Southern Pride In A Native Son – The Bear Bryant Legacy

 

Just outside the north end zone at Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa is an area called the Walk of Champions. The plaza contains expensive statues of the coaches who have won national football championships at the school. When it was built, statues of Wade, Thomas, Bryant and Gene Stallings went up. The school also built the base and put in the lights for another statue. It sent the signal that Alabama fully expected to win more titles.

After Alabama defeated Texas three years ago, some fans put a banner bearing Saban’s name across the area set aside for the statue. The school’s athletic director, a former Bryant assistant named Mal Moore, was asked about a Saban statue.

“I will recommend to the president that we go forth,” he said.

Immediately?

“Well, we’ll talk about it,” Moore said. “But yeah. Hell yeah.”

Hell yeah, indeed. This is college football. This is the SEC. This is Alabama.

Back to Warren St. John: “I grew up in Alabama – possibly the worst place on earth to acquire a healthy perspective on the importance of spectator sports. If you were a scientist hoping to isolate a fan gene, Alabama would make the perfect laboratory. People in Alabama have a general interest in almost all sports – the state is second only to Nevada in the amount of money that its citizens bet on sports, despite the fact that in Alabama, unlike Nevada, sports gambling is illegal. But the sport that inspires true fervor – the one that compels people there to name their children after a popular coach and to heave bricks through the windows of an unpopular one – is college football.

“A recent poll found that 90 percent of the state’s citizens describe themselves as college football fans. Eighty-six percent of them pull for one of the two major football powers there, Alabama or Auburn, and 4 percent pull for other teams. … To understand what an absolute minority nonfans are in Alabama, consider this: They are outnumbered there by atheists.”

Gene Stallings, in the wake of winning a national title, said this about the Alabama fan base: “They still love Coach Bryant. They just tolerate the rest of us.”

Of course, they’ve since learned to love Saban. He will never replace Bryant in Alabama lore, but Bryant would like these Saban teams with their relentless defenses and strong running games. In the era of the spread offense, Alabama’s style has been as much a throwback as the Tide helmets.

Prior to last year’s Sugar Bowl rematch between Alabama and LSU, Ted Lewis of The Times-Picayune in New Orleans wrote a fascinating story about how the state of Alabama’s self-image was closely tied to the Crimson Tide during the civil rights era.

“To the white citizens of the state, Bear Bryant’s undefeated 1961 national champions, his first of six at his alma mater and the school’s first in 20 years, were a source of esteem and self-respect in ways that went far beyond what transpired on the football field.”

The same could be said for other Southern schools in those days. Consider the 22-game winning streak posted by the Arkansas Razorbacks that included several versions of the national championship in 1964 and the undefeated regular season of 1965. Many Arkansans have seen the film footage that was taken at the end of the Jan. 1, 1965, Cotton Bowl victory over Nebraska. An Arkansas fan is on the field waving a large flag. It’s not an Arkansas state flag. It’s not a flag with a Razorback on it. It’s a Confederate battle flag.

When I was a child, Alabama still was viewed as representing all of Dixie whenever the Tide would play a school such as Notre Dame or Penn State. I grieved when Notre Dame scored in the final minutes on New Year’s Eve in 1973 to beat Alabama in the Sugar Bowl. And I’m among those who believe the greatest goal-line stand in the history of college football occurred in the Sugar Bowl on Jan. 1, 1979, when the Crimson Tide stopped Penn State inches short of the end zone and hung on for a national championship.

Old habits die hard.

I’ll be outnumbered in my own home Monday night, but I’ll say it: Roll Tide.

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