COLLEGE FOOTBALL ’87 : COACHES, PLAYERS, TEAMS AND TRENDS TO WATCH THIS SEASON : THE END OF AN ERA : Alabama’s Bill Curry Is a Do-Gooder Who May Do Very Well

Alabama had undertaken a $16-million stadium renovation, and had spent $4 million for an indoor football field and another $5 million for coaches’ offices and other team-related facilities. Still, the football citizenry of these parts were not to be fooled by this apparent emphasis. It was a smoke screen.

What was happening was all too clear, through the smoke and all. This president--and all you need to know about him was he was offered an Alabama football scholarship and went to Harvard--was easing Alabama right out of the Southeastern Conference, right into the Ivy League. No question.

Look what he had done. In the week after Ray Perkins, a Bear Bryant disciple if ever there has been one, left the school for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, this Dr. Joab Thomas hired an athletic director from Duke and a football coach from Georgia Tech. Understand, these are academic--as opposed to football--bastions in the South. What next? Would Thomas want to build a library?

The Georgia Tech recruit was especially disturbing. The Duke guy had at least played at Alabama.

The way folks remember Bill Curry, aside from the galling fact that his little dean’s list of a football team had once whipped the Bear’s team, is as a kind of do-gooder, the Deep South’s version of St. Joe Paterno. Kind of an annoying guy who’s always jabbering about cheaters, academics, putting the game in perspective.

Why, up in Birmingham once, night before the All-American Bowl game, he fired his starting quarterback for busting curfew. That’s the kind of guy Bill Curry is.

You may notice that some coaches appear to prosper with a winning’s-not-everything philosophy. Refreshing, except you may notice as well that those coaches still win all the time. How else would they prosper?

With Curry, though, the philosophy had apparently been winning’s-not-even-half-the-thing. He’d had a 31-43 record at Georgia Tech. Now, that’s fine for Georgia Tech, where philosophy is to be savored just as much as football. For Georgia Tech, as a matter of fact, it was sensational.

Of course, we’re talking ‘Bama here, aren’t we.

So you get the picture: Coach with a losing record and lofty ideals comes to replace Ray Perkins, finally breaking the Bear legacy.

This last thing, actually, was the worst. Curry lacked even the Bear’s silent benediction, never having played or coached for Bryant. He wasn’t family.

“If you’re trying to end the Bear Bryant era at Alabama, we’ve made a giant step forward in doing it,” sniffed Lee Roy Jordan, a former Alabama star.

Although a Birmingham News headline--”Curry: ‘Mr. Clean,’ but can he coach?”--first articulated the concern, it was Jordan again who best put it into words: “He’s a fine guy (but) his record for winning doesn’t match his integrity.”

That was eight months ago, and the citizenry have since calmed down some. No more death threats--Curry got one, Thomas logged two the day of the announcement--and even Jordan has publicly reconciled himself to Curry. It might have helped that Steve Sloan, in his first act as athletic director, located the Bear’s old tower, had it restored and replaced on the practice field, strictly as a symbol, to recall that era. That’s as reassuring as you can get.

Still, there was this letter to the editor in last week’s Birmingham News. It accused Thomas of dismantling the Bear’s football program, piece by piece, Curry being the final wrecking ball. The letter was headlined, “If they want books, send ‘em to Harvard.”

Bill Curry, a lean, ruggedly handsome man of 44, enjoys the looks on visitors’ faces when he welcomes them to his office. This is in the so-called Football Office Complex that cost the $5 million, of which a good half must have been spent on the coach’s office and furnishings.

The corner office is vast enough that visitors actually need time to locate the coach inside it. The walls are paneled with dark wood, the furnishings upholstered in leather. It has the look of a men’s club.

Curry acknowledges his visitor’s astonishment. “I hadn’t seen any of this when I took the job,” he says. “You’ve seen the coaches’ meeting room? (We have: There is a grand table inside it that, if it doesn’t have Reagan and Gorbachev facing off, looks faintly ridiculous.) Well, Dr. Thomas is showing me and my family and, well, we just looked at each other and laughed.

“And this office? One of my first calls was to the man who built it. I said, ‘Perk, tell me about the ego of a man who’d build an office like this.’ He said, ‘Just shut up and sit in that chair.’ ”

Without knowing it, Curry has just voiced the weird attraction of coaching football at Alabama. The emphasis and extravagance of Alabama football, especially to an outsider, verges on the foolish. You don’t need an indoor football field and you don’t need a leather couch. Still, once they’re installed, try not enjoying them. Curry extends his arms and playfully indicates, “my humble surroundings.”

Coaching football at Alabama is like that, at once foolish and seductive. That is, he has indeed sat in the chair. It’s real comfortable.

Of course, he knows how hot that seat can get. Or thinks he knows. A death threat, and he hadn’t lost so much as one game.

There are a lot of people who don’t think he can win here, given his strange pedigree. There are a lot of people, given his equally strange introduction at Alabama, who don’t think he’s even supposed to win. Ol’ Dr. Thomas let out like Curry was brought in to correct all this foolishness about college football, not necessarily win games.

At least that’s how it broke down in the early press. Thomas, who came to Alabama in 1981 and has been expensively improving academic facilities and programs ever since, may have put his coach on the spot by emphasising the outright goodness of the man. Although Perkins’ legacy was remarkable--of his 25 seniors, 19 were able to graduate this summer--Thomas never chose to applaud its integrity. Instead, he acted as if Curry were his big broom.

“Alabama is making a bold statement by this hiring,” he said, two death threats into Curry’s first press conference. “There is just too much wrong with college athletics.”

Thomas, who was only one part of a nine-man committee to select the new coach, had served notice earlier by publishing his three criteria for hiring: No. 1, the coach’s integrity should be above question. No. 2, he should try to improve academic performance. And No. 3, he should win. “In that order,” Thomas had said.

Thomas didn’t want to oversee a university the football program could be proud of. He wanted a little more. And he was surprised at the reaction.

Three death threats into the new regime, Thomas admitted: “It was a little more negative and little more irrational than expected.”

He acknowledged the faction that would “prefer the most effective gladiator on the field rather than the student-athlete,” but nonetheless figured that Alabama had already made great strides in restoring perspective. “Five years ago, people looked at us and said we were a football factory,” he said, happy with his work.

Pretty much lost in the rhetoric was Thomas’ insisting on No. 3 in the criteria. “I want to win,” he said, “By God, I can’t stand to lose. I’m one of the poorest losers in the world.”

He has since said that not only Curry’s job is on the line, but his as well. Thomas is about to find out just how much perspective Alabama, one-time football factory, has gained.

Of course, Curry should win. He usually has.

As a relatively untalented player, he managed to cop three Super Bowl rings.

As a naive, uncompromising college coach he managed to right one of the South’s all-time bad football programs. From a 2-19-1 record his first two seasons, he elevated Georgia Tech into the big-time. Going 9-2-1 at high-minded Tech, against teams such as Alabama, whose players he was unable to recruit for academic reasons, is quite an achievement. That was the year his team won the All-American Bowl, his best player on the bench.

Curry seems to regret being hailed as a tower of integrity when he could have been introduced as a football coach. “One of my biggest jobs is to get the Alabama people to realize they didn’t need to import integrity,” he says.

He points out that the program he inherits is not only clean but geared academically as well. A player cuts a single class at Alabama, his coach knows about it.

It’s as if people think Curry stopped over in Alabama on his way to picking up the Nobel peace prize. There is no question that Curry enjoys his reputation for cleanliness and even Christianity--he has gotten requests to speak at more than 400 churches--but the man who broke into the National Football League under Vince Lombardi would like it known he’s desperate to win, too.

“One thing about Georgia Tech,” he says, “I was going to have a very good record before I left. I had no plans to leave, but certainly not with a losing record.”

That still hurts. “You know, the skeptics say, ‘This son of a gun can’t win, he might as well talk about building character.’ But that’s not me. You got to win. That’s the thrill, that’s the whole point. I want to build character, I want the kids to graduate. I want to win football games.”

Overlooked in that warm smile and easy manner--even for a football coach he is enormously charming--is his drive. Thomas has recalled that in 1984, after Georgia Tech had walloped Alabama, he was told that Curry had had his team scrimmaging at 5 a.m. one day. Well, Curry has nothing if not drive.

“Football in the South is very different,” he is saying. “It’s chivalry, rites of passage, manhood. It’d be a great thing for some sociologist to take on, why in the South there’s this fervor.

“I know at 13, I didn’t like football. But if you’re a big boy, you played football. That’s how it is in the South. Myself, I dreamed of pitching for the Yankees. But at day camp one summer, this awesome presence, the high school coach, booms out, ‘You will be coming out for football.’ ”

Curry did and he hated every minute of it. But it was the South.

“Football, that’s just what you did, if you wanted a date with the cheerleader,” he said.

His own coach, he says, was the epitome of the Southern high school coach, the kind of guy who’d practice you four hours without water and then, to cap the workout, make you run four miles.

“But the discipline of it all wears on you,” he says. “It does build a certain toughness.”

It also accounted for all the self-esteem he had. In class, well, he wasn’t any teacher’s idea of a model student. He admits to spending time physically tied to his desk with his mouth taped shut. Football was about all he had, and that wasn’t much. He wasn’t very good at that.

It wasn’t until his senior year that he started.

“It was as if God said, ‘Let’s fix him up with no talent and a lot of persistence and see what happens,’ ” Curry says. “Everything was a struggle for me.”

Bobby Dodd took him on at Georgia Tech, although Curry still was a late bloomer, if one at all. He remembers saying to the coach, “Guess I’m not working hard enough, coach.”

Dodd answered: “Son, you’re working hard enough, you’re just not very good.”

“After four years I wasn’t first string,” he says, still amazed. “I didn’t start a game until the fourth game of my fourth year. As for the NFL, let me explain that there were 20 (draft) rounds then. You can figure it out. I went in the 20th round.”

His 10-year career in the NFL wasn’t the paradise he thought he deserved either. He was Lombardi’s sometime starting center with the Green Bay Packers and helped them to the first Super Bowl.

Then Lombardi allowed him to go the way of the expansion draft. The New Orleans Saints traded him straight away, that’s how much they thought of him.

“Then I went to the Baltimore Colts and I failed miserably,” he says. “Don Shula tried me at three positions and I was awful. But he gave me one more chance, I’ll never know why, and I made it.”

He finally gained All-Pro status.

But for Curry, it wasn’t the football that was providing his rite of passage so much as the men in it. Starting with Bill Badgett, the awesome presence back in day camp, Curry has compiled an entire gallery of role models.

There was Bobby Dodd at Georgia Tech. Freshman year, Curry was struggling through chemistry, a course he surely did not need. He cut a class. What harm. Next morning, 6 o’clock, Dodd had personally rousted him and had him running up and down steps.

“I never cut another class,” he says. “I got a D in chemistry. I excelled.”

There were Willie Davis and Bart Starr at Green Bay. First year, Curry was struggling through camp, the Packers’ last pick, which made him untouchable even for a rookie. And there were two veterans taking him under wing.

“Willie Davis, he adopted me, and I don’t know why,” Curry says. “I’d never even been on a team with a black guy. And here’s somebody telling me I can make it. He had nothing to gain and yet with his encouragement, well, he changed my life in a heartbeat.”

There was Don Shula, who refused to give up on Curry and eventually made him an All-Pro.

“I don’t know why he did that, either,” Curry says, still mystified. “But it taught me never to give up on anybody, never.”

Altogether, it taught him that he, too, could make a difference in peoples’ lives, for good or bad.

“When I was with the NFL, I’d get a call from a player, suddenly without a job or money,” he says. “I’d ask him what he’d signed away. He wouldn’t have any idea. Thirty years old, never even got his college degree, and now he has no future, nothing. That’s some coach’s fault.”

It’s a fine thing to see a man seek responsibility for kids in their own little rites of passage, helping them chart the way. Of course, there’s no place on the scoreboard to show this kind of victory.

“The so-called controversy was kind of overblown,” Curry says. “It was over in a day. I actually thought it would last longer, considering the circumstances.

“I tell you, about a week after I was hired, I’m coming into the office here, walking across the parking lot. Freezing cold. These guys were paving outside, men with Levi Garrett caps, flannel shirts and bib overhauls. One of them spots me and says, ‘Hey, you the coach?’

“I think, well, here it goes. But they come over and tell me not to pay any attention to these folks. So we’re standing out there in the freezing cold, drinking coffee, having us a little pep rally. If those guys can come around, I’m not worried.

“In the end it will come down to this, always has. They’ll say, ‘Let’s see if he can coach ball.’ ”