by Roy Exum
posted July 30, 2009
 Roy Exum |
Those three will dominate anybody's list, no matter in which order the first three cards are dealt, yet it was still another gentle reminder that this weekend was Coach Bryant's favorite time of the year. His boys would just be back in Tuscaloosa, all strutting around looking muscular and slick, and it used to be great fun to watch him conduct the "12-Minute Run" to see who was in shape during the physicals before the demanding two-a-day practices would begin the next day.
What "The Old Man" would do is start the players out in groups, standing there with his whistle, and would then wave off the best in each crowd, one by one, because all he really cared about was who could run 100 yards or less in a great big hurry.
To the Alabama players it quickly grew into a yearly "rite of passage," a way to assure oneself you were in Coach Bryant's good graces early if he waved you off, but the fun part came when guys who weren't in shape would prance like show-ponies in the early laps, hedging an ill-chosen bet Coach would whistle them out, too, before the 12-minute ordeal was up.
Coach Bryant, you'll remember, became legendary early in his career when he changed the landscape of college football itself after he took a rag-tag Texas A&M team to pre-season camp at a hellish place called Prairie Junction.
In 1954, the then-brash Bryant took almost 100 players to the outpost, where weather records later studied confirmed the temperatures in the Texas hill country that year exceeded 100 degrees on each and every one of the 12 endless days. What's worse, practice would literally last all day with nary a drop of water neither offered or taken.
When it was finally over, only 35 rode back on the single bus to College Station. And it would be another 30 years or so before science would convince coaches lack of water doesn't make a kid tough - instead it darn near kills them. Jim Dent's fabulous book about it, "The Junction Boys," is one of my favorites of all time.
"Bebes" Stallings, one of those Aggie players who somehow survived, told me no preseason practice before or since would ever equal it, but, in abject honesty, I've personally witnessed some long afternoons in the broiling August heat in my travels across the South down through the years and it's still a mystery to me why some poor kid didn't croak as I watched with my very own eyes.
Anyway, this is the time of year when Coach Bryant wouldn't even look at the pretenders in the "12-Minute Run" at first, ignoring them while whistling away the athletes he could easily tell had worked on speed and stamina and conditioning over the summer.
As the clock seemingly began to click more slowly, he would gaze - then soon glare - at the slackers, guys from big-bellied tackles to beer-guzzling backs, who would soon feel their lungs unable to keep up with their legs, their mouths as sticky as thick Georgia clay, and the heat - oh goodness!
Get the picture. The best players, those who had been whistled off and were standing watching, were the first to notice the minute Bryant would growl in a low voice to the individual strugglers each time they would pass on a new lap. Coach didn't exactly use words like "Moron" or "Goof-Off," either.
Towards the end, it would get even worse. Coach found he had more to say than he could whisper to certain gasping miscreants as they passed so he spoke louder, with snarling adjectives and deep disgust, and the players who were watching would turn their heads so "The Old Man" wouldn't see them trying not to laugh.
To those still running around the practice field, it was humiliating to say the least and no less than six or seven would silently begin to pray, "Lord, take me now! Call me to heaven right now because where Coach Bryant is fixing to haul me in the days ahead is gonna' be worse than with Lucifer himself! Take me, Lord, please take me .... and do it now!"
Of course, the Lord wouldn't heed the cry. And, yes, Coach Bryant had a rather direct route to that place of horrors, soon to be dramatically heightened by one-on-one collisions with a Woodrow Lowe, a Ozzie Newsome, somebody like E.J. Junior, or the Hannah brothers and all the rest.
Go ahead, ask any college player what August heat feels like. Then question if it is not even worse when some 6'3", 225-pound outside linebacker comes flying out of nowhere to hit you so hard water squirts out of your eyes.
Nobody liked it, that is, no one save Bear himself who used the heat with the rock-hard parched ground to forge a boy's iron into a man's steel. He did it in such a marked way that even today - 26 years after his death - he is still ranked as the greatest college football coach among the best of any kind in history.
In the 25 years Coach Bryant coached at Alabama, his teams won six national titles and 13 Southeastern Conference championships. It used to be this was the very weekend he used to let the players know winning wasn't cheap.
royexum@aol.com
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