Football's Supercoach

By B.J. Phillips

Changing with the times, 'Bama 's Bear Bryant dominates the college game

He is a man of dimension, there can be no disputing that, and over the years his friends and foes have praised or damned him in outsize terms. To the rabid, almost reverential followers of his University of Alabama football teams, Paul William ("Bear") Bryant is a nearly mythic figure, a man who embodies the traditional American values: dedication, hard work, honesty and, above all, success. To the frustrated fans of the legions of teams he has defeated, he is a relentlessly slippery recruiter, a ruthless win-at-all-costs tyrant. To some, he is the demigod of the autumn religion, the finest coach of a uniquely American game. To others, he is the proselytizer of a brutal sport, a symbol of a national fixation on violence.

The exaggerations miss the point. For all his drill-field discipline, Bryant is not John Wayne with a whistle, a link to vague frontier tenets presumed lost. The most closely scrutinized coach in America, he could not get away with being a bagman for postadolescent jocks even if he tried. Nor is he a helmet-bashing maniac who views Saturday afternoons in the stadium as the moral equivalent of Dday. He is, at times, treated a bit too royally by those who vest football with more importance than it deserves. But he is also scorned too savagely by those who do not understand that the game has a rightful place in the life of small towns, schools, city back lots, the nation.

Today Bear Bryant unquestionably is the dominant figure in college football, but he began to make his mark in another age--the late 1940s, when Harry Truman was still in the White House. Bryant is that rare man who has changed with his times, the only one of his generation to coach as successfully in an era when football players use hair dryers in the locker room as he did when they wore crew cuts. "Thirty-five years makes a long time," he reflects. "A lot of good, a lot of bad, some things you did that were smart, some things you did that were plain stupid. Thirty-five years makes a lot of changes."

Just one thing has never changed: Bear Bryant has always won football games. In 35 years as a head coach, Bryant has won 298 games, lost 77 and tied 16. Before the 1980 season reaches its midpoint, he will become only the third coach to win 300 games. Late next year he should pass Pop Warner (313) and Amos Alonzo Stagg (314) to become the coach with the most victories in college-football history. His teams have won 23 games in a row, currently the longest winning streak in big-time college football. Bryant has taken teams to bowl games 26 times (a record); last season's Sugar Bowl appearance was the 21st consecutive postseason trip for Alabama's Crimson Tide (also a record). Under his stewardship, the polls gave Alabama the national championship six times. Bryant's teams have won 14 Southeastern Conference titles and a Southwest Conference crown.

This season's Alabama team, picked No. 1 in most early-season polls after a convincing 26-3 win over Georgia Tech, last week beat the University of Mississippi 59-35 and seems certain to continue Bryant's inexorable march into the record books. With eight veteran defensive starters on the squad, including four preseason All-Americas, Alabama boasts a swarming, solid defense. But nine starting players on the offensive unit graduated last year, and the team's Wishbone is being rebuilt. Says Alabama Assistant Athletic Director Charlie Thornton: "Last year the defense was green and the veterans were on the offensive unit. This year it's the reverse. These cycles come and go, and you just have to count on one unit buying time for the other."

Bryant's ability to shape successful teams from the constantly changing lineups has made him a one-man institution of higher learning for football: 42 of his former assistants and players have become head football coaches in the colleges and pros, among them the Houston Oilers' Bum Phillips, L.S.U.'s Paul Dietzel, the Washington Redskins' Jack Pardee, the New York Giants' Ray Perkins and the University of Pittsburgh's Jackie Sherrill. More than 60 former Bryant players have gone on to the pros (including five last year alone), among them former Jets Quarterback Joe Namath, Houston Quarterback Kenny Stabler, former Dallas Linebacker Lee Roy Jordan, New England Patriot Star Offensive Guard John Hannah and current Jets Quarterback Richard Todd.

At 67, Bear Bryant is a massive presence, a powerful man, 6 ft. 3 1/2 in., 205 lbs., with sharp eyes and a sharper wit carefully sheathed by a down-home demeanor. His face is seamed and sunbaked from a lifetime on practice-field towers and stadium sidelines. His voice, a rich Southern drawl, is rarely raised; there is seldom any need.

Alabama's players may not feel close to Bryant ("I don't have time to coach individuals any more. I organize; my assistants coach"), but they are devoted to him. Remarks Defensive End E.J. Junior: "Coach Bryant is a father figure to the team. There's never much rah-rah talk, just plain common sense. In that respect, he's one of the best philosophers of life I've ever met."

The eagerness of impressionable youth? Bryant can dominate grown men the same way. Houston Oilers Coach Phillips recalls staff meetings during his days as one of the Bear's assistants at Texas A & M: "There'd be 16 of us, counting everybody on the staff, and we'd all be talking. When he'd walk in, everyone would just stop right in the middle of a sentence. He'd sit down, take out a pack of cigarettes, beat one on his thumb to pack it down, light it and smoke the whole damn thing without saying a word. He just had that magic about him: if he was going to say anything, you were going to be sure you didn't miss it."

A times, it seems that Bryant can lave the same effect on the whole state of Alabama. Governor Fob James, who is far less famous than Bryant in the state, praises him as being "larger than life." Bill Baxley, Alabama's former attorney general, calls Bryant "the No. 1 asset of the state." He is certainly treated as though he were: two uniformed state policemen act as bodyguards and chauffeurs on game days. Bryant has achieved a pop-hero status. His face appears on T shirts and bumper stickers, and there are even postcards showing him strolling on water. The inscription: I BELIEVE. Small wonder that former Governor George Wallace says: "He never got into politics. But if he ever did, he could have had anything he wanted in this state."

Bryant's long career began in Moro Bottom, Ark. His father was a hardscrabble farmer struggling to eke out a living in the Depression South. When the elder Bryant was disabled by high blood pressure, his wife Ida kept the family going by selling vegetables from a horse-drawn wagon. Young Paul perched beside her and felt the sting of disparagement from the "city kids" of nearby Fordyce (pop. 3,206). He first won social acceptance as a fiercely combative football player for the state-champ Fordyce Redbugs, and football has since made him the guest of Presidents. "I had to try to get good at football," he says, "because I didn't have anything to go back to, anything else to count on."

When he was 17, University of Alabama Assistant Coach Hank Crisp came to call in a Model A Ford. He offered a way out of the fields with a scholarship. Paul, who was already known as Bear because at age twelve he had lost a wrestling match with a carnival bear, left for college in 1931.

At Alabama, Bryant lived above the gymnasium, going out for a date only when, in those days of relaxed rules, the line coach peeled a few dollars off a roll of bills and rewarded his charges, ostensibly for sweeping the basketball court. Bear played end on the best team the college had ever fielded: in 1934 Alabama beat Stanford in the Rose Bowl, 29-13.

In the fall of his senior year, Bryant met Mary Harmon Black, a campus belle and "the prettiest girl I ever saw." They were married, and after graduation Bryant took a job as an assistant coach at Alabama. He stayed for four years, then took an assistant's post at Vanderbilt. It was the first of many moves over the next two decades as he followed the apprentice coach's itinerant trail. "We've moved 27 times in our married life," says Mary Harmon Bryant. "I used to say I'd put off spring cleaning until I heard whether Paul was going to change jobs. It was easier to move than it was to clean."

Bryant was returning from an interview for the job of head coach at the University of Arkansas when he heard the announcement of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He immediately joined the Navy. After a tour in North Africa as a recreation officer, Bryant spent the war coaching football at a North Carolina preflight school. He left the service five days before the start of the 1945 football season and, at the age of 32, reported as head coach at the University of Maryland, a school with dreams of football grandeur. To be certain that he did not get off to a bad start as a head coach, he took along some of his bull-necked Navy veterans. The record of Bryant's debut: six wins, two losses and one tie. He stayed at Maryland just one season, quitting when the college president, Harry C. ("Curly") Byrd, a former Maryland coach himself, reinstated a suspended player over the Bear's objections.

For the next eight years Bryant was head coach at the University of Kentucky. In 1950 the school won its only outright championship of the Southeastern Conference. He was demanding. All-America Quarterback Babe Parilli, who later played with the Boston Patriots, recalls preseason training camps that began at 5:30 a.m. with orange juice and proceeded to head-on tackling drills at 6 a.m. He also remembers Bryant's coming into his hospital room the day after Parilli underwent surgery and throwing a stack of new plays on the bed. The plays were designed to let Parilli stand back in the shotgun offense and throw the ball after getting a long snap from center. "Learn them," the coach told his quarterback. Says Parilli: "I thought he was crazy. I could barely move. But I studied the plays. We were playing Louisiana State the next week, and on the day of the game, he said, 'Get into that shotgun and start throwing until I tell you to stop.' I did what I was told, and on the first 16 plays we threw 15 times. I never got touched. We won 14 to 0."

In 1954 the restless Bryant shifted to Texas A & M, at College Station. It was there that his reputation as a football tyrant became truly fixed, largely because of the infamous training camp he conducted at nearby Junction during his first year. Bryant left College Station with 96 football players on scholarship; ten days later, only 27 came back from the crossroads. The rest had quit. Under a merciless Texas sun, they had been drilled hour after hour by a coach who seemed mad. Jack Pardee remembers that the temperature was 110DEG when the workouts began. "It was an effort to survive. Each player could tell his own story, but mine was simply to make it to the next practice."

A quarter-century later, Bryant still wonders about Junction. "I don't know if what I did was good or bad," he says. "I never will know. It was just the only thing I could have done--at that time, knowing what I knew then. I wouldn't do it now because I know more than I knew then, more about resting players, letting them drink water, more about other ways to lead them. They had to put up with my stupidity. I believe if I'd have been one of those players, I'd have quit too."

The 1954 team, weakened by its trial by fire, was Bryant's only loser, 1-9. Two years later, Texas A & M won the Southwest Conference title. Still Bryant drove his players fiercely. John David Crow, a halfback who won the Heisman Trophy in 1957, recalls going into the dressing room after practice, pulling off his sweat-soaked uniform and, too tired to stand, sitting on a chair in the shower. As he relaxed, Bryant called the team back on the field for another practice. Baking in the sun, Crow fainted and was out for three hours. The first sight he saw upon regaining consciousness was Bryant, hovering anxiously over him.

Bryant had other things to learn about big-time football. During his second year at Texas A&M, the school was put on probation for recruiting violations. Bear now acknowledges that the violations occurred, insisting that they were standard at the time: the usual sorry practices of wealthy alumni giving money, cars, jobs. "All the other schools were doing it, so we did it too," he explains. "I was real bitter about it at the time--I cried all the way home from the meeting where they put us on probation--but looking back, it may have been the best thing that ever happened to me. After that, I always lived by the letter of the law, never won a game anything but the honest way."

In 1958 Bryant returned to his alma mater, which had floundered through four dismal seasons. Before the Auburn game that year, he told the Touchdown Club in Birmingham: "Gentlemen, I wouldn't bet anything but Coca-Cola on tomorrow's game. Next year you can bet a fifth of whisky. And the year after that you can mortgage the damn house." Bryant was right. A bettor would have lost a Coke that first year (Auburn won, 14-8), but the mortgages were safe: Alabama took the next four games in the series without allowing a point.

Bryant's early years at Alabama were stormy. There were no recruiting violations. But the reputation for brutality persisted, although it took a different form. This time the charge was that Bryant coached his teams to play too rough. He taught gang tackling; "pursuit" is the euphemism, and mayhem is occasionally the result, when swarms of tacklers bang into the ball carrier. In 1962 the Saturday Evening Post printed a story accusing him of teaching "dirty football," and later ran an article claiming that he and Wally Butts, the University of Georgia athletic director, had conspired to fix a game. Bryant sued in both cases and won settlements out of court totaling $300,000.

Bryant was settling down and building an athletic empire at his alma mater. Last year Alabama spent some $5 million on sports, and its athletic budget was still comfortably in the black. A $5 million fieldhouse, a $2 million track stadium and a new $2.4 million swimming and diving center were financed by football profits. Acres of tennis courts and other recreational facilities for students have been constructed from the vast haul of television royalties and bowl-appearance money earned by Bryant's teams.

Bryant has fed his football machine with generation after generation of blue-chip athletes. "You've got to have chickens," says Bryant, "before you can make chicken salad." He now leaves most of the barnstorming to ten assistants, but in his time he was a courtly and soft-spoken charmer who persuaded parents in order to win over their strong and swift sons.* To sell Alabama, his staff tells prospects, with veracity, that they will have a chance to play on a national championship team if they come with the Bear. Rival coaches try to turn Bryant's reputation to their advantage. Says Auburn Coach Doug Barfield: "We have to sell the concept of having a chance to beat him." Bryant regularly gets the sons of former players: John David Crow Jr., for instance, was a running back three seasons ago. And occasionally Bryant steps in to save the day, and a prospect. Says Bryant: "Recruiting is the one thing I hate. I won't do it unless my coaches tell me I've just got to. The whole process is kind of undignified for me and the young man." Not necessarily. Says one former recruit: "Just knowing that that man came into my home to talk to my parents made me an idol around high school."

The man who had once driven players to unconsciousness under the Texas sun hired an expert in tropical medicine to teach him about fluid intake, electrolyte balance and heat-humidity ratios. As the scandals recede in memory, his skills as coach have been increasingly appreciated.

As for his big, grizzly, anything-to-win image, that came into question when he suspended Joe Namath, his most famous player, for breaking training rules in 1963. Neither man will reveal the details of the infraction, but whatever its cause, the coach benched his star quarterback before the final regular-season game against Miami and extended the banishment to include the Sugar Bowl. "I don't guess anybody would think much of what Joe did nowadays, including myself," Bryant says. "But he was supposed to be a leader, so he had to live by the rules. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do, and it was to the greatest athlete I ever coached."

Mary Harmon Bryant was there to soothe the wounds. Says she: "When Joe was kicked off the team, I sent for him. When he got here, I hugged him and we both just cried like babies. I said to Joe, 'What happened? You couldn't do anything bad. You're just too good a boy to do anything bad.' All he would say was, 'No, ma'am, Coach Bryant is right.' I told him to stay with me. He came out to the house and stayed several days in a room downstairs. Paul never did know it; I never told him." Says Namath: "She hid me out. It was a tough, trying time in my young life. I was hurt. She knew that and responded by protecting me, helping in a motherly way." The next year Namath came back to star again.

Bryant has earned the loyalty of young men as varied as the burly veterans on the G.I. Bill, the obedient crew-cut disciples of the Eisenhower era, the rebellious students of the '60s and the cool careerists of the present generation. Says he: "You can't treat them all equal, but you can treat them fairly. That goes not just for how they're different as individuals, but how they're different from other generations. One player you have to shake up and get mad, but you'll break another player if you treat him like that, so you try to gentle him along, encourage him. The '60s were a rebellious period, and you've got to realize that a player is going to feel that too. Even the places you find good ballplayers can change. I used to think I wanted strong old country boys like I used to be. Now I think the best place to find players is around a Y.M.C.A., where they're playing lots of sports, getting smart and quick, not just strong and dumb."

Ironically, the man who has bent with his times might once have led them. "I wanted to be the Branch Rickey of football when I was at Kentucky," says Bryant. But when he tried to break the ban on black players in the South, just as Rickey had broken the color line in major league baseball by bringing Jackie Robinson to the Dodgers, the university said he could not. "They told me no. So for years, I used to recommend all these great black players to schools up North." At Alabama, Bryant played his first black in 1971, and blacks now constitute around 30% of the team. No one thinks anything of it any more at the university where Governor George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door in 1963 and, for a time, prevented black students from enrolling.

Over the years, Bryant has changed his strategy to keep the juggernaut rolling. An unabashed borrower of football tactics, he is more a refiner than an innovator. Georgia Tech's Bobby Dodd taught him the T formation, then watched helplessly as Bryant's team beat him at his own game. Babe Parilli showed him how to run a split T the way the pros did. Darrell Royal spent a day and a night in a motel room showing him films of the Wishbone offense.

Bryant has also molded teams to talent with a skill that is almost magical, transforming his tactics to suit the players. When strong-armed Joe Namath was at quarterback, Alabama threw like the pros. When muscular Richard Todd, who followed Namath to the Jets, was at Alabama, the Tide did its passing off the run. Says University of Pittsburgh Coach Jackie Sherrill: "He's forgotten more about football than all of us young coaches will ever learn."

This year's defending national champions are a typical Bryant team, a squad short on superstars but stocked with hordes of fine players used so freely that they seemed to be, well, a Crimson Tide. In the season opener against Georgia Tech, three quarterbacks and eleven running backs shuttled in and out of the lineup. The searing heat in Birmingham (105DEG on the field) was one reason; an offense that had but two starting players return was another. While Bryant waits for his offense to gel, he has come up with a few surprises. Split End James Mallard, a world-class track man until a few weeks ago (in 1979 Mallard ran the world's second fastest 200 meters), played the first football game of his life against Georgia Tech. He caught the first pass ever thrown to him and, naturally, outran Tech's defenders for a touchdown.

Bryant controls the substitutions himself. The rolled-up sheets of paper he clutches on the sidelines, containing notes to himself and lists of alternate squads, are as much a symbol of his stadium persona as his jaunty houndstooth hat. Says he: "I want to have my best offensive and defensive units rested and fresh just before the half. I want them not to be worn down for the first five minutes of the second half, and I want them fresh for the last ten minutes of the game. These are the times that football games are won or lost."

In football, where the top coaches freely trade ideas and theories, a genius is a man who taps the common pool of knowledge and then prepares the best for a game. By that definition, Bryant is a genius. Says Paul Dietzel, athletic director at Louisiana State: "One of his favorite expressions is that 'it's the itty-bitty, teeny-tiny things that beat you.' He'll rehearse problems that might arise in a game over and over again."

They tell the story in the S.E.C. that Bryant has a game plan for a hurricane in the first quarter, a flood in the second, a drought in the third and an eagle swooping down to block a field goal in the fourth. Reminded of the tale, Bryant chuckles, but does not deny it. "Well," the voice rumbles, "we do try to be prepared."

Bryant has worn down his critics--or outcoached and outlived them. He now seems somehow above the fray, a man who has left his past behind. And he has mellowed. His practices are no tougher and his teams tackle no more savagely than those of other top football schools, and the day is long past when he would yank a star quarterback out of a hospital bed and send him out to play. But just as in the old days, his players still regard him with awe that is tinged with fear. There is no physical intimidation, in the style of the deposed Woody Hayes of Ohio State and Frank Kush of Arizona State. "I don't remember ever seeing Bear hit a player," says Dietzel. "But I don't think you have to hit people to intimidate them. I don't think there has ever been a player --or a coach--who wasn't scared to death of him."

Alabama Trainer Jim Goosetree, who has watched Bryant refine his approach in the past 22 years, puts it more precisely. Says he: "There is a degree of fear motivation still present in his personality. It's the fear of failing to live up to his expectations. He has recognized that the values of young people are different from what they were at one time; but in a fatherly way, he still demands a degree of discipline that is high."

But other coaches have been just as demanding and made their players fear failure too. Bryant became and stayed a winner because his players knew he cared deeply about them and their welfare. Bryant's concern goes deep and lasts long after the athletes have graduated. Against the advice of his business advisers, he has co-signed loans for his former team members and quietly helped them in their careers. Says Royal: "The greatest testimony that any coach can have is those guys who have long since been out of the program. You go ask them how they feel about Bryant, and it's great right down the line. Charisma alone doesn't do it. He's gone out of his way to do favors for these guys for them to be as devoted to him as they are."

As part of his motivation program, Bryant has his players write down a set of goals, then tries to see that they accomplish them. No detail is overlooked. Running Back Major Ogilvie remembers the first things Bryant told his group of freshmen: "Be courteous to everyone, write home to your parents, and keep your rooms neat." Says Ogilvie: "He's so involved in your future. He teaches us as people, not as football players. He relates football to life rather than life to football."

Bryant houses his players in the Paul W. Bryant Hall, a $2 million athletic dorm opened in 1963, where there are tutors available and the rules are strict. Indeed, the dorm is the only one on campus where the rule against coed visits in rooms is strictly enforced. Says Jack Rutledge, a Bryant assistant: "We don't have any agitation because Coach Bryant sets the policy, and that's that."

One of the hallmarks of Bryant's style is an unrivaled sense of the symbolic. Throughout his career, he has been known for the dramatic gesture that galvanizes players, opponents and fans. When he became head coach at Texas A&M in 1954, he walked into a student meeting, took off his topcoat at the back of the hall, pulled off his jacket and tie as he stepped to the podium, stomped on them, then kicked them aside. Finally, he rolled up his sleeves, leaned into the microphone and announced in a low, firm voice: "My name is Bear Bryant and I'm ready to go to work."

Bryant serves similar notice before each game. He leads his team in a street-clothes tour of the stadium before retiring to the locker room. Following their coach's example, the players peer at the sun, test the wind, check the footing on the field. The message to rivals is clear: Alabama is checking things out; Alabama will be ready.

As football coach and athletic director at Alabama, Bryant earns $54,000 a year, but he is a self-made millionaire, an astute businessman whose real estate purchases and stock market advice are carefully watched by businessmen across the state. Part owner of a meat-packing firm and a lumber company, he has negotiated shrewd deals with the soft-drink and potato-chip companies that sponsor his TV show, and his picture has adorned billboards across the South--for a fee, of course. His Sunday-afternoon television program during the football season has drawn better ratings than professional football broadcasts. The faithful tune in for a play-by-play commentary that is short on inside information but long on the kind of praise that can thrill the home folks. A sample: "Byron Braggs made a good tackle there. I know his mamma and daddy and all the folks in Montgomery are proud of Byron."

With the exception of a few weeks' vacation after the bowl games have been won and the new recruits signed, Bryant works year round at football. He likes to go to a dog-racing track near Tuscaloosa run by his only son, Paul Jr., a successful businessman who likes football but never played the game. The Bryant football tradition is kept alive by Marc, 17, the only son of Bryant's daughter, Mae Martin Tyson. When Marc injured his knee and required surgery last season, the grandfather was openly worried: "I wonder if everybody expects too much of him because of me."

Bryant hunts and goes fishing, plays golf and a little bridge. "But half the time when we go hunting, he never fires a shot," says Jimmy Hinton, a business adviser. "He mostly just likes to ride a horse and watch the dogs work." He plays bridge well enough, but does not care for the game's social aspects. Says Mary Harmon Bryant: "He doesn't like 'visiting' bridge. He wants to bid and win and skip the talk."

Bryant was hospitalized last spring with fluid in his lungs. He has since given up chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes and has begun swimming daily to build his stamina. Says one friend: "He'll never admit it, but he wants those records so bad he can taste it. He's got himself into the best shape he has been in for years because he has to have good health if he is going to win football games."

What fascinates Bryant about winning football games is not diagramming plays or deciding when to kick a field goal or gamble for a first down, but the challenge of melding 95 very young men into a whole, making each man's vision of himself interdependent with those of his teammates. For all its excesses--and football has more than its share of faults--the sport can be, at its best, a social compact of a high order. Creating this bond is what Bear Bryant excels at, and for this he draws on insights and instincts he has developed over 35 years.

The goal is becoming the best at something, even if it is a game. "I'm just a plow-hand from Arkansas," Bryant insists, "but I have learned over the years how to hold a team together. How to lift some men up, how to calm down others, until finally they've got one heartbeat, together, a team."

The key to building that trust between coaches and players, creating loyalties that have reached beyond a game and into the fabric of a region's culture, is a simple matter of taking care not to act like the biggest animal in the forest. "There's just three things I ever say," sums up Bear Bryant, when he is pushed to explain his philosophy of coaching. "If anything goes bad, then I did it. If anything goes semi-good, then we did it. If anything goes real good, then you did it. That's all it takes to get people to win football games for you. I can do that better than anybody. That --and I do know a little something about winning. "

--By B.J. Phillips. Reported by Peter Ainslie/Tuscaloosa

* Under N.C.A.A. rules, Division 1A (big college) teams may grant a total of 95 football scholarships. No more than 30 scholarships may be given to an incoming freshman class. Each team is limited to ten assistant coaches.

With reporting by Peter Ainslie

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