Bill Curry Bears the Immense Pressure of Tide’s Stormy Season

Long ago, a theology professor told Bill Curry, and some others equally intent on working with youngsters, to look in the mirror each morning and get a good laugh. It might be the funniest thing they’d see all day.

For the man who coaches football at win-or-else Alabama, that was wisdom of the highest order. So was something else Curry learned in that class at Emory University 22 years ago: “If you don’t have a good theology of death, you will not have a good theology of life. Period.”

Curry goes on: “Once having dealt with (death), there’s not much that scares you. I don’t sit around and worry about my job. Or worry about some irrational threat by some idiot on the telephone that won’t give its name. Or somebody who throws a rock (through his office window) when I’m not around. I don’t worry about those things. At all.”

No coach in football America has endured a more bizarre year than Curry -- starting long before the season, with one player battling alcholism and two more attacked outside a nightclub.

Later, Curry pulled his players off the field more than a day before the Texas A&M; game. That’s because he was told Hurricane Gilbert might arrive first -- and surely with life-threatening force when it did. So Alabama at Texas A&M; had to be postponed until Dec. 1.

“Every expert I spoke with,” Curry said, “at that moment-of-truth time (before Alabama boarded the plane) said, ‘For gosh sakes, don’t go out there. You’re crazy. We don’t know what that monster’s going to do but we do know it will turn north.’ ”

Gilbert evidently either hadn’t been thrilled with College Station, Tex., or had heard enough Aggie jokes. The monster didn’t turn north after all. The stadium was empty the next afternoon; golfers were playing 36 holes, so lovely had the dreaded day become.

Rarely, if ever, has the coach of a 3-1 team still ranked in the top 15 (No. 17 this week) had a rock tossed through his window. It might simply have been late-night liquor-inspired mischief, as Curry would like to believe.

“You’ve never had a buddy get drunk and throw a rock through a window?” the veteran of 10 National Football League season asked. “Let me say I have been present when events like that have occurred.”

As he spoke, Curry happened to be facing that window, one of the enormous glass panels that serve as a side to his office and took a week to repair. He also knows that loss, to so-so Mississippi, was enough to rouse even the teetotaling rabble to mindless rage.

First of all, Ole Miss had never beaten Alabama in Alabama. Second, it was homecoming. Third, and most important, the loss came hours after the dedication of a shrine-museum to the state deity for whom adoration goes far beyond sport, Paul “Bear” Bryant.

This emotionally flammable fuel was heaped on embers remaining from Curry being an unpopular choice to take over a year earlier. As a player and coach, Curry was a Georgia Tech man -- and with a 31-43-4 resume. Even when former Alabama great Steve Sloan later was hired as athletic director, Bryant disciple Lee Roy Jordan sniped: “If we’re trying to end the Paul Bryant era at Alabama, we’ve made a giant leap towards doing that.”

Curry seemed well-placed in one respect; he followed the unloved man who followed the legend, Ray Perkins. Of the attitude toward Perkins, a long-time Alabama insider said: “There was one man Ray hadn’t infuriated, so he invited him to lunch.”

Had his first season not not been 7-5, Curry’s Georgia Tech background would have been quickly forgiven by fans who know that Georgia Coach Vince Dooley has Auburn roots and Auburn Coach Pat Dye went to Georgia. Losing the final three games, including a shutout to ultrarival Auburn, got Crimson Tide fans to recalling Curry’s past. Yet it failed to deter them from bankrolling Alabama’s future.

The school instituted a priority ticket plan this season, meaning that in order to sit in certain sections of Bryant-Denny Stadium a person had to contribute between $100 and $1,000 per seat. All 19,100 priority tickets were sold, with the school gaining $6.2 million from the plan.

Curry reads that as overwhelming support. More significant was the recent statement by the school’s board of trustees that it would honor his five-year contract. The coach reasons this gives him renewed recruiting clout; his detractors figure the trustees are promising to pay Curry for five years, not necessarily to let him coach that long.

“(The endorsement) was done spontaneously,” Curry said. “But you can imagine what our rivals are doing with the controversy. They’re having a ball.”

Curry believes he is two players away from being unbeaten, having lost a Heisman Trophy candidate (Bobby Humphrey) on offense and dazzling defender and kick returner (Gene Jelks) to early season injuries.

Given his familiarity and popularity at Georgia Tech, the obvious question to Curry was: Why Alabama? The answer begins with a small line of type from the 1926 Rose Bowl: “J.M. Brown (59 pass from Gillis).”

“I grew up in College Park, Ga.,” Curry said. “My dad was a coach at Georgia Military Academy, though not a football coach. One of the men who did coach football was named Grant Gillis, who threw a pass to Johnny Mack Brown in the Rose Bowl.

“Johnny Mack Brown was the only movie star who meant anything to me when I was 6 years old. Therefore, Coach Gillis was my hero. He had a son my age and we spent many a night at each other’s house.”

Curry’s face took on a dreamy glow and he went on: “Grant Gillis threw a touchdown pass to Johnny Mack Brown. In a Rose Bowl. And they played for the Alabama Crimson Tide. So that was the first team that really registered with me.

“When I played against them (at Georgia Tech), they always were the best team. They had the most class, hit the hardest, played the cleanest. So I was fascinated by them. I was in Steve Sloan’s wedding.”

As the offensive line coach at an all-star game in 1965, Bryant had no Alabama players. So, for visits to alumni gatherings and the race track, he adopted center Curry.

“Riding around in a limousine with this legend,” Curry said. “Him giving you $100 and telling you which horse to bet on.” Here, rules-strict Curry was quick to say he’d already signed a contract with the Green Bay Packers. Then he said: “When I was a pro scout (in 1975), Coach Bryant invited me onto the tower (the perch from which Bryant directed Alabama’s practices). . . My first game at Tech (as a coach) was against Alabama.”

Little wonder that when the family was debating whether to move from Georgia Tech, Curry’s son, Billy, who was 16 at the time, half-whispered: “Dad, it’s Alabama.”

For perspective, Curry has won 14 of his first 21 games at Alabama. Bryant won 12 of his first 21, Perkins 11. Bryant also made full and judicious use of almost unlimited recruiting; coaches now must make do with 95 scholarships over four years.

“Folks here,” an Alabama man said, “are going to have to get used to 8-3 being a pretty good year. And if somebody like Bill Curry can’t make it at Alabama, maybe college football’s in trouble.”

Curry apparently offended some former players by the way he told them, during a gathering, that they would not be allowed into his closed practices. It was as if he didn’t trust them, some indicated, adding that Bryant probably would have said about the same thing, only more diplomatically.

Bryant also was not universally welcomed back to Alabama in 1958, many alumni recalling his troubles at Texas A&M; and assuming the Crimson Tide would win and, just as quickly, be slapped on probation. The latter never happened.

The Alabama president who hired Curry, Joab L. Thomas, has gone to North Carolina State on a teaching sabbatical. Curry has said: “University presidents don’t protect football coaches.”

Although it hardly seemed so at the time, Curry was fortunate to have endured trauma and controversy 13 years before arriving at Alabama. He was a major leader among players who in 1974 launched the first strike against the NFL.

“There was no right answer to the tough question back then,” he said. “The tough question is when a marginal player calls you and says, ‘Bill, I got this mortgage payment. We’ve been out 40 days now. I don’t have any money. The club has said if I don’t come in that I might be beaten out. I want to be loyal to the union, but what do I do?’

“I couldn’t tell him. That drove me up the wall. There, I had men’s careers in my hands. I couldn’t in good conscience promise them that if they stayed out it would be the best thing for them.

“Right and wrong in this situation is a lot clearer.”

Perkins sometimes seemed uncomfortable with Bryant staring over his shoulder; Curry sees a friendly, helpful ghost. In his office are two pictures of Bryant and, out of the way but in no way meant to be hidden, this Bear-prayer advice: “Ask God to bless your work. Do not ask Him to do it for you.”

Also featured in Curry’s office are a picture of the rings Alabama gave for six of the national championships it claimed and the actual rings given for winning 18 Southeastern Conference titles. Nowhere is there a hint that Curry earned two Super Bowl rings (one with the Packers and the other with the Colts).

“The reason is that I want to earn another one,” he said. “I made that a symbolic thing with the squad.”

Curry is smart enough to know almost exactly what Alabama would offer before taking the job, and he admitted: “I’ve been under this kind of pressure since 1974, in one way or another. And you have to enjoy it. You have to thrive on it, or you have to get out.

“It doesn’t mean you’re tougher or stronger or better or smarter than anybody else. It just means that you thrive on it. The competition. That element of doubt. Life on the precipice has to be something that appeals to you.”

Is Alabama as scary a ledge as sport offers?

“Well,” Curry said, “it’s one of ‘em.”

Curry admits to having withdrawl problems in the ‘70s common to other NFL players when their careers end. He quotes wife Carolyn as saying when he went into coaching at Georgia Tech: “ ‘I’m just glad you found a cause that has a salary attached.’ ”

In her way, Carolyn Curry is as remarkable as Bill, for having gotten her doctorate in American history and almost completely designing their last two homes.

Curry calls her “the toughest, finest human being I’ve ever known.” He also admits that some of the nastiness has affected her “for about three weeks, one time at Tech and another time here.”

The family (daughter Kristin is a senior at Virginia) is not allowed to respond to taunts, Curry said, “because then we’d be doing exactly what those people would like to see us do, which is to join them.”

Curry expects the best at Alabama; he has bright and energetic friends who have experienced buyout sadness as college coaches. So he says: “If I do the job, I’ll be rewarded. If I don’t, I’ll be rewarded.”