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Allen Barra, author of a new Bear Bryant bio, on the coach's greatness, his mystique, "The Junction Boys" and his moral failure -- and success -- on integration.

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Aug. 26, 2005 | To anyone who grew up in Alabama in the 1960s and '70s, as Allen Barra did, Paul "Bear" Bryant was an unimaginably huge figure. In the introduction to "The Last Coach," his new biography of Bryant, Barra writes about how difficult it was to explain to relatives in New Jersey what a football weekend in Birmingham meant.

And yet, "Many of us had never been able to decide if we actually liked Bear Bryant," Barra, 52, writes. "I suppose it had something to do, at least for many of us, with all those photographs of George Wallace, his arm around the only man in the Deep South more famous than himself."

Barra says the thing that surprised him most in researching "The Last Coach" was that Bryant held the segregationist governor in utter contempt, and spent the entire decade of the '60s making what Barra calls "genuine but ineffectual efforts to integrate the Alabama team," something that was finally accomplished in 1971.

And once John Mitchell, the first black Alabama player, made the tackle on the opening kickoff of the opening game that year, integration moved swiftly, and not just on the field but on Bryant's coaching staff. Ozzie Newsome, the great tight end who played for Bryant, once said, "Martin Luther King Jr. preached equality. Coach Bryant practiced it."

Barra's literally been carrying Bryant around for his entire adult life.

"I must have been planning in the back of my mind to write this book a long time ago," he said by phone from his New Jersey home, "because I've carted through Chicago, then to Brooklyn in 1981, boxes of papers, autographed books. Much of the material I used I had saved, old Birmingham news clippings, Tuscaloosa papers, interviews, magazine stories. I had all this crap with me."

Full disclosure: Barra is a former Salon sports columnist, and I have been both his co-columnist and his editor. He still writes for Salon, and while we aren't exactly drinking buddies -- we've never even met in person -- we do offer each other advice, encouragement and criticism from time to time.

So consider all that when I say that I enjoyed "The Last Coach," even though I went into it without any particular interest in Bryant. Barra is a thorough researcher and a lively writer, and as he did a decade ago with "Inventing Wyatt Earp," he makes fresh the life story of a well-chronicled figure.

It's neither a hagiography nor a hatchet job. Barra makes the case for Bryant's greatness while acknowledging his shortcomings. Publisher's Weekly gave "The Last Coach" a starred review.

Bryant went from Moro Bottom, Ark., a mere plot of land with a few families on it, to nearby Fordyce, and then, thanks to football, on to the University of Alabama, where he was "the other end" on the 1934 Rose Bowl team that featured the great Don Hutson. His nickname, by the way, comes from his wrestling a bear at a theater for money. The promoter ran off without paying him.

After assistant coaching stints at Alabama and Vanderbilt and a wartime job coaching a military team, he began his head coaching career in 1945 at Maryland, moving to Kentucky after one year. In 1954 he went to Texas A&M, and then to his alma mater, where he coached from 1958 to 1982, winning six national championships, cementing his legend and becoming, at the time of his retirement, the winningest coach in college football history.

Not only did he win at all four schools, he turned all four programs from losers to winners in his first year and, as Barra notes, he was almost certainly the greatest coach in the history of three of them, Maryland being the exception.

Bryant died in 1983, less than a month after his last game. In a story told movingly by Barra, about one in 12 people who lived in Alabama at the time turned out to watch his funeral procession.

"If you're from Alabama and lived through the Bear Bryant era," Barra begins his book, "you know where you were on the day he died."

Barra says he's planning to write a bio of Yogi Berra next. We spoke by phone last week.

What is it about Bryant that made him this huge figure? You make the argument in the book that he was the greatest college football coach, but any sport you look at has a "greatest coach," or winningest coach, and most of them don't have his mystique.

There's a number of things. One of them is, he was the greatest coach. What's astonishing to me about Bryant that you can't say about the other great coaches you might compare him to: Bryant turned four programs radically around.

He's clearly the greatest football coach, I think, in the era of unlimited substitution. I don't know that his record before that is great enough to say that he was the best in that previous era, but he's the only coach that qualifies as great in both periods of football history.

And his career is split right down the middle, exactly down the middle, 1963, when they stopped using all those substitution limitations. He's the only coach who was great in both times.

Next page: "The Junction Boys." Plus: Bear Bryant, George Wallace and the integration of the Crimson Tide