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Show by Jim Murray Mnniriraiy im jpnnit Bryant's act will be tough to capture on film Charlton Heston, on a television program the other night, delivered himself of an interesting opinion. "A leader, to be effective, must be a great actor," he suggested, adding that Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and, probably, Caesar and Napoleon and Ronald Reagan knew this very well. Football coaches certainly do. To a man, the successful ones were accomplished thespians. Knute Rockne's locker-room performances, if you can believe the people who were there, ranked with the greatest Hamlets of all time. Oscar winners. Best performances by a male actor using material from another medium. Football coaches play a role that is part John Wayne, part Mr. Chips and, maybe, part Camille. They have to be able to run the gamut of emotions, and not from A to B. From A to Z. They have to be able to cry on command, simulate anger, even pretend fear ("Stagg Fears Purdue"). The football coach has to be Lil Eva fleeing over the ice, King Lear mourning his daughter, Arthur at Camelot, Horatius at the bridge. Paul (Bear) Bryant was one of the best that ever trod the boards. The Prince of Players. A Barrymore of the blackboard. A tragedian, comedian, a man for all seasons. Complex, sentimental, mordant and kind at the same time, Bryant never played a game, he gave a performance. From the time he came on the field in the protective custody of two of the South's finest state troopers grim-faced, sunglassed, looking like refugees from "In the Heat of the Night," twin Rod Steigers he was putting on The Bear Bryant Show, a television special. They've made a movie about the old Bear, called simply "The Bear," and, so far as I. know it's the only theatrically released movie made about a football coach since "Knute Rockne, All-American" back in the 1930s, which catapulted Pat O'Brien and ronald Reagan to fame. But it takes more than a checkered hat, 30 pages of script and nine reels of film to capture Bear Bryant, as any one of a dozen football coaches can tell you. An actor named Gary Busey and the writers, directors and editors make a valiant try. I leave to the paid critics how successful they were, but to me Bear Bryant was not so much an enigma as a contradiction, totally. The Bryant I knew was almost shy. I never thought he was entirely comfortable in social situations. He was happiest in a locker-room full of sweaty football players or on a sideline or at a bar with fellow coaches swapping stories or comparing techniques. A whole cadre of successful coaches came out of the system that produced Bryant, the one pioneered by the revered Bob Neyland of Tennessee. There was Red Sanders of Vanderbilt and UCLA, for whom Bear worked, Jim Tatum, Darrell Royal and a half dozen others. They all knew the secret of successful football and they passed it around in a kind of cross-pollination of clinics, where they shared innovations generously. They knew every able-bodied football player in the United States and they competed for them. They all knew what it took to win: two-dozen of the quickest, meanest, hardest youngsters they could find this side of a chain gang, give them a football, sting their pride, instill an us-against-them philosophy-and go out and win the Sugar Bowl. Bear always wanted to come to the Rose Bowl, which he had played in as an undergraduate but which segregation made him effectually ineligible for throughout most of his coaching career. Bear wasn't a political activist but it chafed him to see his good friends in the Big Ten or the Big Eight or even the Pac-10 winning football games with players who came well within Bear's recruiting range but whom Jim Crow wouldn't let him touch. The movie has a scene in which federal law forces the University of Alabama to accept a black coed for the first time and in the background Bear growls, "Next time let's make it a halfback." But the real watershed moment for Bryant came in a 1970 Alabama-USC game played in Birmingham, which may have been the first integrated game played in that state. Conventional lore has it that a back named Sam (Bam) Cunningham made a believer out of Coach Bryant that night, in which USC ran wild over an outmatched Bryant team'(42-21). But it was actually a lesser-known player, halfback Clarence Davis, who had shredded the Alabama line and secondary. After the game, Bryant shambled over to shake his hand. When he learned that Clarence Davis had been born in Birmingham, he shook his head, then his fistand vowed: "This will never happen again." Bear never posed as a great molder of character. He once stood up in a Santa Barbara coaching clinic and delivered himself of this credo: "If you guys got any boys who are students and like to read, why send 'em to Stanford. But if you have any whiskey-drinkin', women-chasin' athaletes (cq) who like to play football, why you just send 'em to 01' Bear." Yet, when "the best football player I ever had," Master Joe Willie Namath, broke the training rules, Bear suspended him without hesitation. Bear never did the expected. On the other hand, he never did the unexpected either. "You knew what his teams were going to do. You just couldn't stop 'em from doing it," rival coach Wally Butts once observed. You may have noticed in the papers that Mrs. Bear Bryant died the other day. Anyone who knew them knew she wouldn't outlast the Bear long. That was another thing about him. His marriage was a love affair. He never needed much more than "Mary Harmon," as he always called his first lady, a football and a team to hand it to and a team to run it through. The film "The Bear" will open in Tuscaloosa later this month. It will be the Bear's last performance. I only hope it's as good as the 400 preceding ones he gave there. (c) 1984, Los Angeles Times. Distributed by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. |