Tuscaloosa News Honors Coach Bryant

[NashvilleTider]

Whoa....Great series of interviews and stories on the 25th anniversary of Coach Bryant. Make sure you have plenty of time to watch it all. Great stuff.

Coach Bryant Documentary

 

[Crimson Surfer]

(logo from The Tuscaloosa News)

Alabama's Greatest Icon

TUSCALOOSA | The death of Paul W. “Bear” Bryant nearly 25 years ago drew reaction from dignitaries far and wide.

President Ronald Reagan issued a statement lauding the University of Alabama’s late football coach as “a coach who made legends out of ordinary people.” The Rev. Billy Graham sent his sympathies to the family. Football coaches including Ohio State’s Woody Hayes, Oklahoma’s Bud Wilkinson and Southern Cal’s John McKay came from around the country to pay their respects. Bryant’s former players gathered to say goodbye to their mentor. The state legislature suspended deliberations on crucial budget bail-out measures to allow its members to attend the funeral.

The impact of Bryant’s passing was felt at a funeral that spilled over into three downtown Tuscaloosa churches and later at a memorial service that drew thousands to UA’s basketball arena. But none of it made as big an impression on the coach’s family as did the throngs who lined the streets and highway overpasses while a funeral procession of more than 300 vehicles made its way along Interstate 20/59 to the burial service in Birmingham.

 

[Crimson Surfer]

Coach Bryant Videos

 

[Boo Radley]

The video interview with just Coach C.M. Newton is outstanding.

 

[Crimson Surfer]

http://bryantmuseum.ua.edu/

 

[Crimson Surfer]

Cecil Hurt discusses Coach Bryant.

Cecil Hurt Show: Bear Bryant Special (Video)

 

[lafella]

It's hard to remember everything , but I do remember all those people lined up along the road, even as a younger kid all those helicopters, cameras, and news people didn't take my mind of the fact he was gone. I also remember it seemed like the dreariest day ever.. in history.

Possibly the only time I'd ever seen my grandfather shed a tear.

 

[GrayTide]

I suppose with every passing year Coach Bryant's death is remembered by fewer people. Not fewer people in the sense that fewer people care but the fact that fewer who lived the Bryant years are around. So many Alabama fans today were not alive when he died and while that does not make them less of an Alabama fan or love what Coach Bryant did for Alabama it does make a lot of us realize how many years have passed and how much college football has changed since that January day in 1983. With each passing year it also makes those wonderful Bryant years seem sort of hazey in memory.

 

[Crimson Surfer]

A true original

After 25 years, Paul Bryant remains an original. As with the handful of true originals who grace the public stage over a given lifetime, he still is a source of fascination. It’s not just his statistical achievements, amazing as they are. It’s the way that Bryant did things -- his personal style -- that people still talk about, and write about, and try to understand.

At one level, such efforts are futility personified. Bryant was sui generis, unique among his peers. Attempts to analyze precisely why aren’t likely to meet with much success. “Others abide our question,” as Matthew Arnold said of Shakespeare. “Thou art free.”

 

[Whammer Jammer]

The video interview with just Coach C.M. Newton is outstanding.

He was a great coach...Those teams of the 70's (72-76) were as good as the football at Bama.

The interview of Coach Newton was outstanding!

 

[Crimson Surfer]

TideSports.com Coach Bryant Pictures

 

[Crimson Surfer]

Bryant Bio

December 15, 1982 - Paul Bryant officially announces his retirement from the University of Alabama. Including the bowl win over Illinois, Bryant finishes with a record of 232-46-9 for his 25 years at the Capstone.

December 29, 1982 - Coaching in his final game, Paul Bryant and his Crimson Tide beat Illinois 21-15 at the Liberty Bowl played in Memphis, Tenn. Jeremiah Castille, a senior cornerback, is the MVP after intercepting three Illini passes. Craig Turner scores the final TD of the Bryant Era while Peter Kim's PAT is the final point of the legendary coach's career.

January 26, 1983 - Coach Paul Bryant dies at Druid City Hospital where he had entered the night before after suffering chest pains while visiting his friend Jimmy Hinton. The Coach was 69-years-old.

January 28, 1983 - Paul William Bryant is laid to rest at Elmwood Cemetery in Birmingham, Ala. Tommy Wilcox, Paul Ott Carruth, Walter Lewis, Jerrill Sprinkle, Mike McQueen, Paul Fields, Jeremiah Castille and Darryl White serve as the pallbearers.

 

[Crimson Surfer]

Players reflections on Paul W. “Bear” Bryant

Jeremiah Castille He was the most valuable player of Paul W. “Bear” Bryant’s final game, the coach’s final All-American (along with Mike Pitts and Tommy Wilcox), and less than a month after his collegiate career was completed, Jeremiah Castille served as a pallbearer at his funeral along with teammates Paul Ott Carruth, Paul Fields, Walter Lewis, Mike McQueen, Jerrill Sprinkle, Darryl White and Wilcox.

Castille made seven of his career 16 interceptions during that final 1982 season, when the Crimson Tide defeated eventual national championship Penn State, 42-21, but uncharacteristically lost to Tennessee, LSU, Southern Miss and Auburn.

With his health on the decline, Bryant knew he could no longer continue to meet the daily demands of coaching and called a press conference for December 15 to announce his retirement. College football’s all-time Division I-A (or Bowl Championship Subdivision as it was renamed in 2007) wins leader would have one final sendoff, against Illinois at the Liberty Bowl.

 

[Crimson Surfer]

Where does Bear rank among the all-time greats?

It’s hard to believe that it’s already been 25 years since the world had to say goodbye to Paul W. “Bear” Bryant, the man.

That’s before the Berlin Wall came down, “Terms of Endearment” won the Oscar for best motion picture, and the first WrestleMania was broadcast on closed circuit television.

Those events mean different things to different people, but that’s how history works. It’s subjective, always open to debate, and rarely viewed the same way by anyone.

 

[Crimson Surfer]

Guardian angel

Pass through the iron gates at the intersection of Sixth Avenue South and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, and you’re almost to Block 30.

It’s an egg-shaped piece of land that — at least the morsel of it that is indicated by a faded crimson arrow painted on the asphalt — is the heart of Elmwood Cemetery.

The spot marks the final resting place, for the last 24 years and 363 days, of Paul “Bear” William Bryant Sr.

 

[Crimson Surfer]

25 years after his death, Bryant’s legacy lives on

University of Alabama fans still speak of him with the kind of reverence and devotion normally saved for the scores of churches that dot the Southern landscape.

Coach Paul W. “Bear” Bryant died 25 years ago today, yet his name and legacy still carry weight in the state and across the country.

“He was bigger than life,” said John Robinson, who led the University of Southern California Trojans from 1976-82 and again from 1993-97. “It was like meeting the president of the United States. He was funny and a good guy, and he treated his assistant coaches well.”

 

[Crimson Surfer]

Remembering an icon: Former players reflect on life, death of Bear Bryant

Randy Edwards never saw it coming.

The former University of Alabama defensive end has a photo from Paul W. “Bear” Bryant’s last practice on his desk at his Atlanta law office, but Bryant’s death from a massive heart attack 25 years ago today caught Edwards by surprise.

“Looking at that picture, you can see how old and weak he was,” Edwards said. “Through the eyes of a 22-year-old kid at that time he didn’t look that way. He was bulletproof.”