By Bob Hertzel
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — “I’d probably croak if I ever quit coaching.” – Alabama football coaching legend Paul “Bear” Bryant.
On Dec. 29, 1982, Paul “Bear” Bryant coached his final game in the Liberty Bowl, beating Coach Mike White’s Illinois team, 21-15.
I was there for that game, just as I am here for this Gator Bowl game, the final game of yet another coaching legend, Bobby Bowden.
As Yogi Berra once said, “This is like déjà vu all over again.”
Oh, there are differences. As hard as it is for someone who was brought up on the legend of Bear Bryant to imagine, Bowden has more victories.
A lot more.
When Bryant won that game on an numbingly cold Tennessee night, it was his 332nd victory.
He was college football’s top winner then.
Joe Paterno of Penn State has since passed him and so has Bobby Bowden. Bowden comes into tonight’s Gator Bowl meeting with West Virginia possessing 388 victories, second to Paterno. Bowden will be ahead of Bryant even if he loses the 14 victories the NCAA wants to strip him of because of players being involved in a school-wide cheating scandal.
Bowden is 80. He has coached for 44 years, the last 34 at Florida State after coaching at Samford and West Virginia.
Somehow he seems younger, more vibrant now than a tired, worn down Bryant did for his final game.
This game has turned into a celebration of the man who is Bobby Bowden and his career, but somehow it just isn’t the same as when the Bear said goodbye.
I was writing in those days for the Pittsburgh Press, a defunct newspaper that had a marvelous sports section at the time, one that was willing to cover the Bryant farewell because news, not finance, dictated the way they operated.
Let us first understand this tribute to Bowden, no matter how many of his former players they bring to the game, no matter the fact that they are letting him take one final walk with his team, no matter that there even is a street here in Jacksonville named Bowden Drive, cannot match the aura of that Liberty Bowl.
Bowden is a great football coach, but Bryant was a living legend, bigger than life.
He’s the man who fought the bear in the traveling carnival in his younger days.
He was hard as nails, John Wayne who had traded his 10-gallon hat for a hounds tooth hat that became his trademark.
He drank too much, once sneaking away into rehab, and he smoked too much.
He spoke in a gravelly, soft voice that drew you closer and closer, making you cling to almost every word.
It was part how he said things, part what he said.
Take his reason for leaving Texas A&M; for Alabama:
“I left Texas A&M; because my school called me. Mama called, and when Mama calls, you just have to come running.”
Or what he had to say about his quarterback Pat Trammel:
“He can’t run, he can’t pass, he can’t kick — all he can do is beat you.”
Oh, Bowden isn’t bad with the spoken word, either, his words dripping in the same kind of Alabama honey as Bryant had in his voice.
He just isn’t Bear Bryant.
Bryant had six national titles. SIX! Good as Bowden has been, he has but two.
And there was more, a certain reverence that Bear Bryant drew out of people … players, people in his state, at least those who rooted for Alabama and not Auburn.
Bowden is a likeable, lovable person, one of us.
Bryant was a diety.
Bowden's face belongs on a game program.
Bryant's belongs on Mount Rushmore.
Bowden certainly had a stable of great players, but Bryant seemed to draw legendary players to his program, characters as great or greater than even Deion Sanders. In a sport where quarterbacks are king, he coached the great Joe Namath, who simply became the face of the American Football League, who predicted the upset of Baltimore in the AFC’s first championship win and forced a merger with the NFL.
He coached Ken Stabler, who became the maverick quarterback of the Oakland Raiders, who was known for living his life in the fast lane, just like Namath.
There were similarities, though. A lot of them.
Both had their towers where they would watch practice from, running the show from high above, so to speak.
And they would innovate. Oh, would they innovate.
Bowden is known for putting in the wishbone with Jim Carlen to South Carolina in 1969 Peach Bowl. Two years later, Bryant did the same thing in the Los Angeles Coliseum to beat USC, 17-10, for his 200th victory a day before his 58th birthday, ending talk that the game had passed him by.
Bryant is gone, and now Bobby Bowden is coaching his final game. Each is a giant in the industry in his own right, each a legendary figure.
By the way, 28 days after coaching his final game that raw, cold night in Nashville, Bear Bryant lived up to his prediction and, as he put it, "croaked".
Bobby Bowden, we suspect, has learned there is more to life than football and will enjoy a long and healthy retirement.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
