Sport: No. 1, and Still Counting

At last, the Bear of Alabama goes over the mountain

After 315 victories now, after all the history of the past 36 years and after all the hyperbole of the past three weeks, who is this Paul W. (“Bear”) Bryant anyway? Let’s see. He is a football coach named for a bear (looks a little like a football, a lot like a bear). He is a brilliant coach who was never an innovator. He oversees practices from a tower yet touches each player personally somehow. He is a humanitarian who began accepting black players no earlier than 1970. He is shy, but he is not retiring. He is called the cruelest coach in memory and the kindest man in the world.

It is easier to say what Bryant has done. At Maryland, Kentucky, Texas A&M and—for the past 23 years—Alabama, he has won more football games than any other college coach. Numbers are simple. To catch Babe Ruth, all Henry Aaron had to do was hit 35 homers a year for more than 20 years. To catch Amos Alonzo Stagg, all Bear Bryant had to do was win ten games a year for more than 30 years.

He finished doing it last Saturday against Auburn, except he is not finished. A trip to the Cotton Bowl is set for January, and then he will start planning for next fall. As time goes on—and Bryant, 68, says he is going on with it—there may be no catching Bear. For now, there may be no knowing him, except through his players and assistants. At least they can share the feeling of knowing him. And not just by their Bear stories, as fun as those are. The stories are as picturesque as he is, and they top him off like his houndstooth hat. But they do not show enough of what is underneath.

Stagg used to say, “No coach ever won a game by what he knows; it’s what his players have learned.” So perhaps it would be instructive to ask Bryant’s players—and his coaches—what they have learned. For instance, Jack Pardee.

The Washington Redskins’ and Chicago Bears’ former head coach, now the San Diego Chargers’ defensive coordinator, is a survivor of that infamous 1954 Junction (Texas) training camp in the Bear’s first Texas A&M season. Of 96 players who went to summer camp, 27 were left after ten days of workouts in up to 110° heat. The others quit. “It was an effort to survive,” says Pardee. “Each player could tell his own story, but mine was simply to make it to the next practice.” The Bryant term for such tests: “gut checks.”

Those who did not make it included an all-conference center, “the only good player we had,” recalls Pardee. “He didn’t want to work one day and was fired. Bryant ran him out.”

New Orleans Saints Head Coach Bum Phillips, one of Bear’s assistants at A & M, was awed by Bryant’s command. “He’d go into a staff meeting,” Phillips says, “and he’d never have to say, ‘Let me have you-all’s attention.’ Hell, he had it. You respected him and you liked him. You didn’t do it because you were scared of him. Although I was a little scared of him.”

Bum enjoys setting the scene in the meeting room, assistants quietly quaking while Bear takes out a cigarette, taps it on his thumb, lights it, and smokes it almost all the way down before the hush is broken. And Phillips laughs. He doubts if Bryant knew how intimidating he was. “That’s the beautiful part about him,” says Bum. “He just acted natural and, hell, that’s the way it came out. I don’t think a man could plan to do as many great things as that man has done in handling people.”

At Alabama, Joe Namath knew Bryant’s discipline. “If you cut classes, you had to take study hall in his office at 4 a.m.,” Namath says. “You had to be there waiting for him when he got to work. Nobody wanted to do that. He was frightening.” For something worse than cutting class, an infraction never told, Namath was kicked off the team for the last game of the 1963 season (his junior year) and the Sugar Bowl. Joe could have gone to Canada, then and there, to play professional football. He stayed at Alabama. “When he spanked you,” says Namath, “you knew it was because he loved you. There’s still sting in the Bear’s spank. When two of his players were caught carousing on the eve of the Auburn game, he instantly bounced them from the team.

The players, all the different ages of players, growing their hair from a stubble to a stalk, have loved him. Houston Oiler Quarterback Ken Stabler, who ran away from the Alabama team once, was brought in and told by Bryant: “You don’t deserve to be on this football team.” After a long pause, Stabler said, “Well, I’m coming out there anyway.” That sold Bear on Stabler, and maybe Stabler on Stabler.

To the players, this record isn’t larger than life, this man is. “Boy, he’s a big awesome devil when he walks in a room,” former Dallas Cowboy Linebacker Lee Roy Jordan says. George Blanda, who quarterbacked for Bryant at Kentucky, remembers thinking, “This must be what God looks like.” Bryant’s only Heisman Trophy winner, Halfback John David Crow, was so terrified of the coach that he crossed the street to avoid him. “Now,” Crow says, “I love him.”

Only one Heisman, but 27 bowls, 12 Southeastern Conference championships (one Southwest Conference) and six national titles. Won 315, lost 80 and tied 17.

Not much of all this talking and fussing pleases Bryant, who says little about himself and mumbles that. “The record I’m excited about is our team’s record,” says Bear, “because all the records are the team’s. Thousands of people are part of it.It’s a ‘we’ thing, an ‘us’ thing, it’s no ‘I’ thing.” ” Football coaches are good at saying how bad they are, at minimizing what they have just done for the benefit of the coming opponent. But minimizing this is not going to be easy. It’s a gut check, all right.

—By Tom Callahan. Reported by Jamie Murphy/New York