Product Description

The explosive biography of the greatest college football coach in history.

When Paul William "Bear" Bryant died on January 26, 1983, it was the lead story on the all three networks' evening news. New York City newspapers reported his death on their front pages. ("Crimson Tears," read the headline in the New York Post, "Nation weeps over death of legendary Bear Bryant, 69.") 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 his three-mile long funeral cortege drove by.

President Reagan and the three former American presidents sent flowers, as did people as diverse as Bob Hope, ABC's Roone Arledge, advice columnist Ann Landers and the Reverend Billy Graham. Scores of Bryant's former players, including Joe Namath, Lee Roy Jordan, Ken Stabler and Ozzie Newsome, were in attendance. So were Bryant's most distinguished colleagues, the greatest living football coaches, including Southern Cal's John McKay, who said, "It was like a presidential funeral procession. No coach in America could have gotten that. No coach but him. But then, he wasn't just a coach. He was the coach."

Bryant's passing was noted with the kind of reverence our country reserved for statesmen or military leaders, though Paul "Bear" Bryant had insisted for much of his life that he was "just a football coach." For millions he was much more, he was the greatest coach the game ever saw, 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 in his more than half a century as a player and 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 was far more complex than either his admirers or 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 that opened the floodgates to the integration of football at the University of Alabama, including its coaching staff. Old fashioned in his politics, he was nonetheless an admirer of Robert Kennedy, whom he planning to vote for in 1968.

Allen Barra's The Last Coach traces Paul Bryant's rise from a family of truck farmers to recognition as the most successful and influential coach in the game's history. The eleventh of thirteen children, Bryant 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. Paul was raised by his mother, who barely managed to keep him out of trouble and on the Fordyce High School Redbugs long enough to get a football scholarship at 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 and on to a career as an assistant and, finally, a head football coach, where he matched 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, he stirred controversy with his infamous "Junction Boys" training camp in 1954, during which almost two-thirds of the Texas A&M football team quit; his legal battle with The Saturday Evening Post over the accusation that he had conspired to fix a college football game, a trial which rocked the sports world; and his pursuit of Amos Alonzo Stagg's all-time record for college coaching victories.

Through it all, Bryant's influence has not only endured but prevailed as his former players and assistants continue to define the best in not only college but professional football. 32 pages of photographs.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #284783 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 608 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780393059823
• BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. 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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Bear Bryant, who won more games as a college football coach than anyone except Joe Paterno, died in 1983, but he was recently catapulted back into national prominence via Jim Dent's best-selling Junction Boys (1999), an account of Bryant's first year at Texas A&M, and by the well-received HBO adaptation of Dent's book. Bryant was born in 1913 in a tiny Arkansas hamlet called Moro's Bottom. He was educated in nearby Fordyce, where he wrestled the vaudeville animal that earned him his nickname. Football got him into college, and he graduated to coaching, making stops at Kentucky and Texas A&M before moving to Alabama, where he earned his legendary status. Barra, a regular contributor to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, meticulously researched Bryant's life, but his subject somewhat eludes him, perhaps because Bryant kept everything other than his public persona so well hidden. Still, anyone interested in the history of college football will want to read at least some of this book. Wes Lukowsky
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
A thorough and well-written biography….Sports fans and historians will devour this outstanding book. -- Bart Starr, former quarterback, Green Bay Packers

Allen Barra researches a book the way Coach Bryant prepared for a game. This is a perfect fit. -- Mickey Herskowitz

Barra on The Bear is a must read. Few people approach sports with the intellectual vigor and discipline of Barra. -- Bob Costas

Finally a biography worthy of the man…The Last Coach tells why Paul Bryant mattered so much to so many. -- Mark Kreigel, author of Namath: A Biography

If you are a college football junkie like me, you will welcome this book about Bear Bryant. -- Dan Jenkins, author of Slim And None

The Beat growls again, and real gravitas is heard in the land. -- Roy Blount, Jr.

The best-researched and best chronicle of his life. -- Keith Jackson, ESPN

Customer Reviews

A Life of Paul "Bear" Bryant told in a Humanistic Manner
For those how have lived in the State of Alabama during the last half of the 20th Century, there is no escaping the presence of Coach Paul W. "Bear" Bryant. As a fan of the University of Alabama's sports programs, a graduate of the University, a football season ticket holder, friend of the author, and a person who assisted the author in obtaining a minor amount of the information that went into this ambitious undertaking, I am somewhat hesitant to publicly write anything about it. However, it is also with that particular knowledge, that I know what I say may mean more to others.

I have always had an interest in biographies. Whether they be of Eddie Rickenbacker, George F. Kaufmann or, even, Harpo Marx, biographies held my facination from an early age. With Coach Bryant, the books purporting to give one the "insight" into his persona could fill-up several shelves in ones bookcase. Some retell the story John Underwood undertook in the 1970's with Coach Bryant in BEAR. Others talk of specific instances and moments the author and Coach Bryant shared. Still, others discuss his humor, his quotations, his ______ (you fill-in the blank). With THE LAST FOOTBALL COACH, Allen Barra has taken a very complex man, who had values that he adhered to throughout his life, and has written as thorough a book on Coach Bryant as will ever be written.

As a biography, it is not a book that dwells on the Coach's life as one who is infallible, yet it does not shy away from those infamous qualities Coach Bryant's detractors were quick to bring-up: his brutal practices, his drinking, his mistakes.

Allen Barra, whom I have known since his days as the Entertainment Editor of the UAB KALEIDOSCOPE in the early 1970's, is a gifted writer, but I have to tell you, most of his stuff is complicated as heck. The comparison of this baseball player from this era with another player from another era. I mean, I understand him, but if I am going to be using that much energy understanding what I read, I might as well be picking-out stocks that will produce a 200% profit in two years. HOWEVER, and this is a big, in more ways than one, "however," with THE LAST FOOTBALL COACH, Allen Barra has crossed the threshold to being an author who will make a difference in other's lives: those young men and women who read this book, whether they be football players or not, will understand just a little bit better, what went into being the "Last Football Coach," a man not too big to climb down from his tower to show a guard or an end how to "do it right."

I would recommend this book to anyone who loves the college football game and would like to have a lot of insight into what made Coach Bryant click. As a bonus, well to me it's a bonus, you get to read how Coach Bryant gave one ten-year-old, me, a "try out," as I imagine he gave a thousand other boys try outs, with an intensity and focus that made one ten-year-old boy want to "do it just a little bit better for the coach."

A Portrait of a True Leader
In the spirit of Dave Maranaiss' When Pride Mattered, The Last Coach isn't so much a football book as a portrait of a true American original. Barra presents a nuanced portrayal of a man who was loved and feared in equal parts, and who could have been Governor of Alabama-if he got tired of being King.

While there's plenty of artfully described gridiron action in these pages, at its core this is a book about leadership as it is practiced in the real world, not in those 13-Steps-to-Excellence books that weigh down the shelf at your local bookseller.

The Last Coach is not only a great book, it's an important one, as well.

Greatest Book On The Greatest Coach
I've was never entirely convinced that Bear Bryant was the greatest football coach of all time until I read this book. The author's analysis is clear and penetrating, and he never overstates the case but lets Bryant's record speak for itself. But I needed no convincing that this is a great book. From the start it kept me reading, beginning with the story of Bryant's rise from abject poverty in Arkansaas to the way the entire country munrned him at his death. The book reminded me a lot of Davide Maraniss' biography of Vince Lombardi, When Pride Still Mattered, which is one of the best things I could say for it.