Bullish on the Bear’s legend

ALLEN BARRA comes to praise Bear Bryant, not to bury him. A veteran sportswriter whose books include “Clearing the Bases: The Greatest Baseball Debates of the Last Century” and “Big Play: Barra on Football,” he rates Bryant, who won six national titles with the University of Alabama in the 1960s and ‘70s, as the greatest football coach (pro or college) of all time, as well as a primal, overwhelming personality who has no counterpart today. “Twenty-two years after his death, Bear Bryant still intimidates me,” writes Barra, a native Alabamian. If “The Last Coach” isn’t a totally admiring portrait of the tall, craggy-faced man in the houndstooth hat, “it’s because I could not imagine looking him in the eye and presenting him with anything less than the truth as I found it. I suppose, in the end, like just about everyone else who knew him ... I want Bear Bryant’s approval.”

The title of Barra’s lengthy, painstaking biography needs a little explaining, especially for USC fans, who might think Pete Carroll has done a fair imitation of coaching over the last few years. What Barra means is that the factors that gave rise to coach-worship at its most extreme -- including “the embarrassment of living in a state where there was so little to boast about to the rest of the country except Bear Bryant” -- no longer apply. This saddens Barra even as he sees the inevitability of it. Like others of his generation, he once viewed football through a “Vietnam-era mist of skepticism and alienation,” before realizing “how important the game and all of its cultural baggage had been to us.”

Once lost, innocence is never completely regained, even by a football junkie as steeped in the lore of Alabama’s Crimson Tide as Barra. The most interesting thing about “The Last Coach” is the faint but steady current of ambivalence running beneath his celebration of the Bryant legend. He repeatedly acquits Bryant of the worst charges against him, noting that the Bear’s towering stature made him a handy target for cheap shots from journalists who didn’t know the man. But Barra feels obliged to heed Bryant’s critics and admit that now and then they were right.

Take the issue of racial integration in college football. Part of the Bryant legend is that Coach John McKay’s USC Trojans, led by fullback Sam “Bam” Cunningham, prompted Alabama to abandon its all-white policy by whipping the Tide, 42-21, in Birmingham in 1970. This is partly true, Barra says; it hastened a change that Bryant, no racist, had favored all along. Once Gov. George Wallace got out of his way, the Bear was happy to recruit black players and black assistant coaches -- though Barra concedes that Bryant’s greatest failure of leadership was in not pushing harder sooner.

Did the Bear really get his nickname by wrestling a bear on stage in Fordyce, Ark., around 1927? Yes, Barra says, devoting nearly a whole chapter to such matters as the size of the bear and the amount of money bet on the outcome. Did Bryant conspire with University of Georgia athletic director Wally Butts to fix the 1962 Alabama-Georgia game, as an article in the Saturday Evening Post alleged? No, Barra concludes. Bryant’s victory in a libel suit against the Post was justified. Did Bryant encourage vicious, dirty play? Again the jaws of the trap swing open and the Bear strolls free.

Barra, after all, doesn’t like ambivalence, a state of mind he knows Bryant wouldn’t have approved of or even understood. He’s most comfortable discussing Bryant’s 323 career wins, or his dominating record against other Hall of Fame coaches, or his mastery of two distinct forms of college football -- the old game of two-way, 60-minute players and today’s specialized, pass-happy imitation of the pro game. The limitations of Barra’s approach -- and any biographer intimidated by his subject will have limitations -- show up in his treatment of the famous “Junction Boys,” Bryant’s first team at Texas A&M.;

As described in a 2003 ESPN movie, Bryant in 1954 took about 100 players to a rocky, grassless field in Junction, hours from the campus at College Station, and worked them so brutally without water -- common practice in those days -- that after 10 days only 29 remained. Fans pardoned Bryant, because next year the team began to win, but the wider culture has always been uneasy about the episode. Barra hears the critics out but refuses to question the overriding importance of football or the moral equivalence of a coach like Bryant to a great military leader -- part foul-mouthed drill sergeant, part canny field general -- whose exactions of blood and sweat are necessary to “build character” in young men and save the nation from effeminacy and weakness.

“[T]oday, almost to a man, the men who played for him look you in the eye and tell you ... that they are better men, that they lived richer, more responsible lives, because they played football for Bear Bryant,” Barra insists. “Only a cynic would argue that they are wrong about the therapeutic value of football.” As it happens, however, “The Last Coach” arrives when apologists for the Bush administration have been citing just such character-building rituals to justify U.S. treatment of detainees in the war on terrorism. Rush Limbaugh called Abu Ghraib no worse than a fraternity initiation. Max Boot, in the Dec. 14 issue of The Times, wrote that “torture” at Guantanamo was probably softer than Marine training. The result hasn’t been to silence the “cynics” but to make us take a fresh look at boot camp and frat houses. An old debate about the nature of civilization -- is male bonding through sadism really essential to it? -- has willy-nilly revived. It’s a debate that, as Barra notes, last peaked during the Vietnam War. And it surfaces in Barra’s hesitations, even when, as he imagines himself looking Bear Bryant in the eye, he’s half ashamed of them.

*

Michael Harris, author of the novel “The Chieu Hoi Saloon,” is a regular contributor to Book Review.