Football's Supercoach

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The 1954 team, weakened by its trial by fire, was Bryant's only loser, 1-9. Two years later, Texas A & M won the Southwest Conference title. Still Bryant drove his players fiercely. John David Crow, a halfback who won the Heisman Trophy in 1957, recalls going into the dressing room after practice, pulling off his sweat-soaked uniform and, too tired to stand, sitting on a chair in the shower. As he relaxed, Bryant called the team back on the field for another practice. Baking in the sun, Crow fainted and was out for three hours. The first sight he saw upon regaining consciousness was Bryant, hovering anxiously over him.

Bryant had other things to learn about big-time football. During his second year at Texas A&M, the school was put on probation for recruiting violations. Bear now acknowledges that the violations occurred, insisting that they were standard at the time: the usual sorry practices of wealthy alumni giving money, cars, jobs. "All the other schools were doing it, so we did it too," he explains. "I was real bitter about it at the time—I cried all the way home from the meeting where they put us on probation—but looking back, it may have been the best thing that ever happened to me. After that, I always lived by the letter of the law, never won a game anything but the honest way."

In 1958 Bryant returned to his alma mater, which had floundered through four dismal seasons. Before the Auburn game that year, he told the Touchdown Club in Birmingham: "Gentlemen, I wouldn't bet anything but Coca-Cola on tomorrow's game. Next year you can bet a fifth of whisky. And the year after that you can mortgage the damn house." Bryant was right. A bettor would have lost a Coke that first year (Auburn won, 14-8), but the mortgages were safe: Alabama took the next four games in the series without allowing a point.

Bryant's early years at Alabama were stormy. There were no recruiting violations. But the reputation for brutality persisted, although it took a different form. This time the charge was that Bryant coached his teams to play too rough. He taught gang tackling; "pursuit" is the euphemism, and mayhem is occasionally the result, when swarms of tacklers bang into the ball carrier. In 1962 the Saturday Evening Post printed a story accusing him of teaching "dirty football," and later ran an article claiming that he and Wally Butts, the University of Georgia athletic director, had conspired to fix a game. Bryant sued in both cases and won settlements out of court totaling $300,000.

Bryant was settling down and building an athletic empire at his alma mater. Last year Alabama spent some $5 million on sports, and its athletic budget was still comfortably in the black. A $5 million fieldhouse, a $2 million track stadium and a new $2.4 million swimming and diving center were financed by football profits. Acres of tennis courts and other recreational facilities for students have been constructed from the vast haul of television royalties and bowl-appearance money earned by Bryant's teams.