FROM OUR EDITORS

Paul "Bear" Bryant (1913-83) was perhaps the greatest coach in college football history; he was certainly the most charismatic. Tight-lipped, gutsy, demanding, ruthlessly competitive, Bryant personified gridiron determination. "I don't want ordinary people," he said. "I want people who are willing to sacrifice and do without a lot of those things ordinary students get to do. That's what it takes to win." Bryant's teams won; in 38 years of coaching, he suffered only one losing season. This rich, full-scale 600-page biography captures "the best coach there ever was" in his full glory.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The shocking news of Coach "Bear" Bryant's death on January 26, 1983, produced an outpouring of emotion not seen for a sports figure in years. National newspapers reported his death on their front pages ("Crimson Tears," wailed the headline in the New York Post). Three days later, America watched in awe as an estimated quarter of a million mourners lined the fifty-five-mile stretch from Tuscaloosa to a Birmingham cemetery to pay their respects as Bryant's three-mile-long funeral cortege drove by.

Scores of Bryant's former players, including Joe Namath, Lee Roy Jordan, John David Crow, and Marty Lyons, were in attendance. So were the greatest living football coaches, including Southern Cal's John McKay, who said, "It was like a presidential funeral procession."

Even though Bryant maintained that he was "just a football coach," he was for millions much more: the greatest coach the game had ever seen, and the heir to the tradition established by Knute Rockne. He took his Alabama Crimson Tide teams to an unmatched six national championships. But to the players, journalists, and fans whose lives he touched as a player and a coach, he was the last symbol of values that transcended football: courage, discipline, loyalty, and hard work.

To his critics, Bryant represented the dark side of big-time college football-brutality, fanaticism, and blind adherence to authority. The real Bear Bryant, however, was far more complex than either his admirers or his detractors knew. While maintaining a public friendship with Alabama governor George Wallace, he continually sought ways to undermine the governor's segregationist policies, finally forcing a legendary football game in Birmingham with the University of Southern California in 1970 that opened the floodgates to the integration of football at the University of Alabama.

Yet no understanding of Bryant, the great coach, is complete without the story of his remarkable transformation from a driven country boy to a figure of national prominence. As Allen Barra movingly shows in The Last Coach, Bryant, the eleventh of thirteen children, was born in tiny Moro Bottom, Arkansas, in 1913 and grew up in nearby Fordyce-where his legend was born when he wrestled a live bear on the stage of a local theater. A star on the Fordyce High School Redbugs football team, he was good enough to get a football scholarship to the University of Alabama, where he would meet and marry the love of his life, campus beauty queen Mary Harmon Black.

At the height of the Depression, football took Bryant to the Rose Bowl with Alabama's 1934 national champions, then on to a career as an assistant and, in subsequent decades, as a head football coach at Maryland, Kentucky, Texas A&M, and finally Alabama, matching wit and grit with the greatest coaches of two generations-men like Tennessee's General Robert Neyland, Oklahoma's Bud Wilkinson, Notre Dame's Ara Parseghian, Ohio State's Woody Hayes, and Penn State's Joe Paterno. Along the way, Bryant stirred numerous controversies, including the infamous "Junction Boys" training camp episode in 1954, during which almost two-thirds of the Texas A&M football team quit, yet none of these incidents derailed his unstoppable march toward Amos Alonzo Stagg's all-time record for college coaching victories.

Through it all, Bryant's influence has endured and prevailed as his former players and assistants continue to define the best in not only college but also professional football. The Last Coach, then, is the gripping story of a true American legend.

FROM THE CRITICS

Buzz Bissinger - The New York York Times

He's best when the book takes a breath from those monotonous season-by-season regurgitations and finds a theme. The section dealing with one of Bryant's biggest controversies off the field, the successful undertaking of a libel suit against The Saturday Evening Post over unproven allegations that he conspired to fix the 1962 Alabama-Georgia game, is thick and revealing. Even better, truly superb, is Barra's evenhanded recounting of the role Bryant played - or, more precisely, did not play, given his remarkable influence in the state of Alabama - in hastening the integration of the football program.

Larry Moffi - The Washington Post

If you're from anywhere but Alabama, Paul "Bear" Bryant is merely one of the greatest football coaches of all time. For Alabamians, Bryant is the only coach, and for good reason. Allen Barra, himself an Alabamian and a gifted writer, doesn't go quite that far, but his comprehensive and endearing biography, The Last Coach: A Life of Paul Bear Bryant, substantiates the legend—yes, he did once wrestle a bear—without sidestepping some less pleasant issues, including racial segregation.

Publishers Weekly

This meticulous, fascinating look at the life of the legendary "Bear" Bryant (1913-1983), longtime head football coach of the University of Alabama's fearsome "Crimson Tide," will further enhance the reputation of Barra (Clearing the Bases) as one of America's finest sportswriters. It begins with a powerful and unsentimental view of Bryant's difficult childhood in Moro Bottom, Ark., an area Barra describes as "the reality of which Al Capp's Dogpatch, the home of L'il Abner, was the hideous caricature." It ends with a moving description of Bryant's death, just 27 days after his final game and retirement, and the three-mile-long funeral procession viewed by an estimated quarter of a million people. In between, Barra covers Bryant's rise as a cultural and sports icon whose influence helped transform college football "from a game with a large cult following into the most lucrative spectator sport in the world." Among the many incidents Barra deftly explores are Bryant's hesitancy--followed by his thoroughness--in integrating the Alabama team (in 1971), and his visionary use of televised games in the early 1960s--which he accomplished with ABC sports broadcasting superstar Roone Arledge, then a 29-year-old rookie--to establish himself and his team (including flamboyant players such as Joe Namath) in the minds of a national sports audience. Throughout, Barra illuminates the complexities of what he sees as Bryant's legacies: "his intensity and will to win and his unshakable belief that these qualities, when applied to a higher purpose, can make you a better person." Photos. Agent, Jay Mandel. (Sept.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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