Football's Supercoach

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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 110° 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."