I can vividly remember where I was sitting in Mrs. Van Gilder’s class in third grade when the principal came over the loudspeaker announcing that Bear Bryant had died. It came as a tremendous shock. Although I was barely old enough to know much about college football, I already knew that Bear Bryant WAS Alabama football, and he was some sort of permanent fixture in the state that seemingly had always been and would always be. It sounds strange to say, but over three decades after his death, Bryant still seems more myth than fact for what he accomplished and the way he did it. If anything, his legend may have actually grown larger the further we get from his era. Bryant’s status as a semi-mythic figure in Alabama is due in no small part to him remaining forever a caricature in his depiction by those who have studied him—an unvarying trademark look, a mumbled growl when he spoke, a seeming perpetual annoyance with anything at any time except the perfectly executed fundamentals of football. Even those who have admired him have never really known the man, instead remembering him in a series of iconic images and quotes. But Bryant, of course, was much more than a series of such snapshots. He was a real man with an incredible story. While there have been some good efforts at relating his life, there have been numerous mediocre ones, and no small number that are more hagiography than critical biography.
I picked up Allen Barra’s acclaimed effort at chronicling Bryant’s life and times, The Last Coach, because it is reputedly among the very best biographies of the man. I enjoyed it tremendously, and admired how the author went to great lengths to provide the most detailed stories about its subject. Barra’s book is in truth a virtual catalog of Bryant tales, seemingly containing in over 500 pages the complete assemblage of information on the man as related from his own words and those who knew him. Barra delves in great detail into Bryant’s hardscrabble upbringing in desperately poor rural Arkansas, his playing days at Alabama, and his rise through the coaching ranks at Vanderbilt, Maryland, Kentucky, Texas A&M and Alabama. There are the expected stories of him acquiring his nickname by wrestling a bear at a carnival, playing against Tennessee on a broken leg, the infamous summer camp at Junction, Texas, “mama calling” for him to come back to his alma mater after a professional sojourn, and the series of famous moments that collectively built his legend. There are also discussions of the nagging questions of why he was not more forceful in encouraging the integration of the Alabama football program, his mishandling of a few high-profile players, and the bizarre allegations of a game-fixing scandal with Georgia athletic director Wally Butts. Barra’s investigation of all these and other issues is perhaps the most complete to be written in several instances.
A few key themes summarize Barra’s treatment of Bryant and separate it from most of the other attempts to tell the coach’s life story. Collectively, they represent the author’s attempt to demonstrate both the root cause and far-reaching influence of Bryant in place of simple veneration. First, Barra makes clear that by any measure one might want to use—and he uses several—,the man was good at what he did. He goes beyond the usual mere statistics to explain that he coached in both the “single platoon” and the modern era, figured out how to win running the single wing, the wishbone, and a pass-heavy attack, and won impressively everywhere he worked. Second, Barra shows that Bryant had an incredible focus and determination to win, and his competitive spirit drove him to relentlessly pursue success even to the detriment of his family life and own health. Barra points to a desperate attempt to escape his humble beginnings and a lifelong nagging sense of academic inferiority as fueling a fire to constantly prove himself as the catalyst for his accomplishments over his long career. Third, Barra makes clear that the Bear knew he was something of a legend even in his own time and attempted to manage his image more than most might suspect. He could be confident to the point of arrogance, quietly fumed over perceived slights, and even had some minor plastic surgery in his later years.
Despite the wealth of information and the numerous stories about Bryant contained in Barra’s entertaining book, in final analysis it is not one of those biographies that redefines its subject. The Bear Bryant that emerges in Barra’s writing is pretty much the Bear Bryant we have always known. A few of the stories just have more detail, and the author attempts to place his life and accomplishments in context a little better than others. This judgement is not an indictment of Barra’s approach, though, as I do believe The Last Coach is the best biography of Bryant available. Barra has sorted through an immense number of stories from players, coaches, media, and friends and family and backed up as much as he could with solid research using available records. Yet the inner workings of his intensely private subject, who seemingly devoted every waking hour to his work for the better part of a half century, will likely forever remain a mystery. Bryant retired from coaching at, for the time, the advanced age of 69 in extremely poor health, having famously proclaimed he’d “croak in a week” if he was not coaching. His prediction was off by just a matter of days. Perhaps because of that timeline we never got the benefit of the full retrospective by writers and interviewers that he would never have given during his coaching days. Perhaps it would never have come at all regardless. And perhaps all that is part of the reason why he has remained and in all likelihood will remain engrained in lore as an archetype of his chosen profession who simply cannot be evaluated outside of his life’s work. Bryant and Alabama football are as inseparable today as they were when he retired, a gleaming example of success in a state long accustomed to various types of hard luck and even failure. Among the things made most clear in Barra’s narrative is the fact that this situation is exactly the way he wanted to be remembered, without the distraction of personal details.
JMB
The Historians Manifesto 