ESPN.com’s Ivan Maisel was a natural to write this story. Even though he lived elsewhere his adult life, the Mobile-native never strayed from his Alabama roots, which included a certain football coach.
The occasion of Paul “Bear” Bryant’s 100th birthday prompted this excellent reflection from Maisel. More than 30 years after his death, the legendary coach remains front and center every day at Alabama.
Bryant is a presence on the Alabama campus in the ways that an iconic figure is remembered. The stadium where he won games for those 25 seasons carries his name. So does a main campus street, dormitory, conference center and, of course, the museum, which displays and stores the artifacts and history of his career (admission today is free). Paul W. Bryant High School is nearby.
The Paul W. Bryant Scholarship, set up by its namesake, is available to the children of his former players who enroll at Alabama. Over 40 years, some 800 students have been the beneficiaries, 79 of them in the current semester.
“He laid his fingerprint down here,” Alabama offensive left tackle Cyrus Kouandjio. “It’s easy to see.”
A statue of Bryant stands outside the north end of Bryant-Denny Stadium, literally the central figure of the five Crimson Tide coaches honored for taking the football team to a national championship. The 9-foot-tall Bryant stands straight, wears a jacket, vest, tie and his trademark houndstooth fedora, and carries in his right hand the rolled-up manila folder on which he made his game notes. The folders from his 315th victory, the one that broke Amos Alonzo Stagg’s career record, and his 323rd and final victory, are framed and hanging in the office of Paul W. Bryant Museum director, Ken Gaddy.
Maisel writes on Bryant’s impact on him. Mind you, he attended Stanford, not Alabama:
Forgive the personal nature of this story. For those of us who grew up in Alabama in a time when our state was viewed as a cauldron of hatred, Bryant told the rest of the nation that we could produce success and character. He inspired a level of loyalty unlike any coach before or since in any state in any sport.
I can tell you where I was the day he died, and not just because it was my 23rd birthday. I know where I was because that was the first time a death ever made me cry. The notion that he is just a football coach to the 80 million millennials estimated to live in the United States makes me want to cry again.
From Gene Stallings, his former player at Texas A&M who went on to win a national championship as coach at Alabama.
“One of the reasons of his great success over an extended period of time was, we all wanted to please Coach Bryant,” Stallings said. “The players wanted to please him. The assistant coaches wanted to please him. The alumni wanted to please him. The administration wanted to please him. The president of the university — Coach Bryant just had that little something about him that people wanted to please. We’ll do anything just to hear Coach Bryant say, ‘You did a good job.’ He didn’t say it too often. But we wanted him to say it.
“You know, there was a little fear factor, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with fear factor….whether or not you were doing your job well enough to please Coach Bryant.”