it, one dollar for every minute they stayed in the ring with the bear. The only one willing to take up the challenge was thirteen year old Paul Bryant. Bryant wrestled the bear, was bitten on the ear, and as he always later joked, didn’t even get the money.

In today’s southern football atmosphere, the southern schools are bitter rivals. If you ever wonder though why they seem to stick together with chants of S-E-C, a lot of that has to do with how southern football was originally judged. Superior college football, (back then simply football), was found in the Northeast, Midwest, and, West coast. In the 1920s, southerners were not so far removed from The Civil War. People in the south experienced a backlash of anger from the rest of the country and it was during those times that the stereotypes of inferiority and being backwards were born. In 1925, Alabama received a reluctant invitation to play in the 1926 Rose Bowl. Alabama wasn’t even a first or second choice to play in The Rose Bowl and no one outside the state of Alabama expected Alabama to win. Some predictions, legitimate predictions, had Alabama losing 100-0. Considering that only a decade prior Cumberland Tennessee lost to Georgia Tech 222-0, a 100-0 score wasn’t unfathomable. Even Will Rogers got in on the act by calling Alabama the Tuscaloosers.

Alabama didn’t lose. They won the 1926 Rose Bowl by beating Washington 20-19. On that day, Alabama stepped out of the role of a regional team and developed a following throughout the South. It was listening to a public radio broadcast of Alabama’s victory that Bryant became a fan of Alabama.

Legend is that Bryant showed up in Tuscaloosa when he was still a kid but was told to come back when he was of age. Whatever the truth, Bryant did show back up in Tuscaloosa. He was a great football player but while playing for The Capstone, Bryant was given another nickname, “The Other End.” He was called that because the guy playing on the other side was Don Hutson, a man that many consider to be one of the greatest to ever play the game. Bryant had his moments. In 1935, he was playing against Tennessee. During the game he broke a leg bone. He kept playing. To verify the story, Ralph McGill who was a sports writer for the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, asked to see the x-ray. McGill confirmed the veracity, printed the story in the AJC and when Alabama went to play Georgia, Bryant was greeted with an ovation. All of this and he had yet to coach a game.

A few years after Bryant’s college career came to an end, the U.S. found itself embroiled in a World War. Bryant enlisted in the Navy. When the boat he was on was charged by an enemy vessel, the orders were given to abandon ship. Bryant disobeyed those orders.  Such was the nature of Bryant. In later years, Bryant was known for his toughness on his players but Bryant never asked one of his players to do anything that he wouldn’t have done himself. When he looked for players, he looked for one quality among all others, he looked for winners. He knew if a kid had a drive to succeed that he could get them to achieve greatness.

Of course Bryant entered coaching and yes, he won at Alabama but before he won at Alabama, he won at Maryland, he won at Kentucky, he won at Texas A&M and then Mama called. That’s what he told his players at Texas A&M. Alabama had fallen on hard times. After decades of success under two great coaches Wallace Wade and Frank Thomas, Alabama was losing and losing a lot. Bryant had developed a reputation as a young, very tough coach. Alabama’s hire of its first alumnus J.B. “Ears” Whitworth, had proven disastrous but its second alumnus hire of Paul “Bear” Bryant would become legendary.

Bryant showed up on campus in 1958 and he called a team meeting. As soon as it was time for the meeting to begin, Bryant instructed his assistant coach, Jerry Claiborne to lock the door. When the stragglers tried to come in late, he told Claiborne in front of the team, “tell whoever it is, we don’t need them.”

Bryant was the coach of Alabama for a little more than two decades and in that time, he accomplished a lot. From 1958-1982, he won six national championships. From 1963 to 1982, he won every game that was played in Tuscaloosa. That’s nineteen years without a loss. Steve Spurrier suffered his first college defeat at the hands of Bryant. Joe Namath, Kenny Stabler, Ozzy Newsome, and George Blanda all played for Bryant. Bryant didn’t come to a school that hadn’t known success, Bryant followed two coaches that had already placed Alabama on the map. Before Bryant coached his first game, Alabama had already claimed five national championships, had played in six Rose Bowls and amassed a 4-1-1 record in those games. Alabama was the last participant in the last open Rose Bowl and to this date has more Rose Bowl appearances than any team not from the Big Ten or Pac10/12. Even with all of Alabama’s previous success, Bryant dwarfed it and redefined what success meant at The Capstone.

It would be remiss to fail to talk about Bryant, Alabama and segregation. If Bryant was the most popular figure in Alabama during the 1960s and 70s, the second most popular figure was Governor George Wallace. Wallace was a segregationist governor who is most famous for standing in front of Foster Auditorium on the Alabama campus and making his “Segregation Forever” speech. There was no love loss between Paul W. Bryant and George Wallace. Wallace was less a racist and more an opportunist. When Wallace started his political career, he lost running as a moderate. He lost to a man that used race and segregation as his platform. Wallace realized that if he was going to have a political career in Alabama that he would have to adopt a Segregationist platform. He took to it full force. By the time Wallace’s career was in full swing, he had become one of the faces of Segregation and Southern racism. Bryant had privately expressed his hope that he could integrate the Alabama football team but Wallace had made the task nearly impossible. Wallace used Bryant’s success with an all white team to promote his segregationist policies. At one point Wallace was asked whether he feared Bryant running for Governor, Wallace quipped back, “Why would Bryant want the second best job in the state?”

It can be argued that Bryant’s greatest football game as a coach might be a loss. Bryant was famous for trying to schedule an opponent that he felt he could beat. Joe Paterno told of a time that Bryant called him to schedule a game because of his belief that he could beat Penn State. Bryant was a very good friend of John McKay. McKay, was the head coach of the USC Trojans. Bryant wanted to play USC and he wanted them to come play them Birmingham. McKay and Bryant were very secretive in their talks about the game. Bryant had scheduled a team that seemed to be a much better team. The players that played for Alabama spoke of the preparation before the game and that Bryant lacked his normal intensity. USC fielded a backfield of African-American players. There were legitimate fears from the USC players that they were in real physical danger.

There were no incidents that night other than Alabama getting drummed. Alabama lost the game 42-21. After the game, Bryant approached McKay and thanked him. It was an odd gesture for a man who despised losing. The Alabama loss to USC in 1970 was one of the worst defeats, in terms of score, that Bryant ever suffered. The MVP of the game was Sam “Bam” Cunningham, an African-American USC running back that ran for 135 yards and scored two touchdowns that night. After the game, Jerry Claiborne said, “Sam Cunningham did more for integration in sixty minutes than Martin Luther King, Jr. did in twenty years.” It was said semi-jokingly, but there was a truth to it all the same.
Whether Bryant deliberately scheduled a game that he planned to lose is debatable however, when one considers that Bryant scheduling a game against a fully integrated school and winning would have set back his own established agenda of trying to integrate the Alabama football team, it’s easy to believe that Bryant was okay with the loss. However, Alabama was one of the last schools to fully integrate and Bryant himself admitted years later that he was slow to integrate Alabama. His reasoning was that he felt that it wasn’t the right time. Normally, a statement like that could be seen as a flimsy excuse but one has to remember the role Alabama played. Alabama and its success was in the forefront of the racial scene. In the sixties, Bryant had told his coaches that Alabama wouldn’t be the first to integrate but they also wouldn’t be the third. Bryant wanted Alabama to be one of the first SEC schools to integrate but Wallace’s stance had made it almost impossible. If Bryant brought in the player at the wrong time, Wallace could have used that player’s failures to further his agenda that African-Americans weren’t on par with whites. Bryant was playing a chess match against Wallace with Wallace having the better pieces on the board.

The 1970 USC Alabama game did much to create acceptance of an integrated Crimson Tide. The 1971 rematch was legendary for entirely different reasons. It is mostly a given that a coach is only successful at one school for about ten years. After that, it seems like coaches start a downward arc. Bryant’s time at Alabama followed that arc. After claiming three national championships in the 1960s, Alabama was a team that was starting to decline. One reason was that Alabama hadn’t fully integrated but another was simply that the game had caught up the man that was called Bear.
Bryant wasn’t quite done yet. After a disappointing season in 1970, Bryant visited Darryl Royal of Texas. Texas ran the wishbone offense and Bryant ran a more traditional offense akin to a pro set. It had been a successful offense through the years. The first three SuperBowl MVPs were claimed by two Alabama quarterbacks. However, Bryant saw advantages to running the wishbone and he thought he could make it work.

Under secrecy, Alabama made the switch to the wishbone in the off-season. The 1971 season began with Alabama making a trip to Los Angeles for another date with long time Rose Bowl rival USC. USC was favored but the racial drama of a year before was gone. For the first time in its history, Alabama fielded an integrated team. Alabama upset USC that night and went on to win the rest of their regular season games. Their only loss that season was an Orange Bowl loss to Nebraska.
The wishbone would define Bryant’s teams of the 1970s. Bryant would win three more National Championships. From 1971 through 1979, Alabama would win the SEC championship in every single year but for 1976. Bryant’s streak of five straight SEC championships still stands today. Steve Spurrier came close to tying it when he won four straight SEC championships from 1993-1996 but Tennessee’s upset of Florida in 1997 denied Spurrier his chance to tie that record.

Paul W. Bryant ended his career in 1982. 1982 was a rough year for him. Alabama went 8-4 with losses to Tennessee, Auburn, LSU, and Southern Miss. The year before, Bryant’s 1981 team had captured a share of the SEC crown. However, Bryant felt that 8-4 was simply not good enough for Alabama and he didn’t feel he had the energy to climb up the hill one more time. Bryant retired in 1982 as the coach with the most wins in college football history. A couple of years later Eddie Robinson of Grambling would break that record. Years later Bobby Bowden and Joe Paterno would battle it out to break Bryant’s record in Division I/FBS. Unlike Bryant, they didn’t step down after having one bad season. They constantly felt that there was still one more opportunity to turn it around.

On December 29th, 1982, Bryant coached his last game. It was a 21-15 Liberty Bowl victory over Illinois. Less than one month later on January 26th, 1983, Bryant would be dead. The death came as a shock to people across the state. The man that had so entrenched himself into the history and folklore of the state of Alabama was gone. With Bryant’s passing went some of the magic that had been so much a part of Alabama’s history. His good friend John McKay was told that Bryant had died and McKay simply stated he wasn’t a coach he was The Coach.

Bryant’s legacy has been felt in so many different ways. Jerry Claiborne went on to become a legendary coach at Kentucky. Former assistant Bobby Bowden eventually surpassed Bryant’s win total record. Former assistant, and Georgia alum, Pat Dye, would later become one of the most successful coaches at arch-rival Auburn. Gene Stallings, a former player from Bryant’s days at Texas A&M and one of the famous “Junction Boys” would later take over the head coaching position at Alabama and would lead Alabama to its first post-Bryant national championship. Other players told stories about how Bryant had affected their lives. One player attributed his ability to beat cancer to Bryant’s ability to push players past their perceived limits to achieve results that they didn’t believe possible.

To this day, Bryant is the only successful alumnus coach of Alabama. It could be argued that Alabama’s demand for success eventually created the atmosphere that landed Nick Saban but the truth is that it was the years where Alabama was humbled that led to a fan base having to be re-taught lessons in patience. As mentioned above, Nick Saban, at the same point in his career at Alabama, has matched Bryant stride for stride. Whether Saban’s legacy will match that of Bryant’s is a question for a future generation to answer.

Paul W. “Bear” Bryant was one of those men that would have been successful no matter what he put his mind to. Bryant chose football as much as it chose him. Football, however, only partially defines the man that most consider to be the greatest football coach of all time. Football changed Bryant’s life and he spent the rest of his life using football to change the lives of those that played for him. When I hear the phrase, “larger than life” I always picture the man they called “The Bear.”