PAUL “BEAR” BRYANT
Paul W. “Bear” Bryant retired as Alabama football coach after a Liberty Bowl victory over Illinois on December 29, 1982, just a matter of weeks before his death at the age of 69. He was then the all-time winningest coach in major college football.
His totals have since been passed by other coaches, but the Bryant legend hasn’t been diminished. In fact, it seems to add luster each year. Two movies have been based on his career, and it seems a new Bryant biography hits the bookstores every two or three years. A national coach-of-the-year award is named for him.
He grew up in Moro Bottoms, a farming community near Fordyce, and became a star player for the Redbugs’ great football teams of 1929-30. He acquired his
Nickname as a teenager for wrestling a bear attached to a traveling carnival show. He was recruited by Alabama, which defeated Stanford in the 1935 Rose Bowl with Don Hutson of Pine Bluff and Bryant as the Tide’s regular ends. Bryant broke into coaching as an Alabama and Vanderbilt assistant before entering military service in World War II.
As head football coach at Maryland (1945), Kentucky (1946-53), Texas A&M (1954-57) and Alabama (1958-82), his career record was 323-85-17 (.780). He had only one losing season, at Texas A&M in 1954. His Alabama teams were credited with six national championships. Bryant-coached teams finished 22 times in the national top 10 in 38 years, and 29 times somewhere in the top 20.
In 2000, Sports Illustrated picked the top 50 sports figures in all 50 states for the 20th Century. Although he left Arkansas to enroll at Alabama in 1931, Bryant was the magazine’s No. 1 choice for the Arkansas list.
