A Man Named Paul

Paul William Bryant was born in the late summer of 1913 in a Cleveland County, Arkansas, backwater. His hometown of Moro Bottom wasn’t even a town, technically. Only seven families lived there.

Paul was a large infant. Feet like rowboats. Hands like ball gloves. A stern, righteous face that looked like he helped write the Ten Commandments.

He was the eleventh of twelve births. His boyhood friends said he was fearless. And when I say “fearless,” I mean that Paul once wrestled a bear in a traveling circus sideshow tent. The animal nearly ripped off his ear, earning him the nickname “Bear.”

Paul’s generation grew up during a toilsome time. It’s hard to imagine just how difficult things were in America. But make no mistake, they were hard.

The War in Europe was killing 20 million. The Spanish Flu was taking another 50 million. Then came a Great Depression. Bankers leapt off tall ledges. Dust storms killed the Heartland. Sharecroppers were migrating across the US to keep from starving. Another day; another global war.

As a kid, Paul’s father was sickly. His mother had too many children to manage. She couldn’t afford to feed his big-kid appetite. So Paul went to live with his grandfather in the nearby crossroads of Fordyce.

And it was there that football history would be written deep within the Arkansas mud. He had just turned 13.

Paul remembered it like this:

“One day, I was walking past the field where the high school team was practicing football. I was in the eighth grade, and I ain’t never even seen a football before.

“The coach naturally noticed a great big ole boy like me and he asked if I wanted to play.

“I said, ‘Yessir, I guess I do. How do you play?’

“Coach said, ‘Well, son, you see that fella catching the ball down there? Well, whenever he catches it, you go down there and try to kill him.’

The following Friday, Paul was wearing a uniform. The big kid didn’t know the difference between a field goal and a Sears, Roebuck, and Co. catalog. But he played hard. And he hit harder.

He was a crummy student—he didn’t graduate with his classmates. He failed language class, and struggled in most subjects. But on the field he was Michelangelo.

In 1930, he led a rag-tag high school toward a perfect season, snagging the Arkansas State Championship. Talent scouts crawled out of the wallpaper to find him.

One scout offered Paul an athletic scholarship to the University of Alabama. And so it was that Paul Bryant came to Tuscaloosa.

He was only a boy. But he played ball like his life depended on it. In one 1935 game, for example, he played with a broken leg and still pulled Alabama to a 25-0 victory over Tennessee. A broken leg, for crying out loud.

I don’t know why I’m writing all this. I swore to myself I wouldn’t ever write about football in my career. I’m a columnist. Nobody wants to read columns about football.

And yet, football is not unlike life. You get the hope beat out of you, but you keep trying, moving toward the goal line, until your clock runs out.

Which is why I find something poetic in the life of Paul Bryant. His 25-year tenure as coach of Alabama earned him six national championship titles, 13 conference championships, and he changed the trajectory of young men’s lives.

A dirt-poor boy from Cleveland County, who grew up with nothing. A man who, in his lifetime, held the record for the most wins of any collegiate coach.

On the first day of college football, I usually tell this story to myself. The same annual story my father used to tell at the beginning of each season.

Inevitably, I always find myself hearing Bryant’s story and thinking: “If this man could fight insurmountable odds, if he could respect the gift of life enough to play his absolute hardest, why can’t I?”

So anyway, now you know why my middle name is Paul.