Football's Supercoach

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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."