It’s my second-favorite piece of dialogue from Law and Order. (The first was anytime long-suffering District Attorney Adam Schiff would grab his forehead and mutter, “Make the deal.”) In an episode set after the World Trade Center attacks, one of Schiff’s successors, the cornpone-ish D. A. Arthur Branch, facing some insoluble legal dilemma, sighed and said, “If we had been more vigilant, September 11 would still be known as Bear Bryant’s birthday.”
It was ear-catching because it was unexpected, like Steely Dan name-checking the Crimson Tide, but there was truth to the statement. In this part of the world, for a certain span of years, the birthday of Paul W. Bryant could easily have been observed as a state holiday.
There have been lots of coaches at the University of Alabama. There was Otto Wagonhurst, Guy Lowman, even J.B. “Ears” Whitworth, who probably doesn’t deserve the calumny of history. Since football came to Tuscaloosa in 1892, though, only one coach has really ever mattered.
Next week marks the centenary of Paul Bryant’s birth, which, contrary to what some fans insist, did not take place in a manger. In the place he was born, however — a wide spot in an Arkansas two-lane called Moro Bottom, near Fordyce, which is near nothing in particular — a stable would have been a posh maternity suite. In the desperate poverty of the rural South in 1913, little Paul William was lucky to make it out alive.
One hundred years later, the man has been subsumed by mythology. It’s happened before to people of spectacular accomplishment — Washington, Lincoln, Helen Keller — and when the process is complete, the prosaic aspects of a person’s humanity have been replaced by a contrived reality as sturdy and unyielding as a statue’s mass. In Bryant’s case, the Chesterfields have been airbrushed out, the tumblers of good liquor have been replaced with Coca-Cola bottles and any vestiges of mortal frailty have been purged from the authorized recollections.
That’s a shame, because the true circumstances of Paul Bryant’s life already sounded like the stuff of mythology: yes, he was six-foot-one and 180 pounds when he turned 13; yes, he did wrestle a carnival bear and got a lasting nickname instead of his $1 prize; yes, he’d never even seen a football game when he played in his first one at Fordyce High School; yes, he was awarded a scholarship at Alabama despite never graduating from said high school (when he started practicing with Frank Thomas’s Crimson Tide, he was enrolled at Tuscaloosa High School to get a diploma).
Much of the modern mythology surrounding the famous coach involves statistics, the mere and soulless quantification of achievement. There’s no doubt that Paul Bryant amassed some excellent numbers, including total wins, winning percentage and some sizable payouts from canny investments, but they actually diminish our understanding of the man.
Like Washington, Lincoln or Keller, Bryant was an immensely complicated person, capable of paradoxical behaviors in the pursuit of preternatural accomplishments. Was his life’s work powered by the need to stick it to those of nobler birth? What did he see in the X’s and O’s of football strategy that allowed him to change his players’ lives? How do you quantify desire? How can you gauge obsession?
The answers have eluded Bryant’s best biographers, and will, as long as the guardians of the famous coach’s mythology maintain an iron grip on their version of the story. What these well-meaning people fail to understand is that the truth can indeed set one free. When it was revealed that George Washington ran a distillery out of Mount Vernon or that Honest Abe had a less-than-honest wife who nearly bankrupted him with her shopping, it didn’t spark a national movement to sandblast their visages off Mount Rushmore. If anything, posterity benefits from the possibility of a more realistic perspective on outsized personalities.
Where can you get that? In Paul Bryant’s case, there are many witnesses to his life still among us, and, in my experience anyway, they love to talk about the man, not the myth. When his former players, coaches and associates open up about the person they spent years with in the challenging physical and psychological environment of a top-tier college football program, Paul Bryant lives again.
The Bear raised up Alabama, not just the team, but the state, at a time when George Wallace and Bull Connor were a threat to define us to the rest of the world. He created advantages from reading the fine print in rulebooks and he gave opportunities to athletes who might not otherwise have had them. He invented a winning strategy in the ‘60s, and when the game caught up with him, he reinvented it in the ‘70s. He promised his players championships, drove them mercilessly in that pursuit, and after they had given all, a scholarship plan he devised ensured that his players’ kids would never have to pay tuition at his alma mater.
To understand how such things could be, don’t just read the books. Come down to the Capstone next Wednesday and shake the hands that shook the hand.
The only time I saw the man in person, I’d just finished an all-night shift at a Tuscaloosa radio station, and, on the way to Ron Norris’s flophouse off University Boulevard, I stopped by Druid Drugs, not far from the athletic dormitory. There he sat at the lunch counter, hatless, drinking coffee, reading the paper and, yes, there was a Chesterfield going in the ashtray.
As callow a youth as I was, I lacked all gumption to walk up to the famous coach at his ease. I looked for a long moment, then turned around and walked back out.
Even in a small town drugstore at 6 a.m., Paul William Bryant was larger than life and as real as it gets. Happy birthday, Coach.